She brings the same collaborative spirit to her music as she continues to flex her songwriting muscles. She started out singing covers, so Aisyah says that writing songs was not something that came to her naturally at first.
But meeting her songwriting partner Harun Amirrul Rasyid Mohame opened her mind to new possibilities. “He is a poet; he is my twin flame,” she enthuses. “He fixes my songs and enhances them.” The duo worked together for her EP Sugar, which she released in 2020 after leaving her record label.
Her bid to be independent was nerve-racking, she acknowledges, but a necessary step in her journey towards finding herself. “I needed to do my own thing so that if anything happened, I only have myself to blame because I am sick of blaming other people and feeling like s**t about it,” she says.
She realised that her expectations of being with a record label had been influenced by her brother Aliff Aziz, who shot to fame in Malaysia in the noughties. “He was a phenomenon when he burst onto the scene, but I began to see that it was his journey. I cannot do the same thing and expect the same outcome because we are different,” she muses.
To her surprise, Sugar found its own niche among her fans. “The numbers were not great compared to when I was at labels, because there was no money to boost my stuff, but they were organic numbers from people who truly wanted to listen to my songs. Through this, I learnt to be more confident and to write more,” she says.
