Pop-rock singer-songwriter Bella Kay doesn’t understand why everyone thinks her upbeat-sounding breakout hit “iloveitiloveitiloveit” is a sad song.
As she tells Billboard on a giggly Zoom call in late March just a few days after her 20th birthday, “I put it out, and everyone was like, ‘Oh my god… this is gut-wrenching,’” she says. “I was genuinely like, ‘What? Hold on. I thought it was fun, guys.’”
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With Kay’s bright, earnest voice chugging the acoustic guitar-driven track’s momentum forward from start to finish, “iloveitiloveitiloveit” is the winking lament of someone who can’t escape the cycle of a slightly concerning, rollercoaster-like romance — packaged as a carefree love song in which ignoring red flags is thrilling, not self-sabotage. (“I love it when we fight, and I like it when you’re mean,” she admits in the lyrics. “We don’t have to get into what that says about me.”)
“I don’t look at it like, ‘Oh, this is a toxic relationship,’” she says. “I look at it as like, ‘Oh!’” — she cheers, smiling and shaking her head wildly, as if she’s in the middle of a rave — “‘This is a toxic relationship!’”
Intentionally heartbreaking or not, the song’s wide-reaching relatability and punchy lyricism launched “iloveitiloveitiloveit” onto the Billboard Hot 100 in February — Kay’s first entry on the chart, which has since reached No. 17. It was officially released in January, but she first posted the chorus on TikTok immediately after writing it in “five minutes” on her guitar in November. Within the next month, she’d finished the lyrics with producer and now-frequent collaborator Alexis Kesselman and settled on its breathless, no-spaces title — despite people “teasing” her for it — to match the chaotic nature of the song.
“The whole point is like, ‘I shouldn’t do this, but I love it,’” she explains with a shrug. “It has to feel stupid and crazy.”
“iloveitiloveitiloveit” came at exactly the right time for Kay. In the spring of 2025, she decided to begin regularly posting music clips on TikTok in hopes of launching a career, despite being two years into a prelaw degree at Texas A&M. “I was so embarrassed,” the Houston native recalls of sharing her first original song snippets on the platform. “My TikToks were getting, like, 30 likes … but I kept going.”
As her fan base took off that summer — largely thanks to viral clips of her moody, stripped-down tracks “Lonely” and “The Sick,” which appear in full on her November 2025 self-released EP sick to my stomach — she signed with Atlantic Records in July and then partnered with Immersive Management’s Adam Mersel and Priscilla Felten in October.
The fire had been lit — she just needed one song to pour gasoline on the flame. Released on Jan. 11, “iloveitiloveitiloveit” did that in abundance, racking up nearly half a million uses on TikTok to date. “When it started charting, I was like, ‘This is insane,’” Kay says tentatively, as if she still can’t quite believe it herself.
But the most fulfilling evidence, she says, is how loud her fans scream the words back at her when she sings the track at shows. Felten notes that Kay’s performances have been key to the success of “iloveitiloveitiloveit” — particularly her series of free, intimate pop-up concerts in Los Angeles, London, Houston and more cities beginning in November.
“The L.A. show in particular … even though [the song] was unreleased at that time, hearing it in that context — and the word-of-mouth that spread from there — was powerful,” Felten says of the 100-capacity performance. “It was also the first time you were seeing her [in person], because everyone had just known her solely through a phone.”
Mersel adds that Kay dropping “iloveitiloveitiloveit” on a Sunday evening, forgoing the industry-standard Friday release window, has been a strategic win — and one inspired by Kay’s prior farm-to-table delivery of sharing songs straight to social media. “During the school year, when Sunday nights can really be the blues for a lot of kids, it’s a nice little treat before the beginning of the week,” Mersel says, pointing out that the team has stuck with non-Friday releases for Kay’s other singles. “[Fans] felt like they were communicating with her in real time. They didn’t feel like there was a middleman involved.”
Next on the agenda is her first headlining tour through theaters in Europe and North America this spring, plus even more yet-to-be-announced live shows after that. And, if all goes to plan, Kay will release her already nearly complete debut album this summer. She says that the sound and emotional nuance of “iloveitiloveitiloveit” has informed the project more than any other track, recalling with a self-deprecating laugh, “I was talking to Alexis, and I was like, ‘There’s not enough sad songs.’ And she was like, ‘Bella. There’s like one and a half happy songs, and they’re not even really that happy.’”
But just as she did with “iloveitiloveitiloveit,” Kay has her own way of looking at things. “A good sad song to me is always going to be a happy song, just because you feel so understood [by it],” she says. “I want to make sure that I do pop my own way. I don’t want it to be super shiny and polished — I want it to be dirty and real.”
A version of this story appears in the April 18, 2026, issue of Billboard.
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