Introducing: NIKI COLET

With her shimmering new EP We Only Ever Meet In Strange Dreams, Niki Colet invites listeners to the Sad Girl Dance Club—a place where grief and groove collide, heartbreak sways to synths, and catharsis comes under strobe lights.

Hailed by Dazed for her emotional range and by The Line of Best Fit for crafting “a warm ethereal world of her own,” the Manila-born, London-based artist fuses dream pop, alt-rock, and dance into a beautifully melancholic release that’s both intimate and anthemic.

Fresh from the haunting new video for standout track Strange Dreams—a visual echo of club comedowns and emotional surrender—we caught up with Colet to talk heartbreak, healing, and the power of dancing alone in a crowded room.

1. “Strange Dreams” beautifully captures that ‘crying on the dance floor’ feeling—what inspired you to translate heartbreak into something so sonically euphoric and visual?

Heartbreak is so brutal, it leaves us clawing almost desperately for catharsis. I think there’s a reason why a lot of people turn to partying after a breakup – searching for distraction, validation, escape… Sometimes when you’re so completely broken by something, all you want to do is go out and dance. 

The song itself took a strange shape with the role it played in my life, in a truly meta way. I was in the thick of heartbreak and going out a lot, and dance music had become almost sacred to me during this time. It was a release and a reckoning for the tornado of emotions I had been feeling all at once. The first line of the chorus is a bit of a thesis statement for the spirit of the song and what I was writing it about: “I’m dancing into every party in town/But my heart hurts/Does it get worse?” 

From all of that, the concept for the music video emerged. It happened really seamlessly between myself, Freddie Wright (the director) and Maddy Williams (the producer). Freddie had been wanting to work on a video that utilised a specific visual effect to simulate warping a person’s figure and surroundings while they were in movement. We spoke about how the song feels like a soundtrack to the kind of night out where everything turns into a strange dream. Sonically, it builds slowly over its 3-minute duration, never fully climaxing. We wanted to capture this with an ever-growing visual, where we took a scene from reality and slowly introduced it into a strange, dreamlike state. 

2. You’ve described the recording of “Strange Dreams” as emotionally intense, almost like a turning point. How did that session shape the direction of the full EP?

The day I recorded Strange Dreams was honestly so crazy, one lived example of life being stranger than fiction for me. It was the last song we put down on the record. I was on a time crunch for visa reasons, had recently left my job in hospitality to go work a 9-5 in fashion, and was going through a really painful breakup that felt like the backdrop to everything for me. I had found a home in London but my time there was uncertain with my visa being in the air. So much was changing all at once and I felt like I couldn’t find my footing no matter where I tried to stand. 

I had written a couple of lines in the first verse of “Strange Dreams” on a napkin a couple of years before, but I never finished the song. The melody for those lines was collecting dust in the depths of my voice memos. But after a couple of years, a new life, and a brutal recent heartbreak, I had a lot more to say. I took that old napkin into the studio, played around with the melodic structure, and it all flowed out really seamlessly. I had a lot of references, but one particular touchstone for me and my producer Alex was Robyn’s “Dancing On My Own” (obviously). 

Afterwards, I went straight from the studio to the club. I was going to Fold to see Avalon Emerson for what my therapist later called a “reparative experience with the DJ” – the last thing I had done with that ex was see Avalon Emerson at The Cause. I thought that going to this event would help me reclaim some things for myself, like a full-circle ending to close this chapter. But he came up to me on the dance floor pretty unexpectedly, and that threw me. I sort of ran away, and after trying to spend the next few hours dancing with my friends, I went home in a cab at 7am crying.

I had gone to the event with a friend who was also going through a recent heartbreak. When we got back to my place, a little battered from this night out, I played her the demo of “Strange Dreams” I’d just recorded the day before. We were sitting on my couch, slowly sobering up. She said, “You know that’s the one, right? That’s the best one.” I think she meant that it was the star single for the entire project – and she was right. That moment, I decided that it was going to be the first single, and that it would be a north star or a backbone for the project as a whole.

The next few months that followed, as I was wrapping up this record, were completely unexpected but also undeniably inevitable. My heart opened and then broke again. Shortly after that moment on the dance floor, that ex came back asking for a second chance, and we ended up getting back together. But it wasn’t a nice experience for me, and it eventually ended for good. By the end of that relationship, I had to start gearing up for my release cycle, and I felt completely shattered. With only five months left on my visa, I had to pick myself up from the floor and start to build the foundations for what would be my return to music from the ground up. It was intense and I already felt I was running on nothing, but I made things happen for myself because I had to.

The process of finishing this project and the period of my life in which it happened was bizarre and often painful, but sometimes beautiful too, and I don’t think I’ll be able to make sense of it for a very long time. It was like some kind of fever dream. It was so, so strange, to release work that was about something that was still happening to me in real time, because I had gone through it again. It’s a little hard to talk about because on the one hand, I find it very difficult to separate my personal life from my creative practice as they are both so intertwined, but on the other hand, that particular relationship feels so completely marred for me now, for personal reasons. I recently found out that there were betrayals that had been happening all throughout that relationship, unbeknownst to me at the time. I still feel a lot of pain when I think back to that relationship and all the collateral damage it caused, both during and after. But having my music to turn to felt empowering, like a true return to myself after losing so much, and feeling so broken and so small. Strange Dreams will always have a special place in my heart because it was my first big step forward, before I even truly believed in myself or thought that I could actually make anything happen.

It shaped the direction of the EP because it felt like an amalgamation, a true end-credits-scene, to the entire project. The EP is an exploration of different sounds, so each song is very different from the next, but I think there’s also a cohesiveness in the overall sensibility of the music. The previous three songs on the EP cycle through stages of grief: sadness, anger, denial. But Strange Dreams comes as a final surrender after grappling with all of that loss, love, pain, and longing… it’s an ode to letting your heart break, and letting the world around you open as it does. It immediately felt like the EP’s first and central single, and provided the project with something like an anchor for what this little collection of songs was all about.

3. The line “we only ever meet in strange dreams” feels poetic and central to the project. At what point did you realise it was more than a lyric—it was the heart of the record?

It’s a little funny, the EP title is from an Instagram post I made on the day I recorded Strange Dreams. I made a post of the recording session and the subsequent night out, and captioned it “we only ever meet in strange dreams,” from a line in the verse (“We only ever meet in strange dreams/Where I run and you can’t chase me”). I liked the line, but it also felt relevant to the bizarre experience I had had the night before, on the day I recorded the song. 

It then became the working title for the EP, but it stuck. I liked how long it was, how it felt like a run-on sentence. And you are right in that it is poetic and central to the project! But regardless of its banal origins on an Instagram caption, I think that line stood out to me for a reason. It’s about that sense of longing you have after a big loss, where something that was once so real and so close to you is gone, and you can only touch it again as a memory in your dreams. You know when you come out of a particularly intense relationship and you’re like, “What was that?” I think the line “we only ever meet in strange dreams” really captures that feeling.

So as a title, it did end up feeling like a thesis statement of sorts for the project, which was ultimately a record about heartbreak, and it was happening to me in real time as I was releasing the work. That line truly felt like the heart of the record because this project was a visceral snapshot of that moment in my life, like one long strange dream: the time I fell in love, followed by a period of surrendering to heartbreak (and all the pain that came with it, in the form of grief, sadness, and anger). Throughout it all, I was forced by difficult circumstances to rise to the occasion, and that felt like a strange dream in and of itself. With my visa on the line and having just recently lost my day job at the time, the stakes were so high and everything felt so extreme and intense. A year later, off the back of all the difficult things I was confronted by, I’m following dreams that I thought had died a long time ago. I am back to being an artist, but also back to being in the driver’s seat of my own life. 

4. This is your first pop project and your first since moving to London. How has the shift in geography and culture influenced your sound and songwriting?

Hard to say! I think in many ways, I have this strong core sensibility that has been there from the beginning: a penchant for the euphoric and nostalgic, and a preoccupation with my own brambly inner world, which I sometimes use music to navigate or even just see clearly. I’ve also always been an alt girl, and my music has always occupied different shades of alternative as well as pop music. I love the unique, unpredictable textures of alternative genres, but I also really enjoy translating that into an accessible form. But being in London has changed me, and consequently it’s changed my music as well. I do think I’ve been exposed to a lot of new music since my move here, and my palate has developed as well. I gather from a wider net of inspirations and influences. And I’m able to work with other musicians and producers who might also have their own wide net of influences and resources. But I think that my sound has changed ultimately because I’ve become a bit more fearless, and a bit more in touch with myself. Being in London has opened me up in that way, too.

5. The video for “Strange Dreams” is so atmospheric—it feels like a waking dream. What was it like working with Parakeet Pictures and ALFRED to bring that emotional state to life visually?

It was kind of perfect, how it all came together, because we were immediately so aligned on ideas. The first time I met Freddie was during the meeting where he pitched the concept. The video is set at a squat rave after party, where the last partygoers standing are coming to the end of the night. Freddie positioned me to stand alone in the center of the space, my body there but my mind elsewhere. The concept was simple: I would be standing on a rotating turntable while a camera (set up on a circular dolly track around me) filmed me as it slowly moved in a circle the opposite direction. This would simulate a languid but dizzying sense of motion, spinning as the camera revealed the dying party around me. The background would then begin to distort as if reality itself were bending, with the warping becoming even more dramatic and pronounced throughout the track as reality broke further and the dream took hold. When he first shared this idea, it felt so serendipitous to me – it was exactly the kind of world I envisioned the song to occupy. The general spirit we wanted to capture was that I would be dissociating, completely alone in a room full of people, dissociating on the dance floor, physically at the party but mentally elsewhere, separating me from everyone else. This allowed for us to continue the sensation of isolation that we had been so intent on capturing in my previous music video for Devil On My Shoulder, despite being surrounded by other people. There’s an insularity to the video that mirrors the introspectiveness of the song’s lyrics.

Turning up on set, I was surprised to see how crazy the set-up was – the circular dolly track that the production team had rented was massive, it occupied an entire dancefloor-sized space in the abandoned warehouse in Tottenham where we shot the video. I worked with Alice Marriot, a dance and movement director who choreographed all my movements for the video, and we immediately had a really wonderful chemistry. Her warmth and generosity really created a lovely environment throughout the shoot – these things can be really hectic and sometimes they can feel a bit intimidating if you’re on a huge set where you don’t know anybody, but Alice’s presence really put me at ease and helped me be my best self even though I felt so nervous. They quite heavily used VFX on the initial edit, but printed the final cut to film. This duality of VFX and film perfectly captures the balance between the song’s contemporary, and forward-moving dance music influences as well as the nostalgia that inundates the music itself. It was such a brilliant idea, and I’m so grateful for the guys at Parakeet Pictures for thinking of it and pulling it off.