Mimi Webb, the English pop singer who found a bigger stage as K/DA’s Kai’Sa

Mimi Webb

Photo: Justin Higuchi / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 23, 2000 Canterbury
Occupation	Singer-Songwriter

In the new K/DA video, animated by the French studio behind Arcane, a League of Legends champion called Kai’Sa starts to sing, and the voice is Mimi Webb’s. Millions of people have heard it within a fortnight without seeing her face. For a British pop singer who built her name the conventional way, chart single by chart single, it is an odd kind of arrival: the widest audience of her career, reached under someone else’s name.

The timing explains why it matters. Her second album, Confessions, was the most candid record she had made and the least heard. The singer behind Good Without and House on Fire, both platinum in Britain, watched her streaming audience drift away just as she started writing about herself without a filter. What her career now has to prove is whether a voice can travel further than the person it belongs to.

Amelia Anne Webb was born in Canterbury on 23 July 2000 and went to Kent College, an independent school in the city. She learned guitar and piano and was writing her own songs at 13; she credits a piano teacher with pushing her towards music as a career at 15. Her reference points reached past her own generation: Adele and Amy Winehouse, and further back Etta James, Ella Fitzgerald and Nat King Cole. At 16 she moved to Brighton to study at Brighton Music College, part of the BIMM network.

The industry moved faster than she did. In December 2018 her manager took her to Los Angeles to meet labels, and in February 2019, aged 18, she signed with Epic Records, more than a year before her first single. That single, Before I Go, came out in April 2020, in the lockdown months when TikTok was setting the pop agenda. Charli D’Amelio used it in her videos, and clips built on the track passed 85 million views.

What followed was the rare viral start that turned into a chart career. Good Without reached No. 8 on the UK Singles Chart in 2021, spent 26 weeks in the Top 100 and went platinum. The EP Seven Shades of Heartbreak reached No. 9 on the albums chart that autumn. House on Fire, still her biggest single, peaked at No. 6 in 2022, the year she opened for Tate McRae across North America, sang at the Platinum Party at the Palace for Elizabeth II’s jubilee and then held back Ghost of You for three weeks after the Queen’s death.

In January 2023 she was shortlisted for Best New Artist at the BRIT Awards, a prize that went to Wet Leg. Her debut album, Amelia, titled with her own first name, reached No. 4 that March, carried by Red Flags, a No. 12 single later certified gold, and she toured it from Madrid to Cork. Every box of the British pop template was ticked: viral breakout, platinum singles, a Top 5 album, a BRIT nomination.

The template did not hold. Three singles released in 2024, Mistake among them, missed the Official Singles Chart entirely, and Mind Reader, the Meghan Trainor duet that opened the second-album campaign in May 2025, registered only on the sales chart, at No. 88. Confessions, released by Epic and RCA in September 2025, spent a single week on the UK Albums Chart, at No. 81. That same week it sat at No. 9 on the physical albums chart, and the gap between those two numbers is the real story: a committed core still bought the CD and the vinyl, while the streaming listeners who had made Good Without a hit had gone elsewhere.

Critics were kinder than the figures. Dork gave the album three stars and called it a sharp, self-aware follow-up to Amelia, and Webb described one of its singles, You Don’t Look at Me the Same, as the most vulnerable song she had ever released. The drop says more about the machinery than about the songs: a career switched on by an algorithm stays hostage to it, and candour is not something a feed rewards. She kept working the road regardless, opening for Benson Boone on his North American tour in 2024, headlining the Confessions Tour across Britain and Europe in the autumn of 2025 and closing that year at Capital’s Jingle Bell Ball.

The label kept faith with the record. A deluxe edition, Confessions: An Unexpected Turn of Events, arrived in February 2026 with a new single, Eyes Closed, and the summer brought festival dates, among them the Festival d’été de Québec in July. Then, on 19 October 2026, Riot Games released FIRESTARTER, the first K/DA single in six years. Webb takes over Kai’Sa from Jaira Burns, who sang the part on Pop/Stars, the 2018 debut whose video has passed 668 million YouTube views. Miyeon and Soyeon of the K-pop group i-dle return as Ahri and Akali, and the Canadian singer Sophie Powers joins as Evelynn. Riot said the new video drew 9.2 million views in its first 24 hours; a four-track EP followed two days later.

That same week her song Obsession turned up on the soundtrack of the third season of the Netflix comedy Nobody Wants This. Like the K/DA role, it puts her voice in front of an audience far larger than the one that let Confessions slip, with her name in the small print.

The next test happens in public. On 14 November 2026, K/DA performs at the opening ceremony of the League of Legends World Championship at Barclays Center in New York, alongside the virtual hip-hop group True Damage, with Webb singing as a character to an arena full of esports fans. Whether those fans follow the voice back to House on Fire and Confessions will shape what she records next. At 26, she has the time to find out.

Tags: singers, pop, K/DA, League of Legends, Mimi Webb, Good Without