Niki 'Blacked Out' Opening for Taylor Swift 10 Years Ago. Now She's Headlining Her Own World Tour (Exclusive)

The Indonesian pop star opens up to PEOPLE about Swift's lasting impact and the cycle of intergenerational trauma as she releases third album 'Buzz'

In 2014, 15-year-old Nicole Zefanya opened for Taylor Swift when her Red Tour stopped in Jakarta, Indonesia.

“I definitely blacked out,” confesses Zefanya, now 25, who later adopted the stage name Niki. “I don't remember the onstage part, to be honest. I remember walking on and then walking off.”

She was amazed by the size of the crowd, with more than 8,000 in attendance. Although she admits that she was “deathly afraid,” she imagined that for one second, she was singing alone in her room. The experience solidified her love for performing live.

A decade later, she has her own crowd of fans singing along to every word. The Indonesian artist moved to the United States at age 18 to pursue music and signed to the predominantly Asian American record label 88rising. Her songs have garnered over 3.3 billion total streams on Spotify across two EPs and two albums, along with several collaborations and an end credits track for Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

Soon, Niki will embark on her second world tour to support her third studio album Buzz, which released on Friday, Aug. 9. The 41-stop tour spans North America, Europe, Asia and Australia and will feature songs from her latest LP, a 13-track exploration of “being lost in your 20s,” she says.

When introducing Buzz to her fans on May 2, she wrote that the album was inspired by her “on-the-go” life, traveling from Vancouver to Singapore to Sydney on tour. For the first time, “being on tour was really energizing,” Niki tells PEOPLE.

A homebody at heart, Niki used to isolate herself after a concert and then sleep. When she began to explore the tour stops and hang out with friends while touring, she says it “changed everything.”

“It's really difficult to establish a sense of routine and balance,” she says of being on tour. “You have to eat as well as you can, as regularly as you can. And keep yourself mentally healthy.”

Niki adds, “If you're going through a hard time personally, and then you have to show up on stage and give everyone a good show, that also can feel really mentally taxing.”

Several songs on Buzz, like “Blue Moon” and “Paths,” chronicle Niki’s emotions following the end of her four-year relationship with musician Jacob Ray. As “Blue Moon” goes, “Four full laps around the sun / We wouldn’t admit that we were done.”

Creating Buzz helped her process the split, but she also had to confront existential questions to start writing the album.

“When you're comfortable, you're not really allowing yourself the opportunity to grow,” says the songwriter, who turned to her therapist, family and best friends to wade through the discomfort of the breakup — and from “just living life.”

Another good friend, 24-year-old pop singer Maisie Peters, lives in the United Kingdom. The two became long-distance friends when they were teenagers posting covers and original music on their YouTube channels. Last month, Niki and Peters — who have stayed in close contact — reunited when the “Every Summertime” musician visited London.

“It’s meant everything,” Niki says. “To this day, we still keep up with each other and are so excited to see each other win. I think it's a really beautiful story. What were the odds that we were both YouTube girlies and then we both got signed?”

The parallels in their career trajectories don’t end there. Niki and Peters played Lollapalooza in Chicago on back-to-back days in 2023. On Aug. 19, Peters will join Niki among the ranks of Swift’s openers when she performs on The Eras Tour in London — a secret Peters kept from her friend.

“I was like, how dare you!” Niki jests. “She’s been such a vocal Swiftie online, and oh my God, I’m so happy for her.”

Related: Meet Maisie Peters, the Singer-Songwriter Poised to Be Pop's Next Big Thing: 'My Music Is Me'

Swift, 34, still influences the young pop star, from her focus on songwriting to her business-savvy thinking.

“She’s just so smart,” Niki raves. “I respect this empire that she's literally built forever, and it just keeps growing.”

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With Buzz, she comes to terms with the idea that life is “constantly messy.” For example, she still grapples with having her heart in two countries. Although she owns a house, a dog and a lush garden in Los Angeles, much of her family remains in Indonesia, but she makes an effort to regularly visit them.

“This is just my life, and I’m so lucky to have two homes,” she affirms.

There are lessons she is still learning from family. The twelfth track off Buzz, “Heirloom Pain,” touches on the inheritance of intergenerational trauma from parent to child. For Niki, she seeks to overcome her family’s tendency to prioritize others at the expense of their own dreams.

“They’ve always been afraid to take up space,” she explains. “I actively try to unlearn that. … My parents and grandparents, they survived through so much and they lived so much life so that I am able to live mine, and now I think I’m just trying to learn to comfortably take up space.”

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