A few years ago, Inji was at a crossroads. The New York-based, Istanbul-born musician had recently departed the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in finance, and found herself on a graduate scheme at a management consulting firm in New York City—while making dance-pop bangers on the side. “It was a real everything-is-falling-apart time of my life,” she recalls. “I was crashing out.”
The result of this freakout is captured on “Teen Angst,” the brilliant, brassy opening song on her mixtape Superlame, released at the end of October. (Suffice to say, she turned to music full-time.) The song was the product of her getting in the studio with producer-of-the-moment Zhone, the mastermind behind Troye Sivan’s “Rush” and Demi Lovato’s “Fast.” After hours spent looking for the right starting point, Inji took the mic and just started freestyling over a stomping club beat, chanting, “I woke up pissed off on a Tuesday / I said, ‘Fuck this shit!’” Inji explains that the words came out as a furious stream of consciousness, remembering the aftermath of recording the track with a laugh: “I was like, ‘Oh, I see. I think this is what the album’s about.’”
If Inji felt like she’d landed on a theme while writing “Teen Angst,” you wouldn’t necessarily guess it while listening to the mixtape as a whole. Its 12 tracks veering from the floor-shaking dubstep of “U Won’t” to the sound of an Arabic lute on “Boys Ain’t Shit” and the cheeky electroclash of “Bodega,” the project is a showcase for Inji’s remarkable versatility and her iconoclastic approach to genre. But what ties it all together is her eye for an irreverent lyric and ear for an irresistibly catchy pop chorus—even if, in Inji’s words, “it feels like a complete and utter coincidence that I ended up making dance music.”
Inji’s journey as a musician began with taking piano lessons from the age of seven. After a few years of study, her teacher suggested she apply for the Istanbul University State Conservatory, where she spent a decade studying music theory and classical piano. “It was very intense,” Inji remembers of that period of her life. “I think, by the end, there were three of us graduating in my class, and those other two are now concert pianists.” She then headed to Pennsylvania, where she kept her musical muscles working by participating in church choirs and jazz ensembles.
“I loved clubbing. I loved going out. I loved going to DJ shows. And my first friend in college, who was the drummer in my jazz band, gave me a house beat to sing on, so that’s where it started,” she recalls. “I didn’t even know what house meant.” (There are a few nods to Inji’s musical roots on the mixtape, however, courtesy of the jazz riffing that crops up in the intro and interlude.)
That initial ignorance became something of an asset. “I think one of my biggest strengths is that I came into the music industry not knowing pop music or dance music and not really listening to much mainstream music at all, so I didn’t know a lot of these constraints that maybe some people are boxed in by,” she says. “It means that everything has felt really exploratory and free.”
Similarly, it was the rigidity of her environments at a high-pressure college and in the corporate world that nudged her to be as playful as possible with her music, and to inject the songs with a winking sense of humor—leading to her initial breakout moment a few years back, when her hits “Gaslight” and “Bellydancing” went TikTok viral, racking up tens of millions of streams. “My life was very serious, very stressful, wearing blazers and loafers and calling bankers on the phone to ask them about the market. Horrible!” She breaks into another laugh. “So the music became the antithesis of that. It was really silly and about having fun, and letting out the side of me that my school didn’t really allow for. The whole project is about life not being that serious.”
When we speak, Inji is in Los Angeles, busy with writing sessions before she returns to her home in New York, where she’s bought her first fancy piano. “I’m practicing some of the hardest pieces I used to play, and I really want to work them into the debut album,” she says, noting she’s been inspired by the classical elements on Rosalía’s Lux. She’s also begun preparations for her first major headlining tour, which she announced last week.
There’s an impressive roster of venues on the list—LA’s Fonda Theatre, New York’s Webster Hall, London’s Koko—and Inji is ready to give it her all. “I’m being super meticulous,” she says. She’s been asking friends to film her performing, then going back to comb through the footage and perfect every detail, besides working with choreographers and movement directors and running on the treadmill while singing through her entire set list to build up her stamina. “The rooms are really big—like, scary big—but touring is my absolute favorite thing to do in the world. That’s why I’m an artist. And I want this tour to be an absolute rager.”
Inji certainly doesn’t lack for ambition: the mixtape was something of a side quest as she works on her first full-length album. “I was in such a good flow with making really fire music, and I was like, ‘Okay, let’s take these 10 songs and just put them out,’ but I never stopped writing,” she says.
Her reason for calling it a mixtape? “I want my debut album to be fantastic and so thought-out and so coherent. So I didn’t want to call this one the debut album. I love it, and I think it’s great, but I think the debut album has to be phenomenal—really out of this world.” She’s also been studying the rapid ascents of Doechii and Chappell Roan, observing that breakout live performances were what helped them go stratospheric. “I’ve realized it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort, and that’s a good thing.”
But for now, she’s also basking in the afterglow of Superlame. When she did a festival in San Francisco immediately after the mixtape’s release, she was delighted to find her audience singing back every line to every song. “This has definitely been the most rewarding release of my life ever,” she says, breaking into a wide smile. “It’s just wonderful to see that people really care.”
