Dark-Pop Artist Riah Shares a Spicy Pole Video for "Daddy Issues"

Denver dark-pop artist Riah isn’t afraid to be raw and risqué. Her music often oscillates between vulnerability and empowerment, a dichotomy of emotions she explores her sophomore record, Trauma Bond, which she released independently in September.

“A big part of the Trauma Bond album was exploring the theme of duality and the fact that many experiences in life we can hold multiple feelings about them,” says Riah, the dream-pop alter-ego of Mariah Heller.

She brings that to life visually in her latest music video for the song “Daddy Issues,” which just released on March 28. The lyrics, inspired by her lack of relationship with her father, helped her find strength in walking away from such a self-destructive situation.
“‘Daddy Issues,’ for me, was written about my father, who hasn’t been in my life for a very long time,” she explains. “I was thinking about him, and I was lying in bed one night and this line came to me while thinking, ‘What if I wrote something about, maybe in a parallel life or another life, if this could be different?’”

That came through in the line, “In another life, baby, maybe you’ll stop fucking it up.” It says it all, really. And as the title suggests, “Daddy Issues” is also a bit of a double entendre that Riah, who has a background in sex work, plays into by showcasing her experience in pole and chair work — something she’s proudly featured in all of her videos (she also won the 2023 Pole Sport Organization Mountain championship).

“It’s interesting, right? I don’t dance in clubs, but I dance at private events sometimes, and I think it’s such an empowering experience to be in that field,” she explains. “I think ‘Daddy Issues’ is one of the themes that comes up, especially amongst people who are judgmental of that field, so that was something that I was poking fun at.

“But for some people, that song may speak more to a lover that they’ve had,” Riah continues. “I really want people to embrace the idea of duality and the idea that people, and women especially, are multi-faceted and we’re not just one thing. I think the ‘Daddy Issues’ concept is very cohesive. I’m also in the video dancing on a pole in eight-inch heels. Both those things are true. They don’t have to be mutually exclusive.”
Credits for the “Daddy Issues” video include Nergeim Evgeni (composer), Quoc Truong (mixing and mastering) and Chris Rasmussen (videographer and photographer).

Before Riah moved to Denver three years ago, she spent most of her teens and early twenties in the Los Angeles music industry, pre-Me Too movement, where she became part of a girl group that was subject to “cult-like” grooming, she shares. “All of the things that I think are stereotypical to happen to young women happened at that time,” Riah adds.

“I was very hungry and that was all I had ever wanted to do. Everything in my life had been planned so that I could leave and move on my own to pursue a music career," she says. "When everything happened there with the first development deal that I got, it was like, ‘Oh, boy, this is really ugly.’”

That type of introduction and indoctrination could have easily crushed her career aspirations. Instead, Riah chose to leave the horrors of Hollywood behind in an effort to reclaim her music and reinvent herself as an artist. She released her first solo album, Love. Loss. Rise., in 2023, and most recently collaborated with Sacramento rapper Rob Lootchi on his song “On My Way.”

Now that the “Daddy Issues” video is released, Riah is turning her attention to the next record, titled The Fourth Wall, which she plans to put out by the end of this year. So the desire is certainly there, and she credits Denver and its healthy music scene for allowing her to have such a second act.

“I feel very empowered at this point,” Riah says. “I feel like there is some momentum building for my music here and just generally. I feel very positive about it. I want to get more established in the Denver music scene and learn more about the artists, because there’s a lot of really great music here.”