Dance Rookie of the Month: Inji Was Going to Be a Banker — Now She’s Probably Going to Be a Dance-Pop Star

Inci Gürün was supposed to be a banker.

Born and raised in Turkey, Gürün came to the U.S. in 2018 to study finance at UPenn. “My whole personality was that I wore blazers,” she says. “I went to business classes, and I became president of the clubs.”

But just as it had for most of her life, music was bubbling in the background. In Turkey, Gürün had completed a 10-year program that she’d started at age 7 to become a concert pianist, then moved to London at age 17 to pursue classical singing.

Her parents encouraged her to pursue a more secure career. Still, while she was steeped in finance-related academia by day at UPenn, at night she was singing with a jazz band that performed at frat parties around campus. It never occurred to her to pursue any other type of singing style until her junior year, when the jazz band’s backup drummer casually mentioned that he made beats. Intrigued, Gürün met up with him to work on music, laying her vocals over his house production.

This session would help open a new musical world, viral fame, a fresh genre and ultimately a career well outside of finance for the artist who’d come to be known as Inji. Three years after graduating from UPenn, she is today (Oct. 24) releasing her most expansive project to date, Superlame, a 12-track mixtape that drips with attitude and self-aware fun while pulsing with club-ready productions.

This path began unfolding back at UPenn, when Inji brought the house production she’d worked on to another UPenn student who was also a rapper, asking him to help her write a song. In 2022, they made a catchy, cheeky house-infused dance pop track called “Gaslight,” put a 15-second snippet of it TikTok, then watched it go viral. (As of publication date, there are 4.7 million videos on the platform using the song.) Suddenly, an influx of labels and managers were reaching out and asking about who Inji was.

“I was like, ‘Oh, my God, could I be an artist? Is this forbidden dream now becoming a reality?” Inji says with a laugh while talking to Billboard over Zoom from her place in New York.

This viral moment happened during the summer before her senior year, when she was interning at global consulting firm Bain & Company in New York City. “I’d literally be there in a suit going to take secret phone calls from my lawyer, like,’ Arista is saying they’ll give me this much for the single! They want to do a five song deal!’ before sitting back down at her desk to pore over spreadsheets.

But the virality of “Gaslight,” which she ultimately decided to release independently, was hard to keep secret — and soon she was called in for a meeting with human resources.

“I was really scared that they were gonna be like, ‘You can’t be posting TikToks while you’re working here,” Inji says. Instead, they asked her how to grow the company’s following on the platform.

Her senior year was spent navigating classes while plotting her next career move, determined to become more than just another flash in the pan viral star. Inji didn’t sign with any of the labels that had reached out but was taking career advice with the lawyers these labels had connected her with. Her team expanded again after a 2022 singing gig at New York’s Webster Hall was attended by someone from Range Media Partners, who connected her with the person who’d become her manager.

These connections were especially urgent given that Inji’s student visa was set to expire after graduation. Along with acing tests, her mission was to secure the visa that would allow her to stay in the U.S. as an artist. “All of my senior year was like, ‘Let’s build something big enough so that we can get a visa rolling,’” she says.

As such, she hustled, occasionally “ditching like, five days of school to fly to L.A., do five sessions and then release all of those songs.” Collaborators encouraged her to also ditch the jazz singing and try rapping and pop vocals. She’d never seriously considered seriously making electronic music, but she loved the genre and loved to party, so “it felt very natural” when her work veered into the electronic lane.

By the time she graduated, she’d released her second song through Polydor, which then released her debut EP LFG in July of 2023. Instead of filling out finance job applications, she went on tour in New York, Los Angeles and London. “It was one of the most euphoric times of my life,” she says, even if she didn’t yet have a ton of original music to perform.

“At my first shows, I had maybe 25 minutes of original music, so I would play the chorus seven times. I would just loop it and loop it… I remember playing a three-minute song for seven-and-a-half minutes, with breakdowns and drum solos and another chorus just to make the show long enough.”

But while she didn’t yet have a ton of material, she had talent, style and an infectious charisma and confidence, coming off like the down-for-anything best friend you’re guaranteed to have a good time with when you go out clubbing. This vibe helped draw what she calls “a really cute, really fun fan base. They loved it. Nobody cared [that the shows were long].”

And yet for all the dance music she loved (“Mau P and Fisher and Dom Dolla, I’m like a huge fan of all these DJs,” she says, “I go see them all the time”), she was still convinced that she was trying to become a pop star, not seeing a bridge between the two worlds. Then, Charli xcx‘s Brat came out.

“Before Brat, I didn’t see a pop star making dance music like Charli, so I had this misconception of, like, ‘No, I shouldn’t be at a dance label. I should go make pop music because nobody listens to dance.’ I was wrong.”

None of the pop music she’d been making ever came out (“it ended up being extremely boring,” she says) and she found that audiences on her first tour had better reaction to her electronic work anyways. “People came in sunglasses, they came to rave, they came drunk. They wanted to jump and oomph and do the dance thing,” she says. She went back to L.A. and told her collaborators they were definitely making a dance album, with this declaration happening in the same moment Brat was seemingly taking over the world — helping Inji see, she says, “that you can be a pop star through any genre. You just have to do it well.”

It helped that she had a dream team of collaborators, working with producers and songwriters like Zone, Vatican and Alex Chapman, who’d just worked on Troye Sivan‘s Grammy-nominated 2023 smash “Rush.” These sessions all built to Inji’s Superlame, a 12-track mixtape out today (Oct. 24) via AWAL Recordings. Featuring three previously released singles that together have more than three millions streams on Spotify alone, the project delivers sharp, inventive dance productions and lyrics both rapped and sung that traverse such relatable topics as hookups, hangovers (“to the couch!” she shouts on the party anthem “Bodega”), going out, having fun and then doing it all over again.

As straightforward as she is charming, Inji says she already knows she can make something that tops it. “One of my reasons for calling it a ‘mixtape’ is because I want my debut album to be even better,” she says. “I love the mixtape, and think it brings so much to my project.”

But she also sees a long runway to keep growing. While she’s previously gotten frustrated when her songs didn’t blow up more than they did, today she admits that “I’m so glad they didn’t. Now I see how artistry takes a long time, and it would have been bad if something got bigger than what I was ready for.”

This wisdom also applies to her live performances, which this year have included the Berlin and Paris editions of Lollapalooza, Osheaga and San Francisco’s Outside Lands. Going back to analyze footage of these performances like a professional athlete, Inji sees how she could, and will, be better, and how that will serve her as she works towards her goals. “If last year I was sad that didn’t get Coachella, now I’m glad we didn’t,” she says, “because I want to be a better singer, dancer and a performer with better songs at Coachella.”

Beyond just putting in the hours, she knows how she’s going to achieve it. While dance music vocalists often live in the shadows of the scene, her goal is to put herself, her voice, her personality and her stories at the fore. “A few years ago, I think there was such little dance music that had the pop storytelling and lyricism and artistry around it,” she says. “The lyrics, for me to like it, have to be a little crazy and funny. When I’m writing, I want to either make people gasp or giggle. I always want them to say, ‘Who is the girl that just said that in my ears? I must know who she is.’”

While her vision is clear, her parents back in Turkey are still giving her deadlines to “make it” before she falls back on her finance degree, along with feedback that highlights her raw ambition.

“At Lollapalooza Paris my mom watched me on the mainstage and was like, ‘Good.’ Then she watched Olivia Rodrigo and she was, ‘Well, Olivia was a lot better than you.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, duh!’ I’ll get there. Give me six months.”