1ycia has entered the chat. She appears before me on my computer screen, an enviable photograph of a tropical beach superimposed behind her. A similar image can be found on the cover of her debut EP, a bubblegum electro pop punk, tucked into the bottom row of its Instagram grid design like a digital postcard. It’s a perfect entry point into her world, where imagery and sound collapse into each other, and where the line between person and persona is never quite clear.

​The music follows the same logic: bright synths and glossy hooks that dissolve suddenly into jagged riffs or unexpected drops. Bubblegum electro pop punk isn’t a genre you’ll find on Spotify, but one that 1ycia made up herself—part joke, part manifesto. “It came from a spot of feeling like I needed a genre name, but also from my love of people describing their sounds in non-traditional ways,” she explains. Each track becomes a new splice of her invented taxonomy, stitched together with equal parts sincerity and satire.

Her favorite track from the EP is “freckle boy,” written mid-flight as she tried to distract herself from turbulence. “[One of my friends] was starting to realize that her boyfriend was kind of a loser, and we ended up talking about it the whole trip,” she says, grinning. “I wrote the whole song on the flight back. I love to take these really specific situations happening around me and talk about them in my songs.”

​Humor, she admits, is lifeblood to her process, both on this record and in her previous work. “With ‘feel like charli’, I struggled to say the song is satirical, because elements of it definitely are,” she explains. “Obviously, I’m mimicking [Charli XCX’s] accent at the end, but it’s also a commentary on iconography and idols and inspiration. How do artists use inspiration, and when does it become mimicry instead?”

​That line between sincerity and performance is a consistent dilemma that connects 1ycia’s music from start to finish. “Through my visuals and tone, it’s a commentary on person versus persona. Where do I end and where does my username begin?” she asks. Lycia Yousfi (with an “L”) is the person, but 1ycia with a “1” is the artist, the username, a partnership with herself and producer Alex Balfanz. “I hope to convey that I am behind a screen in a way, whether that’s literal or metaphorical.”

When she says this, I can’t help but wonder what that means for Lycia with an “L”. When asked about how she stays grounded as a real-life, flesh-and-blood human despite her digital persona, she notes that writing about her lived experiences, especially those related to her upbringing, keeps her on this earth. She says, “Girlhood is a topic that I cannot escape when I'm writing. Growing up and feeling the magnifying glass of the male gaze and all these things… I think that gaze is a huge lens that I use with writing, and is also something that I have felt all my life.”

As for what’s next: more singles, a potential mixtape, and a slate of DIY shows. And she’s quick to remind herself of the core philosophy: “Trust your crazy ideas. Those are the ones that make for the most fun listening experience,” she tells me. “People love to feel the fun.”