Vivek Shraya Reinvents Herself as VIVICA

Meet the electrified persona channeling grief, rage, and pleasure into a distorted pop alter ego.

By Yasmine Shemesh

Photos by Christopher Sherman

Published on May 22, 2026

It might look like Vivek Shraya at first, but look a little closer: at the catsuit, the in-your-face attitude, the unapologetic lust. With her twelfth studio album, VIVICA, Shraya is in the spirit of pop star tradition: reinvention. This alter-ego goes out dancing all night, makes out with whoever she likes, looks right at you when she does it, and puts pleasure—and herself—first. A sexually-liberated party animal, VIVICA, Shraya confesses, is “the kind of the person [she] always secretly wanted to be.”

In 2023, after Shraya had moved back to Toronto from a few years in Calgary, her frequent collaborator James Bunton suggested they meet for regular songwriting sessions. Nothing preconceived, just to experiment. Bunton had some beats that Shraya instantly gravitated to, but she didn’t know what to do with them yet. With the rise of hate against the transgender community in recent years, Shraya wanted to lean into her grief and rage.

It’s something the Edmonton-born-and-raised artist has historically done in her work, a prolific output of music, literature, visual art, theatre, television, and film—going into the pain and making something beautiful out of it. At the same time, though, Shraya just wanted to have fun. Two distinct projects began to form and one, last year’s New Models, took immediate focus.

But Shraya found herself returning to those beats. She realized she enjoyed them more as songs that weren’t coming from her. “The past few years have actually been really hard,” Shraya says. “It was simultaneously difficult to sort of conceive joy and pleasure through me.” Her usual way of creating felt almost like a crutch. “This time, I wanted to do something so different than that and it really required me to actually imagine being a different person.”

Shraya’s New Models pushes back against the violence and vitriol and eradication of rights through feeling and expression, like singing akar, the classical Indian technique. On VIVICA, she does it by the power of turning pain into pleasure.

Who is VIVICA, then? She is freedom, fantasy, ego, confidence, and possibility. She is the Rayanne Graff to Shraya’s Angela Chase, someone who is intoxicating because she represents many things that Shraya isn’t. Though, Shraya notes, “there is a bratty side of me, and it’s not one that I get to explore a lot in my art or that I have explored a lot in my art.” That side planted the seed for this character. But the persona is also as far from Shraya—who describes herself as someone who hadn’t kissed maybe more than five people before this project—as possible.

“It’s funny,” she says, “I’m getting ready to do some pop-up shows here in Toronto and I’m actually very nervous because, I don’t know, do I even know how to embody this person?” When Shraya takes the stage, she’s always been intentional in creating a welcoming, comfortable atmosphere. “VIVICA doesn’t give a fuck if you’re having a good time. She’s narcissistic, she’s selfish… and all of those things that I’ve had to tell myself are wrong. I grew up in a house where even looking at yourself in the mirror was seen as vanity. She’s her own person, which is exciting and terrifying at the same time.”

As such, it was important that VIVICA’s voice be unrecognizable from Shraya’s natural rich, warm tone—distorted and auto-tuned to a deep, glitchy pitch. “I think, sonically, that’s the glue of the project for me,” notes Shraya. The voice struts through a propulsive soundscape of sweat-drenched electronic music with lyrics that are playful, erotic, funny, and explicit, and also full of pop culture references—like “Do you want me to flex in the middle of sex? / Do you want my biceps to throw you on the bed?” on “DO U LIKE MY MUSCLES?,” winking to the films American Psycho and Love Lies Bleeding. But the words also carry depth.

Catty call-outs feel like a slippery slope into hostility (“CRASS”). A threesome can be interpreted as a release that’s as much from pain or loneliness as it is sexual (“3WAY,” with its All Saints intro). Ego transcends relationship archetypes on the album’s title track, inspired by Babygirl and the scene where Harris Dickinson dances to George Michael’s “Father Figure.” And then there’s “CENTRE OF ATTENTION,” VIVICA‘s closer and crown jewel, about an all-consuming obsession. The last lines, vocals sped up, are the first she’s heard being anything but self-absorbed: “I will never be enough because you don’t want to just get off you want my body, body.” It drives home the point, bridging other references to the body—to politicized bodies—across the album. You want me? Here I am.

“This obsession with trans people is so bizarre to me,” says Shraya. “The fact that trans people get dragged into every kind of rhetoric or conversation, just the obsession with our bodies—forever, ever, obsessed with our bodies. And to me, it was interesting to turn that obsession on its head a little bit, to be like, oh, you just can’t get enough? And it’ll never be enough.”

VIVICA is a visual album, and one that also acts as a celebration of the creative community. Fashion is always a pillar of Shraya’s work and VIVICA’s look is an important element of the project. She wears striking pieces, like a black bodysuit with silver chains and an oversized, structured silver, pink, and gold jacket. “I really wanted to collaborate with Canadian talent and designers,” notes Shraya. One such designer is Toronto-based Mic. Carter for L’Uomo Strano, who has done many of Shraya’s tour costumes—though those are a bit more conservative. “It was fun doing something that we don’t typically do together–and I’m super excited,” she adds, “because they’re doing a fashion show premiering their new collection next week and VIVICA is going to have her debut there. She was an inspiration for the collection, which is really, really nice. It’s nice as artists to be inspiring each other.” BRIELLE, the Montreal designer Madonna recently wore to Coachella, is behind the catsuits, a nod to Catwoman from Batman Returns and Mystique from X-Men.

Shraya worked closely with photographer Christopher Sherman on the images and one-minute video clips that accompany each song, giving intimate peeks into VIVICA’s nights out on the town as she takes lovers in club bathrooms and dances with friends under strobe lights. The clips were filmed across three “magical” days in Toronto. A crew of the city’s creatives, including porn star Zeid Moon, painter Nicko Cecchini, and theatre artist Kwaku Okyere, star alongside her. Shraya wanted VIVICA to be a true collaboration, an opportunity to highlight other artists in different ways. It’s part of why she loves TV and film so much, she says. “Just bringing a group of people together.”

One of her favourite moments on set illustrates this perfectly. It was filming the clip for “CENTRE OF ATTENTION,” which sees VIVICA and two other trans women on a pedestal on the dance floor.

“It’s meant to be a bit satirical, but then you’re there in the moment and it’s three trans girls on a pedestal and everyone is watching us and they have their cell phones out and they’re taking pictures. I’m getting chills even talking about it right now. It just felt so beautiful to create this space where, you know, it is fantasy and fictional, but also, we’re making it, so it’s real. Some people even cried. There was definitely this celebratory feeling of holding up trans girls in this particular moment. And I was thrilled to facilitate that in some small way.”