In conversation with aleksiah: Aussie pop star is big on song writing, flavoured milk & telling messy stories

Ever heard of a singer who chugs strawberry flavoured milk before they go onstage?

If not, it’s definitely time you got acquainted with aleksiah, a rising pop star from Adelaide who just opened for UK sensation Maisie Peters.

There’s a lot more to her than an affinity for a pre-show beverage, having turned her lockdown “sanity” project into a full time music career that has taken her across the world.

Now, back home after four months of touring overseas, The Nightly catches up with aleksiah as she prepares for the release of her upcoming EP Good On Paper that she is set to tour in Australia in May.

Just post that video

“If the all the pop girls had a baby.” That is how aleksiah described her upcoming project, but there was a time she thought she’d never release music.

Over the years, she felt the “usual thing every young girl feels about anything that she’s slightly passionate about” - that she wasn’t good enough.

But when Adelaide was plunged into lockdown alongside much of Australia, aleksiah downloaded TikTok, and unlike most, she actually started making videos.

“I was posting, like a song a day kind of thing, just so I didn’t go absolutely insane,” she said.

“A couple of videos of my original songs started getting decent views, and through that people at triple j found me, namely Max Quinn.”

She already had about 150 songs in the vault from a childhood spent writing music, but it still took some convincing for her to put out her debut single Fern in late 2022.

Even though Mr Quinn had encouraged aleksiah to release music, it wasn’t until her friends and partner said she would be an idiot not to that she went through with it.

“I showed my friends and my partner my music and they were like ‘are you an idiot? Are you actually stupid? You should do what he says’,” she said.

Up in the Adelaide Hills, aleksiah penned Fern with a friend, the release of which alongside its dreamy music video, was met with acclaim.

After a couple of years in the game, her 2025 singles saw a spike in listenership, with Clothes Off, a dancey ode to feelings of sexual shame and negative body image, becoming a fan favourite.

Following this up with singles like The Hit and Punch Drunk Love, aleksiah’s knack for a catchy chorus and fun visuals saw her gather a Spotify audience of more than 120,000 monthly listeners.

But, as strong as her image is, the actual making of the music is what she has always been the most fascinated by.

‘Songwriters are my pop stars’

aleksiah is big on her work being hers, creating music from ideas found in her self-described “jungle” of brain. Ever since she was little, she has always been more interested in the minds behind her favourite songs rather than the big names performing them.

“I’ve always looked up to songwriters personally, they’re my pop stars,” she said.

When she was a child, she was obsessed with Aussie songwriters Sarah Aarons and Ben Abraham, as well as international talent like Cathy Dennis, who co-wrote Britney Spears’ hit Toxic alongside Henrik Jonback. Who doesn’t love that song.

“I’m at a point in my career where I’d love to write with other people, but being from Adelaide, it can be hard, because the pop scene is not nearly as big as I personally would love it to be. I sometimes struggle to find people that are writing the same kind of style as I am,” she said.

“So I’ve kind of inadvertently been bubbled into myself. But it is really fun, because every single song that comes out is like the inside of my brain, and it’s like a jungle in there.”

All of her work, including her soon-to-be released third EP, is “100 per cent” written by her. She recalls the time spent working on it with producer Chris Collins as a joyful experience.

“Chris is the best, he’s like a father figure to me. We go up to his studio in Mullumbimby in rural New South Wales and we just have a lot of fun,” she said. “And I hope that can be heard in the music.”

Just like the Twilight apple

Asked to describe the vibe of Good On Paper, aleksiah told The Nightly to think of the glistening apple from the cover of Stephenie Meyer’s hit vampire novel Twilight.

“Imagine the most beautiful waxed apple, gorgeous, like the Twilight apple. But when you bite it, one half is perfect and crisp and the other is powdery, gross and mushy,” she said.

Just like this half-half apple, aleksiah said her music explores how anything can be beautiful on the outside and though her songs may sound fun and bright, there’s a hidden bite.

“You delve a bit deeper into these songs, the lyrics are actually quite messy, quite messed up,” she said.

“I try to talk about a lot of issues that I personally find myself dealing with, and I know a lot of other people do, like sexual intimacy issues, queer love and suicide.”

Although the themes can be heavy, aleksiah tries to put them in a “relatively easily digestible package”.

“It’s like when you give kids medicine and then you shove a freddo frog in their mouth,” she said.

“I feel like these issues aren’t talked about nowhere near enough and not to the depth that I would like to talk about them.”

She rejects the idea that normalising these struggles that many people face is a bad thing.

“Why should we not normalise these things? How do we get better at coping with these things? How do we fix these problems? This is what I strive to talk about in my music.”

Doing anything for art!

aleksiah probably wouldn’t do anything for her art, but she did give herself a serious case of motion sickness from riding a mechanical bull.

The music video for her new single Bullshit Baby features the smiling singer being tossed around on a rodeo bull, but behind those pearly whites, the struggle was real.

“It was an amazing idea, but then I got really bad motion sickness because I had to ride it for four hours,” she recalled.

“I had a Thai chicken salad at home that I was looking forward to eating all day and I couldn’t eat it. I came home and was like, I need to lie down. I just kept vomiting.”

Her creative team know that the “aleksiah-verse” demands a strong image, and the singer said fans can expect a full on pop-girl frenzy at her upcoming tour.

“We’re going full pop girly because that’s what I want to do, that’s what I feel comfortable doing.”

On a hunch, The Nightly asked if aleksiah was a theatre kid in high school - maybe you can guess the answer?

“I think it’s so comically obvious that the answer is yes. I used to teach musical theatre, and I stopped last year, that’s how deep the rabbit hole goes,” she said. “I was a humongous theatre kid.”

“We’re trying to mash-up two of my songs because I love Glee, I’m a gleek.”

As proof of her love of musicals, she offered up a story from her time touring in Europe.

“When the second part of Wicked came out while I was touring in Brussels, and I went and saw it. It was not in English, it was in French, and it had German and English subtitles. Luckily, I can speak a little bit of French, but it was quite hard. I was pretty much locked in on those subtitles the entire time.”

In that same musical theatre vein, aleksiah said she’s most excited to perform her unreleased song Be The Diva - an anthem that bubbled up inside her when she was called a diva over requesting some milk before one of her shows.

“Diva is a good thing. Diva means you know your worth, you know what you want, and you are confident enough to ask for it.”

The battle of the flavoured milks

aleksiah’s fans are well aware of her strawberry milk habit, but she wants them to know that her time on tour in Europe threw a spanner in the works.

“I’m going to be so honest, I’ve been drinking banana milk recently, this is the scoop,” she said.

“Some of the strawberry milks I had overseas were disgusting because they don’t have milk, they have drinkable yogurt.

“So they would give me strawberry drinkable yogurt. That was a bit hard. I was just having banana smoothies before the shows, and that’s how it started.”

But for the record, aleksiah thinks Nippy’s strawberry milk is the best on the market, and she is not opposed to mixing banana and strawberry in the future.

In terms of showtime rituals, she tells The Nightly the only other one of note is what her team does to celebrate the end of her tours.

“After the tour ends, me and the crew and the band will always go out for an absolutely filthy Chinese meal,” she said.

“We have a couple places that we always go to in each city, depending where the tour ends.

“A lot of my tours end in Sydney, and there is a place called Western Legend BBQ in Mascot that we always go to.”

Her Good On Paper tour kicks off in Perth on May 15 and wraps up in Melbourne - we’ll be keeping an eye out to see which Victorian Chinese restaurant makes the cut.

And after that wrap meal, aleksiah says she is bunkering down for six months to “write that damn album”.

“We’re going all out for this tour, because it’s going to be pretty much the only time that I get to show you guys the full extent of the aleksiah-verse before I lock myself in my house for six months.”

She’s hoping to bring fans some diva inspired merch (people, there are rumours of hot pink fans).

But most of all, she’s stoked to be at the place she is, making it in triple j’s hottest 200 list with Clothes Off, and with most of her tour on its way to selling out.

“People seem to be excited about the new music and I’m excited to share it with them.”

aleksiah’s EP Good On Paper comes out on May 7. Tickets for her Australian shows are available at www.aleksiah.com