Nxdia on the weirdness of going viral and ‘unreal’ Reading Festival reception

18 months on from the release of their viral track of sapphic angst, “She Likes a Boy”, Manchester-based Egyptian-Sudanese alt-pop artist Nxdia stepped out on to the BBC Introducing Stage at Reading Festival to an insane atmosphere.

“Unreal,” is what Nxdia said to PinkNews of the festival that took place at Ritchfield Avenue over the Bank Holiday weekend, adding they had never seen a music event so big. “It was amazing, and then the stage? Oh my god, I had so much fun. 

“I was so surprised because Limp Bizkit and Becky Hill were playing at the same time. I was like, ‘I feel really confident right now’,” Nxdia joked self-deprecatingly, “but it was a massive crowd, and they were really up for it, so raring to go and just being so lovely. I loved it.” 

Despite their already huge following – Nxdia has more than a million followers on TikTok – fame is still a “weird” concept to them, describing it as “insane” and “mad”. 

“I feel exactly the same in a lot of ways because, unfortunately, especially, I always feel like myself. 

“But I think… I don’t know, it’s weird. I’m not used to it!” 

Reading Festival came off the back of a very big year-and-a-half for the 25-year-old.  

“She Likes a Boy” – a track about having a crush on a straight girl who likes a boy (oh sapphics, who hasn’t?) – went viral on TikTok and has been streamed more than 65 million times on Spotify. Their debut mixtape I Promise No One’s Watching was released in June, they performed at BludFest, Latitude Festival and Brighton Pride over the summer, they are going on their first – and sold out – headline tour in October before supporting the absolute icon that is Cat Burns in November. 

“My baby, the angel, perfect angel,” Nxdia praised of the “Go” singer. “Cat can do no wrong and has the voice of an angel.”

Burns, whose second album How to Be Human comes out on 31 October, was not the only artist Nxdia was happy to gush about.

They, like many, “wear [their] teenage playlist on [their] soul” and said they inspiration from Dominic Fike, My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Paramore and Stromae – even though they do not speak French, the latter’s 2013 album Racine carrée is one of their favourite of all time. 

“You’d have to sedate me,” Nxdia said if they ever got to work with Paramore lead Hayley Williams, “because I would be having a panic attack in the corner. It just would not be normal. I don’t think I could be normal!” 

“I don’t want to be one of those people who’s fanatical in a way because I don’t act like that – and I really am quite a chill person! I promise. But, I think I love telling people when I think they’re incredible. I love it no matter what level they think they’re at.”

Born in Heliopolis, a suburb of Egypt’s capital Cairo, Nxdia moved to Manchester as a child and describes themselves as a “really social hermit”. 

“I love people and I love being around people. I’m very extroverted, but I also need a lot of time on my own,” they explained. 

“I need time to sit down and write and think and understand how I feel, because it doesn’t always come super easily to me and, for me, that’s through music or poetry or writing.”

Their extroverted side comes across in the fact they have always loved performing “in any capacity”, namely because “it’s really cool that you can just embody something else”. 

“That element of just being able to bring myself to the forefront and really accentuate parts of me that are there, but maybe not to that kind of braggadocious or bigger amount, I find really cool because. If you could be larger than life anywhere, why wouldn’t it be on stage?” 

Nxdia’s Egyptian-Sudanese and queer identity plays a pivotal role in their music, with their tracks mixing English and Arabic as they draw from their lived experiences. 

“In the same way that when I was growing up, on the bus to school, I’d be on the phone to my mum, speaking in Arabic, and it would be very much that I was saying it very quietly into the phone. I think I’ve fallen into this creative thing where I tend to write the Arabic parts as stuff that I wouldn’t necessarily say directly out loud in English,” Nxdia explains of their creative process. 

“It’s not even a secret because it’s obviously just another language and it’s the most spoken language in the world, but it’s just my inner dialog more than my outer one.

“Maybe that has something to do with the fact that I speak English day-to-day and I speak Arabic with a lot of my friends and my family and maybe that’s just kind of the dynamic that my brain has applied to music – but I don’t know, I love it.” 

They add its “fun” to play around with language in their music the way they do because the phrases they do are particularly colloquial to Egypt and specifically Cairo. 

“I speak in a very heavy accent and it’s so obvious, but it’s one that everyone recognises, because most popular media and series come from Egypt,” they add.

As a queer person of colour, the increase in queer representation in music and wider pop culture that we are all loving at the moment particularly from female and non-binary artists, aka the ‘lesbian renaissance’, is something that Nxdia thinks is “beautiful” and “amazing”, adding: “I love representation.”  

“I make music and I love putting it out there but I’m always hunting music, I’m so happy that there’s more space, especially for sapphic stuff,” Nxdia told PinkNews.

“I enjoy there’s so much more representation now that we don’t have to just look at like one or two people to speak for an entire community.

“I can find people who look like me or like who have experienced certain things, or who don’t look like me and have experienced different things but we’re drawn together by similar kinds of experience or love to different people. 

“It’s a really beautiful way of stopping yourself from feeling different for any bad reason.”