This is an unofficial fan archive of J-WAVE "TOKIO HOT 100". Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the program or the artists.
You’re on the dance floor, looking at the girl next to you, and somewhere between the second and third drink the question arrives: do I want to be her, or do I want to be with her? Chloe Qisha’s 【♪Baby Girl♪】 is three minutes built around exactly that blur, set to a funk-leaning groove that keeps moving while your head refuses to. ‘Baby Girl’ lives in the three minutes where you can’t tell if you want to be her or be with her, and Chloe Qisha refuses to answer for you.
Released July 2026, it’s not really a party song, even though it works like one. The mirror ball is spinning. Her attention isn’t.
Key facts
- ‘Baby Girl’ arrived in July 2026 as a single from Chloe Qisha’s debut mixtape Fantasize, out October 30.
- Co-written and co-produced with Oscar Görres (Taylor Swift, Troye Sivan) and Caroline Ailin (Dua Lipa’s ‘New Rules,’ ‘IDGAF’).
- Chloe Qisha is from Kuala Lumpur, based in London, signed to Columbia UK / RCA (Sony).
- Fourth advance track from Fantasize, following ‘So Sad So Hot,’ ‘YDH,’ and ‘Surprise Surprise.’
- Sound: funk/disco-inflected alt-pop.
- A dance-floor song that’s actually about overthinking
- The line between admiration and desire
- Görres, Ailin, and the shape of the sound
- Kuala Lumpur to London, the long way around
- Why ’80s funk still works in 2026
- Three things to listen for, and where the song really lives
- Its place inside Fantasize, and how she handles queerness
- What comes after
- Related reading
A dance-floor song that’s actually about overthinking
The gap between where the song takes place and what’s happening inside it is the whole thing. Setting: a club. Sound: made to move to. The narrator’s head: trying to name a feeling she doesn’t have a word for. Admiration? A crush? A friend she likes a little too much? Chloe has described it as the moment when you’re out and catch yourself asking that exact question.
That order matters. Pop usually names the feeling first, then sings it. ‘Baby Girl’ works the other way: the sound arrives before the label does. Which is why the chorus, for all its lift, never quite reads as pure euphoria. There’s a small ache under the shine.
First spin, I filed it under summer-banger. Second and third listen, the picture shifts: it’s a song you dance while thinking about. That double layer is the center of gravity in her writing. She’s also mentioned that in an industry that loves to tear down pop girls, most of us are just fangirling at each other anyway.
The line between admiration and desire
On paper the subject sounds simple: admiration slides into something warmer, and the narrator notices. In practice, it’s a nightmare to write. Push too far, it’s a coming-out song with all that weight. Pull back too much, it’s a friendship anthem. ‘Baby Girl’ walks the thin line and stays with the noticing. Chloe leaves the shape un-labeled on purpose, which is why it lands wider than a strict queer-anthem read. Worth remembering: she studied psychology. Someone trained to put names on feelings, writing about the moment before the name arrives. That contradiction is quietly the smartest thing about the track.
Görres, Ailin, and the shape of the sound
The credits make the design legible. Oscar Görres (Taylor Swift’s Midnights orbit, Troye Sivan’s records) co-writes and co-produces. Next to him, Caroline Ailin, who co-wrote ‘New Rules’ and ‘IDGAF’ with Dua Lipa. Danceable, but with the lyric still visible through the gloss. Görres brings the sheen; Ailin brings hook engineering. Chloe’s voice, a slightly lower mid-range held back rather than launched, sits between them. She doesn’t belt, and that single choice pulls the song out of disposable-club-track territory.
The bass is the tell: leaning-forward, somewhere between an ’80s slap bass and a synth bass, setting the temperature in the first two bars. Hi-hats busy, top of the mix surprisingly empty. Across Fantasize, the Görres/Ailin co-write axis is reportedly the spine of the record: she’s not chasing one-off hits, she’s shaping a sound that carries.
Kuala Lumpur to London, the long way around
Chloe Qi Sha Lim grew up in Damansara Jaya, Kuala Lumpur, moved to the UK at 16, then stacked A-Levels, a psychology degree, and a master’s in communications. Music was self-taught: piano and guitar on her own, covers on SoundCloud. She’s told Rolling Stone UK she fell into music backwards, not the bedroom-songwriter-since-14 origin story. She’d been on a therapist track. A song about dancing and overthinking at once makes different sense coming from someone who nearly became a psychologist.
The pace after is fast. Debut single July 2024, first live that October, by summer 2026 she’s on lineups for Wilderness, Reading, Lowlands, Austin City Limits. Fantasize arrives October 30 via Columbia UK / RCA.
Why ’80s funk still works in 2026
Coverage keeps landing on the same descriptors: funk, disco, an ’80s tint. But that lane’s been crowded for a while. Post-Weeknd, post Future Nostalgia, the vocabulary is basically shared property, and doing ’80s in 2026 doesn’t differentiate you anymore. The move here is to use the era as a cooling agent, not a decoration. Disco is usually the sound of collective joy; in ‘Baby Girl’ the beat runs full speed while the narrator quietly takes her own temperature in a club-bathroom mirror. Verses half-voiced, pre-chorus widening, chorus letting the bassline finally open up. The bones are ’80s funk; the mix is tuned to the dry, spacious 2020s.
Three things to listen for, and where the song really lives
- The bass in the intro. That leaning-forward tone between slap and synth sets the mood in two bars. If it grabs you there, the rest of the track will.
- The chorus refusing to shout. No belt, no gain-riding. She rides the bass and hi-hat instead. Her mid-range does more with restraint than most singers do at full volume.
- The outro leaves the question open. The song ends and ‘be her or be with her’ never resolves. It’s handed to the listener, unwrapped.
One read: ‘Baby Girl’ is a pre-going-out song, not a mid-club song. Fifteen minutes on the train heading in, or the last stretch at the mirror finishing your face. Blasted at full volume in a packed club, honestly, the lyric detail and vocal pullback don’t survive that kind of SPL. Someone else will hear it as a summer-driving song, or a 2 a.m. dancing-alone-in-the-kitchen song. Which one is it for you?
Its place inside Fantasize, and how she handles queerness
‘Baby Girl’ is the fourth advance from Fantasize, alongside ‘So Sad So Hot,’ ‘YDH,’ and ‘Surprise Surprise.’ Line those four up and the lane is obvious: pop that keeps thinking after the beat drops. Inside that group, ‘Baby Girl’ is the one most pointed at someone else. If it lands in the back half of the sequencing, it’ll probably read as the pivot where the record turns outward.
The other layer is unavoidable: the central line is a woman looking at a woman. Chloe has talked about it in terms of that fuzzy teenage stretch where admiring someone and wanting them weren’t obviously different things yet. She doesn’t turn it into a statement. No label, no anthem posture. Some listeners will want her to push further. Others will feel like this ambiguity is exactly what growing up in the late ’90s / early 2000s felt like. The song has room for both reads, and I think that’s deliberate.
Where to start / what to play next
If ‘Baby Girl’ works on you, next stop is her earlier single 【♪So Sad So Hot♪】, a fan favorite and the clearest expression of her danceable-self-awareness mode. Then the full 【♪Fantasize♪】 mixtape on October 30. Sonic neighbors: Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia and Troye Sivan’s Something to Give Each Other show what Görres and Ailin tend to bring to a room, which makes it easier to hear what Chloe adds on top.
What comes after
The songs, for all the speed, don’t sound rushed. She’s not punching through with a hit; she’s setting up an identity, and that usually shows in the numbers a cycle later. Being from Malaysia in a Western pop market, she could easily be flattened into ‘Asian newcomer with a hook.’ ‘Baby Girl’ doesn’t lean on that. The vocabulary is straight London/LA mainstream pop, and not making ‘from Asia’ the pitch might be what gives her a longer career.
Where does she get grouped next year: UK new-gen pop/R&B alongside Griff, PinkPantheress, Olivia Dean, or the glossier Troye Sivan / Charli XCX corridor? The mixtape will start to answer that. A Kuala Lumpur writer, trained in psychology, who fell into pop late: that biography isn’t just profile decoration. You can hear it in how the song is built. October 30, when Fantasize lands, we’ll see how much of this read holds up.
コメント