Mckayla Twiggs Wants It All

The Broadway-kid-turned-pop-diva re-introduces herself with her glossy debut EP, WHAT A GIRL WANTS.

By Cam Delisle

Published on March 20, 2026

Somewhere in the American pop subconscious there’s a very specific type of character: the theatre kid who leaves the stage behind and reappears online years later, inexplicably cool enough to transcend description. Meet Mckayla Twiggs, the latest iteration of that story.

A Broadway kid before she was old enough to even Google herself, Twiggs spent her childhood singing songs written decades before she was born, making her Broadway debut at just seven in the Tony-winning musical Once. Now in her early twenties, she’s re-introducing herself through MacBook Photo Booth visualizers, snarky, diaristic pop songs, and a distinct kind of sincerity that only really makes sense in a post-Tumblr, post-TikTok internet – squarely in the long tail of millennial indie sleaze.

“What A Girl Wants,” Twiggs’ first single, didn’t exactly explode on contact. “For the first two weeks of teasing it, it didn’t do anything,” she admits, content in hindsight, knowing now what followed. So she pivoted: scrappy webcam clips, colour‑graded, chopped up, and posted one by one. The videos came studded with glinting face jewels, wind-tossed hair, and fur boas drifting in and out of frame like a low-budget pop fantasia. Views began to crawl, then they leapt, tens multiplying into hundreds of thousands. “Those videos took off really quickly,” she says, with a small smirk. “That’s kind of when I knew.”

The track, an EDM-teasing pop experiment reminiscent of other luxurious affairs such as Ariana Grande’s “7 rings,” opens accordingly: “Everything I love is illegal and so expensive, Christian Dior, religious about my possessions.” What started as a four-track set then expanded to five, “Golddigger” emerging as the next jewel in the sequence, shaped by the flash of attention that “What A Girl Wants” had drawn. “The day I wrote ‘Golddigger,’ I knew it had to come out next. But, if people hadn’t reacted to ‘What A Girl Wants’ like that, I’m not sure that song would have happened the way it did.”

If “What A Girl Wants” was the introduction, “Golddigger” is where Twiggs really seems to relish the character that she’s building. When we talk, she’s sipping an iced coffee from Starbucks, hot pink nails tapping lightly against the cup – a detail that wouldn’t look completely out of place in one of her own videos (just slap on the sepia filter). In the visual for “Golddigger,” Twiggs pirouettes through gilded absurdity, posed in front of a leopard-print backdrop and swimming in dollar bills printed with her own headshot. The aesthetic isn’t subtle, and it isn’t meant to be. “In a lot of ways, who I am as an artist is like my alter ego,” she says. “That version of myself that’s bigger, bolder, and more fabulous.”

After seeing Twiggs at full tilt in a video like “Golddigger,” it’s hard to imagine that she almost walked away from it all. She spent three years at NYU – a year shy of finishing when she dropped out to pursue music in Los Angeles. “When I went to NYU, I had an extreme identity crisis because of how much rejection comes with being an actress,” she admits. “I was like, I don’t want to spend my entire life constantly being told no.”

For a while, she paused her career in entertainment to see if something else could fill the space. “I started taking neuroscience and biology classes… I was even coding,” she says, almost as if she still can’t believe it herself. But stepping back didn’t make her feel free. “I think that you realize you want to do something sometimes when you’re not doing it. Not doing it made me genuinely feel not alive.” Even after two years of trying to be someone else, she kept hitting the same truth: stepping away didn’t make her feel lighter – it just made her want it more.

Wanting it, of course, means letting people watch you try. For Twiggs, that audience now exists largely on the other side of her phone screen. The internet, she says, still feels like foreign soil. “My thing is, fake it until you make it,” she shrugs. “It makes me so genuinely uncomfortable to put myself on the internet because you never know how people will respond.” That uncertainty isn’t theoretical: years ago, singing clips tossed into the algorithmic churn of the internet came back buried under what she remembers as “hundreds of thousands of hate comments.”

The reception to her own music, however, has been different – warmer, almost disorientingly so. “I think people really connect to it,” she says. “It’s still such a scary thing making yourself so vulnerable online, though.” Then again, fear has a funny way of dulling with repetition. At some point along the way, she found a strange equilibrium. “I’ve started to find a lot of identity in expressing myself that way,” she says. “It’s become fun for me.”

Twiggs’ debut EP, WHAT A GIRL WANTS, negotiates the space between granular synth washes and euphoric pop melodies, modulated pads and plucked arpeggios meeting the kind of hooky choruses that once made early-aughts Gaga or Britney so irresistible. “I love electronic music, like The Helpp and Imogen Heap… and I also love pop music… Ariana is my queen,” she gushes. “I really wanted to mix those worlds together… Over time, I think that I started not only trying to combine those two things, but rather sit in the pocket of electronic or psychedelic, and write a pop song over it.”

Twiggs’ aesthetic is a collision of impulses she didn’t quite let herself have as a teenager. “I wanted to mix and match things that maybe didn’t make the most sense,” she says, tracing a line from the shadowed, experimental pop of her teenage years – artists like Billie Eilish – back to the bright, unabashed pop girl she always imagined herself being. But it was only when she let that hindering ideology go that she finally began to fully embrace her own vision. “Eventually, I just had to let the diva out.”