While it may seem as if Max appeared out of nowhere, she worked tenaciously in order to arrive at this moment, and “Sweet but Psycho” came after years of attempts to break through.

Ava Max was born Amanda Koci, in 1994, to Albanian-immigrant parents in Milwaukee. When she was eight, her family moved to Virginia. Her mother was an opera singer; her dad played the piano; her uncles were in bands. She was a Britney Spears fanatic who wanted to pursue pop music.

As many a stage mother has done before, Max’s mom moved her 14-year-old daughter to Los Angeles in 2008. (“She’s like, ‘We're moving to California . . . [because] there’s nothing to do in Virginia for your career.’”) But Max found the city “overwhelming,” and, a year later, they were back in Virginia, where she would remain for her teenage years. “I’m happy nothing happened back then, so I could actually have a normal childhood,” she said.

She eventually moved back to California a few years later, in hopes of igniting that career. She started making music with a friend of her older brother (one of the few members of the family without musical inclinations; Max said he’s an “entrepreneur”). That friend was the producer Cirkut, who, alongside Max Martin and Dr. Luke, was responsible for Katy Perry’s “Roar,” and Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” (with Dr. Luke), among other titanic hits that shaped the 2010s pop sound. Though Cirkut and Ava Max recorded a bunch of songs together, it was a modern-day cosmic event that spurred her ascent: a song that the two uploaded to SoundCloud.

“I’m not even kidding you,” Max said, “We got e-mails from record labels wanting to talk [just from that song].” Over the past year, Max has sung on David Guetta and Jason Derulo tracks, and released some one-off singles—including the bombastic, effervescent “Salt” and a re-interpretation of “Barbie Girl” titled “Not Your Barbie Girl”—but none gained traction until the Cirkut-produced “Sweet but Psycho” was unleashed.

A successful pop star needs more than just the music, though, a fact Max seems highly aware of. When she was 13, she had come up with the middle name “Ava” for herself, which she eventually started using as a first name. “I never felt like an Amanda,” she said.

When she was signed by a record label, she decided she wanted a last name to go with it—and thought carefully about what exactly she wanted that last name to represent. “Max came about because it felt very masculine, and I feel a little masculine sometimes, like 50/50, like my hair,” she said. “I wanted something with the feminine that Ava has, and Max has masculinity, so I added those two together.”

Again and again, Max spoke about how success for her means standing out, visually or otherwise. When asked about her personal style, she said, “I think about it like, what can I do against the grain? I don’t want to do what anyone else is doing. I don’t want to go to the designer that everyone is going to. I want to find a designer that maybe no one’s paying attention to. . . . And I’m not afraid to wear something crazy and ridiculous. I think it’s important, again, to give people an experience on a red carpet or a performance.”

The pure pop sound, the striking platinum blonde hair, the outsize persona, the flashy stage name—it all recalls, well, a certain pop-star icon. And Max didn’t shy away from the Gaga comparisons. She name-checked Gaga—along with Spears, Perry, Céline Dion, and Mariah Carey—as one of her musical inspirations. Of Gaga, in particular, she offered, “It’s funny, people compare me to her, but I think she’s such a legend, and she’s untouchable to me. I think she’s as . . . I see her as iconic. So that’s such a compliment every time I hear that. Yeah, she’s incredible.”