I have let someone have me in an altered and sinister state of mind – completely relaxed, feeling no pain, nothing on my mind but him. He had gotten so far into my system that I stopped functioning as a normal person and I let it happen and I would let it happen again without a second thought. That is what it feels like when someone is your drug. Codeine does that to you. Your body gets heavy and the world outside the room goes quiet and you stop being a person with a schedule. Add someone who knows what the hell he’s doing and you are not fucking coming up for air. You’re not sharp enough to make good decisions. You do not want to be. Akaiza’s ‘Codeine’ is that night, written from the inside.
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Akaiza is a self-producing US-based artist who decided “vampiric R&B” was his lane and honestly, he’s not wrong. His sound sits somewhere between shoegaze and alt-R&B, built on dark atmospheric production and a vocal delivery that is raw and genuinely unsettling in the best way. He pulls from Jane Remover, blackbear, and bodyGaard, writing about desire like it’s a drug problem he has no interest in solving. ‘Novocaine,’ ‘Bloodplay,’ and ‘Shy’ are already in his catalog, and every damn one of them confirms this guy is building something worth paying attention to.
The song opens with “Drip the codeine down your body / Let me taste it, / Taste the skies” and right away you know who’s in charge. He’s the one administering it, dripping it on her and consuming her along with it. Then he hits her with “Tell your boyfriend that I’m famous / Make him hate me, / Tell him that you’re mine” and the audacity of that shit is breathtaking. He’s not asking her to leave anyone. He wants her to use the boyfriend as a witness to how completely claimed she already is. That’s a dare and the correct answer is yes.
The chorus lands on “Ooh, baby, turn the lights / bleed me dry / Asphyxiate like a valentine, baby” and I need a second. Asphyxiation as a love language, bleeding as closeness, desire as something that takes from you physically with the loss being the whole damn point. “Valentino lighting up the sky / A lip liner with a mind so vacant / Throw it back just like your bloodshot eyes” and she is heat and surface and he is fucking obsessed with every inch of it. The bloodshot eyes are what get me because that is not glamour, that is the face of someone who has been up all night doing whatever she wanted and looks incredible doing it.
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The second verse is where Akaiza stops being cool about it. “Knew it since 17 / That you would fuck me up” and he saw it coming and walked straight into it anyway, no hesitation, no excuse, and he is not sorry. “Just press your lips to mine / Taste all my mania” is one of the more naked things anyone has written about letting someone all the way in: you are handing over the 3am version of yourself, the unraveling one, and you want them to drink it down. “Paint your face inside my room / Just like a work of art / Rewrite your soul tonight / Show you just what you are” closes the whole thing on something obsessive and completely certain. He thinks he is the only person who actually sees her. That kind of conviction is sexy as hell and a little bit terrifying.
Akaiza built something seductive and quietly sinister, and the self-produced shoegaze earns every bit of the “vampiric R&B” tag he put on himself. This goes on the playlist you only share with people who already know what kind of nights you have.
