Making out with a total stranger and filming it for YouTube is still one of flowerovlove’s best ideas.

“I was just like, I want to kiss a boy. I didn’t really think about who it was going to be with or anything. And then we met two minutes before filming…” The British pop it-girl, is explaining the voyeuristic visualizer she wanted for “Kiss, Kiss, Kiss”, released in July. It features her locking lips with singer 24kGoldn for several minutes while reciting a Cher Horowitz “I’m totally buggin’” inner monologue and innocently pondering, “What’s a kiss anyway?”

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“I just thought it would be very cunty to kiss a boy for three minutes and have a water break in between,” she adds. “Remember growing up, there used to be those ‘how to kiss’ videos? I used to actually watch them because I was like, wait, how do I kiss someone? The whole point of it wasn’t for it to be sexual or anything. It was for it to feel young, when everything you’re doing is being watched. That’s why we have the Barbie dolls in the video too. It was meant to feel like your first kiss, your first time.”

At just 21, the singer-songwriter—real name Joyce Cissé—has lived through many of these coming-of-age experiences over the past six years she’s been releasing music. And she used the lessons of first loves and first heartbreaks as a muse for her just-released Capitol Records debut, Mini Skirt Warrior.

“It’s really about the first time living as an adult. It’s intense and often feels like I don’t know what to do right now. I’m still just a baby! It also doesn’t help that I feel things on an extremely deep level for no reason,” she shares with a self-deprecating laugh. Cissé speaks with the same open-book easiness that comes across in her confessionals like the singalong pop number “In My Victoria’s Secret.” It’s a song idea she came up with while shopping in the store and wondering how many women had cried about liars and losers while looking cute in their lingerie.

The artist has a name for how she processes things like the lingerie-to-languish throughline. She calls it her “thought daughter” persona, which makes even more sense when you find out she’s an Aquarius. “It’s like the girl who looks outside of a window when she’s driving in a car and has deep thoughts about each individual snowflake and why it looks that way, or just all the intricate details of life,” she explains. “It’s overthinking, but it’s also peaceful in a sense too.”

That’s just half the album, though, she assures. The other half is when she dons her Mini Skirt Warrior alter ego for bravado tracks like “Don’t Even” and becomes the “bad bitch.”

“There’s parts of her in me,” Cissé says of the character she conjures for the album. “I’ve kind of always been a diva. I’ve always had main character energy. But she’s definitely my superhero, because the confidence that I get when I have on a mini skirt and a pair of heels is untouchable.”

The way flowerovlove wears the high fashion look like armor in photo shoots and even the cover of her album (where she’s holding a cheerleader pose while a wild zebra looks on) is likely why many designers have called on Cissé to model looks when she’s not busy with her music career.

As a teenager, she did a few campaigns for the likes of Gucci and Swarovski. More recently, she’s been featured in campaigns for Louis Vuitton and Coach and was seen at Fashion Week in New York and Paris. But Cissé is quick to note, “I really don’t identify as a model.”

Still, her playful and bold sense of style—like a mix of Grace Jones and Twiggy—is hard to miss, which makes it all the more disappointing she has her camera turned off for our video call. “Next time!” she promises with an unshakeable bubbly disposition that makes you really want to take her at her word. “It’s just too early for me.”

At the moment, Cissé is far from her London home, holed up in Los Angeles where she’s putting the finishing touches on the deluxe edition of Mini Skirt Warrior. “I feel like it’s already blossoming into a second album, my brain is already ahead and on it,” she declares.

The hustle and deep desire to create have lived within flowerovlove since she wrote her first song at 13. That’s when music became an outlet as she wrestled with a bit of an identity crisis, originally taking on her nom de plume as an Instagram handle to represent the resilient person she wanted to bloom into. “I kind of always felt like an outcast and like I’m different, like there’s something bigger out there for me,” Cissé admits. Part of it was her environment. Cissé grew up the daughter of Ivorian immigrants in England, where she didn’t always feel like she fit in. “I was raised as an African child, but I grew up in Essex and in London, a mostly white man’s country, in a white man’s city.”

But inside her house, music always felt like an escape. “I grew up around so much music, a lot of ABBA and Donna Summer and disco,” she shares. Her mother was also a huge fan of Bollywood. “Bollywood movies, Bollywood culture, and Bollywood music specifically,” she says, teasing, “For my deluxe, I’m going to have some slight influences.”

When COVID hit, the then-15-year-old Cissé started taking music seriously, which came as a bit of a shock to her parents. “I’m not a nepo baby or anything. I don’t come from a secure amount of status or a secure financial background whatsoever, so to be like, I’m going to do this thing that is not guaranteed to make a lot of money was scary for them.” But in time, their support grew, especially with the comfort that Cissé was working exclusively with her brother Wilfred as a producer and co-songwriter in the beginning.

“I think he saw me as a little project of his. I’m the youngest sister [of four], so I’ve always been, like, the most annoying sibling. I was constantly around, constantly pestering, and I was just bored, truly.” In time, Wilfred expanded flowerovlove’s music palette, introducing her to pivotal music like Frank Ocean’s Blonde and Tame Impala’s discography.

“I’d never heard anything like it before. It was like my brain was expanding. At the same time, I was also getting into artists, painters, photographers, travel, and stuff about the world.” One of the other important things Wilfred introduced young Joyce to was the 2021 Billie Eilish documentary, The World’s A Little Blurry. “After seeing that, I was like, we should do something like this.”

To compare Joyce and Wilfred’s relationship to that of Billie and Finneas isn’t too far off. “I would say [the O’Connell’s] situation is way more intimate, especially because I work with other people now and am flourishing into my own as a songwriter and producer,” says Cissé. “But I would say that the connection we have is very similar. Wilfred is one of my favorite people, definitely.”

Through their partnership, flowerovlove released her earliest songs “Kiss & Chase” and “Unseen Miracles” followed by a series of EPs that eventually caught the attention of Capitol Records, which signed her on her 18th birthday. In short order, she found opportunities to play big gigs like Glastonbury and Lollapalooza, which increased her visibility, racking up over 156 million combined global streams to date.

That success is something Cissé believes was brought on not just by hard work but also by positive thinking and mood boarding. “I’m a big manifester,” she affirms. She’s also a big gatekeeper. “My closest friends don’t even know anything. If I have a tour or if I have something, they find out on Instagram. I don’t tell anyone anything,” she adds. “The only person who knows stuff about me is my brother. I’m very secretive and big on protecting my peace.”

Beyond finding early inspiration in The World’s A Little Blurry, there was actually another music documentary that made Cissé initially want to pursue her pop star path—Justin Bieber: Never Say Never, the 2011 concert film that chronicled the young star’s journey to selling out Madison Square Garden when he was just 16.

“I rewatched the documentary two days ago!” Cissé admits, happy I brought up the film. “That was the first long-form thing I’ve ever seen where I was like, I really want to do this too. And to this day, it still hits me seeing him play MSG.”

In April, flowerovlove almost had a run-in with her pop idol as both made their debuts at Coachella. “I would’ve loved to have seen his set. But it started at 11 p.m. and I needed to be on the ground the next day at 8 a.m. I knew it wasn’t going to be responsible, and it was either my show or his.”

But there were other standout moments at Coachella that stuck with her after the weekend wrapped. First was the fact that she was able to complete the set at all. A few months before, Cissé had started to experience symptoms of vertigo that nearly derailed the performance. “It was fucking scary. And I had the lingering question, am I ever going to be able to perform again? I was struggling with this thing that could have affected my whole dream. But I was able to do the show, and it was one of the happiest days of my life for sure. I would love to do it again.”

Another big win was the many artists who approached her backstage to share how much of a fan they are of flowerovlove—chief among them being Sabrina Carpenter. “I was standing right near her, but I wasn’t going to say anything, and then she came over and said, ‘I think you’re so talented.’ And I’m like, wait, you know me? This is fucked!”

It’s not like it’s a new phenomenon for Cissé, but it still shocks her every time. Everyone from Olivia Rodrigo to SZA, Haim and Halsey have sung flowerovlove’s praises. Niall Horan and Role Model have taken her out on tours. Even Sir Elton John rang her up one day to invite her to lunch. “I was very nervous. I was just like, ‘thank you, thank you’ the whole time. I didn’t know what the hell to say. He was just giving me the biggest compliments ever … and to have that level of support, it’s like okay maybe I do know what I’m doing,” says Cissé.

But one of the most personal run-ins for flowerovlove happened when she randomly met North West on the Coachella grounds. “She came up to me and was like, ‘I see your TikToks all the time and I love your music’. And I was like, girl, don’t even. I adore you,” Cissé recalls. 

Interacting with the blue-haired teen daughter of Ye and Kim Kardashian illustrated the bigger picture for Cissé of the importance of what she’s doing with her craft. “I love young Black kids who feel like outcasts because I was there. She feels alternative. She has that feeling. And the fact that she sees me and feels something about my music is like, we see each other. It’s like my music is touching the people I want it to touch. So that was a very special moment for me, for sure.”

It reminded Cissé of how she once saw a role model in another Black femme alternative artist, Willow Smith, who showed her that women of color have a place in often white-dominated genres like pop and rock. In a full circle moment, Willow is featured on Mini Skirt Warrior in a “dream collaboration” for the heartfelt dream pop song “Girls Will Be Girls.”

“I don’t think people understand how hard women work, especially Black women, to fight through and be seen in a certain space. And then they still won’t get the credit that they’ve worked 10 times harder for,” Cissé explains, audibly sighing at the struggle of Black artists constantly being lumped into the same few categories. “What I love to do is ask people whenever I first meet them, ‘What kind of music do you think I make?’ And a lot of people will say R&B,” she shares with another sigh. “It feels like the very few people who are trying to fight the stereotype are brave in trying to break through.”

It’s a topic that recently came up at a girl dinner with her friends and fellow alt artists Alemeda (who makes a cameo in flowerovlove’s campy music video for “American Wedding”) and Ravyn Lenae. “We were talking about how we have no idea why an artist like SZA isn’t labeled as a huge pop icon, a huge pop girl,” Cissé says, revisiting the dinner table conversation. “If you think about Tate McRae’s music, she openly said she was influenced by SZA when she was making her most recent album. And you can hear it. But it’s like Tate is labeled as a pop girl when she’s making SZA-esque music. And SZA isn’t labeled as a pop girl. And it feels like that’s only because she’s a Black woman and because she collaborates with rappers sometimes.”

The other thing that irks Cissé is that “there’s so much expectation on Black artists to be serious, but people forget that you’re allowed to have fun. You can be pop. … I don’t need to whip out a guitar and do poetry. It’s okay.”

Flowerovlove is certainly finding joy in what she’s doing. On recent tour stops, she’s jumped out of giant purses and lipstick props; for Coachella it was an oversized mini skirt. It’s just one of those things, like kissing a total stranger and filming it, where Cissé wants to try everything at least once and dare others to do the same.

While she keeps checking the boxes on her “firsts” list, there is one permanent experience that she hopes to accomplish at some point in the future. “I want to wake up every single day and be proud of myself,” she says like a total thought daughter. “I think I have moments, but I want to feel that every day, to know I’m doing it and can just be proud. That’s when I’m going to be like, okay, I’m a warrior for real.”

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