Nikki Williams Talks Writing Demi Lovato’s “Heart Attack” & Tackling Ultra

When Demi Lovato‘s glorious “Heart Attack” dropped a few weeks back, we were pleasantly surprised to see a familiar name in the song’s writing credits: Our favorite rising star Nikki Williams, the South African singer-songwriter who first made a splash with the smoldering “Kill, Fuck, Marry” before taking us to the dancefloor with her current single “Glowing,” a gleaming house smash.

Though we just chatted with Williams a few months back, we had no idea that she’d been so prolific in writing future pop hits for her contemporaries — so we caught up with the songbird while she was in Atlanta running down choreography for her upcoming spot at the Ultra Music Festival. (That picture up top? Yeah, that’s her getting super sexy in rehearsal.)

“We wrote the song two years ago,” she explained. “The Halloween before last — I almost didn’t make it, because I wasn’t feeling so great from the night before, but I put on my tiara and went to the session. At the time I was going through some relationship stuff, and I was just so depressed, so when I got into the session I thought, ‘You know what? I’m gonna pour it all out there, and get it off my chest.”

“It’s a fun song,” she continued. “It’s about me being really scared to fall in love again after being rejected, after feeling so fragile and vulnerable all the time — thinking, I don’t know if I can do this ever again! I’m such a love addict, but I always fall in love with them in, like, one day.”

As for Demetria’s performance, Williams agreed with the critics and the charts that Lovato more than delivered: “She really put her own touch on it,” Williams said. “She’s got that signature wild note at the end, which I thought was so great. I know she could relate to it — I could tell by the way she sang it, and the emotion she put into it. I was pretty damn happy with the end result! It’s not the easiest song to sing, and she’s a really great vocalist.”

And as Williams (signed to Island Def Jam/Chameleon Records) preps for her own big launch, she’s hard at work getting her choreography on point. But when she continues on to Miami to perform at Ultra Music Festival, she’ll be running her own personal priorities, too: “I just really wanna make out with someone hot,” she laughed. Sounds about right.

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