First seen supporting Ed Sheeran at 14, the singer has a clutch of Mobos, Grammy and Brit nominations, and a star-packed album just out. But has success been worth the slog?
Mahalia Burkmar has a knack for penning earworm-strewn pop about relationship drama: complex feelings, shady exes, just being generally irked by your lover. It’s fitting, then, that the day that we meet for a coffee close to her east London home she’s just had a row with her boyfriend. Happily it’s just a minor tiff: he passes by soon after to collect a set of keys en route to the gym, and the pair kiss and make up. As for the exes that appear frequently in her music, “it’s almost like they had a sonar signal that told them when I was single again … Every man in my life has done it. I’d come out of a relationship and then I would get a message from them and be like … ‘What?!’” She’s written a song about it for her new album, but it isn’t behaviour she endorses. “When I see, ‘Hey stranger’” – the title of the track – “I think: ‘Urgh, go away!’”
Burkmar – better known simply by her first name – has garnered a fervent following in recent years, tackling breakups and growing up with honeyed, occasionally talky vocals that can turn a two-and-a-half minute pop song into a one-act play, reminiscent of Frank-era Amy Winehouse. On I Wish I Missed My Ex, from her 2019 debut album Love and Compromise, she laments the inevitability of an old flame popping up again (you can almost hear the sigh as she sings “You’ll be like ‘Babe, come over’ / I know how this goes, yeah”; today she describes it as “a painful experience that I was trying to play off as being hilarious”). On recent single Cheat, with the 00s pop great JoJo, the pair unite against a philandering man, for what feels like an updated version of Brandy and Monica’s 90s hit The Boy Is Mine.
