Miki: “The person I’m flirting with now is myself”

She undoubtedly marked the year 2025 with her sassy interpretation ofCheckmate and a handful of other hits full of originality, which revealed a young performer, a unique songwriter of her kind. Miki’s catchy and humorous titles have accumulated 70 million streams, her clips have nearly 50 million views, and after a sold-out Olympia, the singer continues her tour. The young artist will be found on July 12 at the Francopholies in La Rochelle, August 26 at the Rock en Seine Festival, near Paris, and November 18 at the Zénith, in Paris.

A performer at heart, at each of her concerts, this new French pop sensation spreads a contagious energy around her. His bright smile and his youthful features give him a charm full of candor. As a counterpoint to this apparent carelessness, the 27-year-old Franco-Korean artist has something Rimbaldian, uno flamboyant crack. Passionate about art and culture, she distils corrosive and committed texts in resonance with the concerns of her generation and mischievously plays the self-deprecation card. 

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“Miki brings a breath of fresh air, but, even more, she has style: she is a musician who skilfully takes on all genres and her writing deeply touches our heartstrings,” testifies her colleague Charlotte Cardin, female artist of the year at the Victoires de la Musique last February. ceremony, Miki – named as a stage revelation and female revelation – offered a magnetic performance of her hit PARTICLE. On this May morning, at the photo studio of Madame Figaro, she emerges dressed in her stage uniform: black mini shorts, high football socks, tight t-shirt under a hoodie topped with a cap playing hide and seek with her eyes outlined in black pencil. A look tomboy which suits his athletic figure well.

Miki assiduously practices all kinds of sports: tennis, basketball, football, athletics, ping-pong, not to mention the dance lessons she started as a child at the conservatory. “I like to wear comfortable outfits that are a bit cyberpunk and hyper-technical, as if I were a mountaineer going to a rave party,” she says. This is how I see life.” The look is mischievous, the speech free, the femininity emancipated. Her appearance as a Japanese comic book heroine won over celebrities like Leïla Bekhti, Camille Cottin and Louis Garrel, who went to her last concert. But the young singer expresses her uniqueness above all in her songs. “There is something new about Miki,” explains singer Zaho de Sagazan. This mix of sung melody, rap and SMS-style jousting on urban music is fascinating. »

Pop sans frontiers

Miki’s musical map is without borders: “My influences range from Japanese city pop to Korean K-pop from the 1990s, including old school American hip-hop, electronic music, rock and hyperpop.” Not to mention his passion for classical music and the composer’s melodies. Japanese artist Ryuichi Sakamoto, whom she often performs on stage. “When I was a child, my mother made me listen to Mozart or Chopin to fall asleep,” she remembers. Often, she took me to the Philharmonie de Paris to discover the great voices of lyrical singing, like Patricia Petibon and Roberto Alagna, and we cried with emotion.

My parents are very cool, but they don’t accept mediocrity.

Miki

 Miki is an impetuous torrent that cannot be contained. A former good child, often first in class, who started playing the violin at the age of 6, followed by ten years of piano, then guitar and bass studies aimed at enriching her musical palette. “My parents are very cool, but they don’t accept mediocrity,” she sums up about the education she received from her French father, an aerospace engineer, and her mother. Korean, music lover and extrovert. Born in Nice, Miki grew up in Luxembourg and spent long stays in Korea, where part of her family lives. “We come from a small village near Gwangju, in the South. It’s a region where people are very tenacious and determined.” Miki remembers the days spent with her grandparents, who owned a grocery store, and walks in nature: “I loved going on hikes to listen to the song of frogs and cicadas, then go to the sea crab fishing. While I was there, I took taekwondo lessons and met extraordinary people, who remain my best friends today.”

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Listening to him, his existence has something magical about it. However, everything was not peaceful in the career of this artist, who learned very early to adapt to the circumstances of life. Since childhood, Miki has had to zigzag between two very distant languages ​​and cultures. She also explains having been confronted with “the acceptance of difference”, growing up alongside a disabled sister who taught her a lot. “My big sister has the mental age of a child, but she has a boundless imagination and our exchanges are based on an artistic dialogue: she loves singing, creating comics and doing watercolors. My benchmarks regarding “normality†are completely different from those of the majority of people. I grew up with weirdness.” Miki also emphasizes how this relationship has greatly inspired his music: “My sister brings me back to a form of essence of things. We share a love for music and everything that is synesthetic.”

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A wave of cyberbullying

When his first EP was released, Graouin March 2025, the singer was propelled to the front of the French musical scene by immediate success. At the same time, she was the victim of a wave of cyberbullying. The first virulent criticisms against him appeared on social networks in reaction to the clip ofCheckmatefilmed in front of a Buffalo Grill with few resources and an assumed amateurish rendering for a DIY aesthetic, this do-it-yourself which gives the impression that we did everything ourselves. “After it was broadcast, Internet users started writing that I was a spoiled middle-class girl who pretended to be poor,” says Miki. I was then criticized for being too old for the type of pop I was producing and for being a puppet used by my label, who would have had my songs composed entirely. In short, according to them, I was just an imposture.” Anything but prefabricated, Miki, a great film buff, had worked on this clip for a long time. 

I started to believe what people wrote about me and I completely isolated myself, to the point that I no longer dared to go out into the street.

Miki

In reality, long before music, Miki’s first love was cinema. So much so that at the age of 17, with a baccalaureate, the young woman, who dreamed of being a director, enrolled at the Royal Holloway University of London, where she left three years later with a diploma in film studies in her pocket. “From there,” she says, “I made short films and worked on documentaries as an editor and assistant director. I also received a grant at the age of 21 to make a film.”Checkmate was therefore part of a universe close to the cinema that she loves – Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Lee Chang-dong and Bong Joon-ho. Accused of being a ” industry plant“(a “product of the industry”), Miki responded through his debut album, ironically titled Industry PlantÂ: a pop snub to the haters and an outlet to regain control in the face of these virulent attacks. “I vomit all the words that are said about me on the Internet / They are printed on my skin, so I believe them”, are the eloquent words of the title Yes.

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In Miki’s career, there was a before and an after: “I experienced these attacks very badly. I started to believe what people wrote about me and I completely isolated myself, to the point that I no longer dared to go out into the street. I started to feel nothing, to be disconnected. I felt like a scam, a fraud. I couldn’t sleep and I was constantly insulting myself in my head.” Miki then decides to get up every day at 5 a.m. and compose, “to keep myself busy, to hide,” she says. Then, she decides to start therapy. Her songs come to life through intimate notebooks in which she writes down one truth a day, without embellishment. Then were born texts in the style of Sophie Calle, of which she is a fan, which interweave autobiography and fiction, art and life, artistic, social and individual identity.

Irreverent by nature and choice, Miki loves the books of Virginie Despentes and the engaging songs of the Spanish pop star RosalÃa, whom she considers to be the Maria Callas of her generation. “I like these women who embody both masculinity and femininity. These women who are in search of truth and who at the same time constantly dramatize it. » Very sensitive to the bonds of sisterhood and women’s rights, Miki has devoted numerous songs to these themes. In Poly Pocketshe urges every woman of her generation to be independent and to leave a man who would prevent her from doing so. “Dump him before you find yourself festering in an apartment or, even worse, on the street,” she tells them during her concerts. “I have seen too many women of my mother’s generation, who married men on whom they were financially dependent, finding themselves at 40 or 50 years old with nothing, trapped,” she explains.

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Miki herself has come a long way since her adolescence. She remembers playing the role of the Lolita in spite of herself. “I was born in 1998 and I am part of a pivotal generation in which girls still had to be pretty for boys, and learn to imitate love while risking never discovering what they really love. At 16, I wore too much makeup, I wore leather boots and little plaid skirts. Today, thanks to music, which allowed me to deconstruct everything, I don’t care at all. The person I’m flirting with from now on is myself.” Taking leave, Miki puts on her backpack with ping-pong paddles sticking out and gives us one last look: “In a few days, I’m going to Scotland, on residency, to compose new pieces.” Before returning to the stages of numerous festivals this summer.

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July 12 at the Francopholies in La Rochelle, August 26 at the Rock en Seine Festival, near Paris, November 18 at the Zénith, in Paris.