The FADER's longstanding series GEN F profiles emerging artists to know now.
“Joni Mitchell-approved” is a label few artists get to claim in 2026. For girlsweetvoiced (Adriana Mallya), getting that nod of recognition from the legendary folk artist was one of the first wins of her career.
Mallya first teased the demo to her song “Tonight,” which samples the recognizable dulcimer strum of Mitchell’s “California,” in January. In the video, Mallya’s doe eyes look up and off, glistening in her bedroom’s warm light, as she sings softly but strongly about a crush. It went viral. Very. As of October 2026, it has over 2.5 million views and nearly half a million likes.
Maybe Mallya is just blessed. It has certainly felt so since the singer-songwriter came onto the scene with little more than a bedroom webcam, her recognizable bangs-haircut, and a voice which, as her name suggests, is oh so sweet. Her debut album, Lovesweet, released July 24, is produced by Michael Uzowuru, most well known for his work on Frank Ocean’s blonde and collaborations with SZA, FKA twigs, and Beyoncé. Eagle-eyed Ocean fans noticed that Mallya is one of eight people he follows from his alleged private burner account @kikiboyyyyyyy. (When I ask her if they’ve hung out, her eyes grow wide and she makes an X with her arms to signal “no comment”). In the summer of 2025, she signed to the buzzy A24 Music record label (home to ear and Sophia Stel) and RCA.
Oh yeah, and then there was that Joni Mitchell endorsement.
I didn’t think the sample was going to get cleared, because, first of all, how does one get in contact with the Joni Mitchell?
“I didn't think the sample was going to get cleared, because, first of all, how does one get in contact with the Joni Mitchell?” Mallya says from a hotel room over a recent video call. She’s in the middle of her first-ever tour, opening for Los Angeles’ esteemed crooner Ryan Beatty.
Luckily for Mallya, she had an in with Mitchell’s team. She had recorded the demo to “Tonight” at Chaplin studios in Los Angeles — previously A&M Studios, which is where Mitchell recorded her album Blue. The studio said they could pass along a letter and huzzah, she got a response. It was cleared.
Mallya grew up in Ottawa, Canada, the country’s capital city that feels more like a really small town, she says. “Most of the people I went to elementary school with, I went to middle and high school with,” she says. The expectation for her and her peers was that after growing up, they would get a job in the government. Being an artist simply didn’t feel “feasible,” she recalls.
Maybe that’s why it took her relatively long to lean in to making music. During the pandemic in 2020, while still living in Ottawa, she went to Long & McQuade (Canada’s equivalent of Guitar Center) and got the cheapest microphone she could find, an interface, and MIDI keyboard. “I was just like, ‘Okay, we're going to try this.’”
Her earliest musical influences were a blend of folk and pop: Laura Marling, Fleet Foxes, Janet Jackson, Frank Ocean, and Joni Mitchell. She was always transfixed by the question of how her favorites actually wrote music. “I went on YouTube and Google, and I was like, ‘How to write songs,’” she remembers. “I followed it play-by-play. I gave myself a bit of a curriculum.”
She was living in Ottawa at the time, and over the next few years would work a slew of random jobs: the local Metro, retail, and a non-profit. She began posting some early demos on Soundcloud and gave herself the name girlsweetvoiced, a reference to a line from one of Anne Carson’s translations of ancient Greek poet Sappho’s found fragments: “Girl, sweet-voiced.”
In 2024, a year before her music career began taking off, she moved to be close to friends in Montreal. In the artistic city in Québec, she noticed, people tended to introduce themselves based on their chosen creative pursuit so she began to socially identify as a musician. “If I'm going to be at these parties and tell people that I make music, it should be out there,” she remembers thinking. In January 2025, she posted her first video of her singing, to little effect.
Soon after, she shot grainy webcam performance of her song “u & me” alongside a caption that read “this one is about ai.” “It was the first video where I opened my TikTok and it was like, 99+ notifications,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh, I feel like a viral sensation right now.’” She’d feel that feeling magnified by, well, a lot, a year later.
Suddenly, Mallya — who had spent little time in the States prior — was spending time in Los Angeles, where she locked in with Uzowuru. (They were connected through her label). After bonding on shared references and realizing their perspectives were moving in “lockstep,” she asked him to come on board for the album. “That was an insane moment because he's worked on every album that I freaking love.”
I was like, Oh, I feel like a viral sensation right now.
Working on Lovesweet in Los Angeles, Montreal, and Ottawa, the album is an ode to different forms of love: romantic, platonic, familial. “so long” and “ruby & stone,” for example, are about her family; the latter is a lilting, guitar-led lullaby about the grounding force of connection.
She calls the album a sampling from the first “50 songs I've ever written in my life — It feels like a representation of finding myself as a songwriter.”
“I'm quite literally doing everything for the first time,” she adds. “I’m staying attached to the novelty of this experience, the honor and the magic of it.”
