In everything Mila Smith does, her abundance mindset is apparent. As we talk, she snacks on a breakfast of Bovril and cheese toast, which she has every single morning. She savours it, smiles and laughs. She says she’ll thank us if the article helps secure her a sponsorship from the love-hate savoury spread brand. It’s clear that she’s in heaven.
Understanding her career path, her breakfast ritual feels like less of a quirk and more of an indicator of work ethic. She’s consistent (her 2026 single drops run on rails), and incredibly aware of how she has achieved so much success at such a young age. At 22, she’s a SAMA-nominated musician with multiple radio-play singles under her belt. At 14, she was signed to Platoon. At 11, she started her first band, Skyscrapers. At 3, she was gifted her first microphone. It seems that starting out as young as she did gave her what few musicians are able to hold onto as the pressures of adult life mount: fearless experimentation.
“Why don’t I do this a thousand times more?”
Experimenting with genre is something Smith has done from the beginning: first when developing her sound through live performances with Skyscrapers, then as she stepped into her solo career. On her recent voyage into pop-punk, she says, “It was completely natural. It wasn’t like, okay, now that I finished the debut EP, we have to do a complete genre shift. I just gravitated to the sounds that I felt resonated at the time, which happened to be this more alternative side.”
Alternative music is where Smith found a voice for her anger. “It felt so satisfying recording The Adults Are Talking because I was ranting about someone I didn’t like. And I was like, why don’t I do this a thousand times more? I was finding different ways to do it just because it was really cathartic. And I had a lot I wanted to get off my chest.”
That catharsis, so integral to our alternative soundscape, explains why Smith’s pop-punk singles have attracted so many fans. Ask any pop-punk artist who their influences are and they might list Blink-182 and Neck Deep, or diverge into a hair-raising monologue about whether we can consider The Ramones the fathers of whatever Panic! At The Disco was doing in the mid-2000s. But Smith’s influences, which include the likes of Olivia Rodrigo and Lady Gaga, tell a more nuanced story about her music. Whereas churlish purists may turn their noses up at any mention of (notably, women) mainstream artists, it is precisely Smith’s ability to defy puritanical convention that makes her sound so popular.
“I’ll know I’ve made it in the scene when
people start moshing to my music.”
And yet, she’s humble about her place in the scene. “I love how into [the music] the crowd gets. I never saw a mosh pit until I went to alternative gigs, and I was like this is crazy,” she laughs. “I’ll know I’ve made it in the scene when people start moshing to my music.”
Despite Mila Smith describing her pop-punk hits as the “starter” in a three-course meal, her take on the genre with a single like Why Does This Always Happen To Me? serves up an omakase of lyrics, sound, and performance that breathes a fresh perspective into the South African alternative scene. In fact, it’s Smith’s effortless charisma in both her online and offline worlds that we should learn from.
Smith’s approach to curating her online content, some of which has racked up over 200K views on TikTok, is simple. “Cringe is a state of mind,” she says. But scouring her accounts, you’ll struggle to find anything remotely close to cringe. Instead, you’re met with a young woman who believes in her art enough to be loud about it.
“Are people going to forget that I exist?”
But that doesn’t mean that Smith doesn’t struggle beneath the pressure of staying relevant. She explains, “Are people going to forget that I exist? You just want to make sure the momentum continues going upwards, it doesn’t plateau. I might have nothing new to share, but what’s another way of saying something that I’ve said before that I can share with people? Why don’t I just keep promoting the song that I don’t think got a lot of flowers when it initially came out?”
The pressure to build a social media presence that somehow balances the scales of being both ‘scroll-stopping’ and palatable is a question we all face at the outset of a creative project. Artists are rarely ever expected to be ‘just’ artists when going viral is treated with the same importance as crafting honest and poetic lyrics. One can’t imagine Carole King bouncing between writing It’s Too Late and competing for views with Charli D’Amelio.
And yet, it is the world our Carole Kings find themselves in. But Smith’s compass for navigating this new frontier reveals a different way to see it, “I’m always going to be new to someone.” That belief, so objectively true yet profoundly humble, is what can distinguish a good artist from a great one. Mila Smith knows the worth of her art enough to be excited by the prospect of being discovered and rediscovered, and to work hard for it too.
See Mila Smith live at Emo Night Presents: Feedback in Cape Town on 25 April. Tickets on Quicket.
Photos by Saarah. Artwork by Skip Ramen.
