Mahalia: ‘I love creating something fun out of something ugly, and painful’

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, go away!’”