Some children want to be astronauts when they grow up. Others dream of becoming doctors or actors. But ever since she can remember, Aditi Iyer had only one ambition for when she became an adult — to be a musician. “My mother tells me that I have been humming songs that I have heard since I was only nine months old, and started singing popular nursery rhymes when I was three. Then, when I was about four or five, I graduated to songs like Power of love by Celine Dion, and tracks by Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson,” says the 17-year-old Mumbaikar who released her first track when she was merely 10 years old, adding, “My entire goal is to dedicate my life to music. I have really lofty ambitions and dream of being the first Indian musician to make it really big in the West. I am really trying hard to make that dream into a reality.”

Dollhouse, her recently released second EP, is one step towards achieving that end. It’s a four-track project with a dark-pop sound, where she sings about experiences that she might not have personally gone through, but which she’s seen others around her deal with. Iyer tells us, “I would like to call myself the sort of songwriter who likes to write about things that are foreign to her. I want to live other people’s lives vicariously. I haven’t ever been in an abusive relationship [one of the themes in the EP]. But I have a friend who is in one, and this EP is an ode to her and people like her. I wanted to get in touch with what they feel.”