At 11:38 on a Wednesday my best friend sent me a screenshot of a Hinge profile belonging to the man whose toothbrush was still sitting beside mine. He had spent Sunday naked in my bed asking for time to work on himself, work that apparently required six fresh photos and a lowered age range. I still had the spare key to his place along with three months of screenshots that could wreck the clean little story he had prepared for everyone, so revenge had options. I opened Notes and started listing every way to make the truth public before he finished telling his version, and by midnight that list had gotten impressively detailed with help from a group chat full of women who treat vengeance as a collaborative assignment. My willpower eventually dragged me away from the spare key and the send button, which deserves a fucking plaque, because betrayal makes ruining his life feel considerably more useful than crying over him. ALEIA turns revenge into a project on ‘Willpower’ and makes restraint the hardest decision in the room.
The production takes its time because ALEIA’s rage is still gathering evidence. Dylan Ollivierre produced it and his credits run through The Money War, EDIE, Joan & The Giants and Siobhan Cotchin, so the man knows how to keep a room tense. A synth hangs low over everything while the guitar shows up dirty and sparse refusing to fill the fucking space and underneath it a snare marches along at funeral pace. The track swells and pulls back and swells again so by the time it opens all the way up you have been sitting in the tension so long that the release feels less like relief and more like getting away with something. Grunge-pop is the label and it fits, though she’s singing it like a woman who has decided the fight is going to be won quietly right up until it isn’t. ALEIA calls this a song about “the chaotic emotional turbulence you experience after someone has betrayed your trust,” which is a very composed way to describe it, and then she finishes the thought with “the extreme lengths someone will go to get even,” which is where the shit gets darker.
She opens mid-argument with herself which is the most honest place a song like this could start. “I don’t know if it makes me feel good / Holding my words in or letting them fly out” is the entire problem in two lines. Anybody who has typed and deleted the same message eleven times knows this shit on a cellular level. Neither option is good and she knows it, which is why the song sits there refusing to resolve. Her delivery is low and almost bored and the boredom is doing so much work – she sounds unbothered on the surface with the whole thing simmering three inches under.
Then she gets into the research phase which is genuinely my favorite stage of any grudge. “I’ve looked into coolness, and cruelness and brazen / All my answers are begging more questions” is a woman auditioning personalities to see which one gets her through the week. Not one of those personalities fits her. The follow-up is where she shows her hand completely with “Tried wearing anger, and sadness and bargaining / Don’t know the fit of my clothes / Already wearing thin”. She’s turned the grief stages into a wardrobe. I have been in that fucking fitting room and so has every woman reading this, standing there in the rage because sadness didn’t suit you.
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That last couplet of the first verse is the one that made me sit up. “Don’t even know if it makes me sound hopeful / You always were like this, just never as vocal”. There it is – the retroactive horror of realizing he was always that and finally got loud enough for you to hear it. Every red flag you explained away comes back for a second showing with better lighting. It’s such a specific hell and she writes it in eleven words.
Her chorus arrives and she outsources the entire revenge fantasy, which I found extremely relatable. “What a low blow / Hit a dry wall / But you’re the one to bloody your fists / And I can tell / The universe exclusively to cut you out / ‘Cause I’m feeling ’bout as strong as your willpower”. He threw the punch and wrecked his own hands doing it. That’s what happens to men who blow up something good and then act stunned about the debris. And that closing line is a fucking assassination because she measures her own strength against his willpower and finds both of them pathetic, insulting herself and him in the same breath while only one of them should be embarrassed. At this point she can barely trust herself to walk away and admitting that makes the anger feel human as hell, because a woman this composed while she’s plotting is the most dangerous thing in any room.
Verse two is where she stops pretending she’s above any of it. “Full-cycle karmic event / Before I go psycho / And take in into my own hands / I should back, you should hold me back / You were good at that”. The part that guts me is the ask at the end, because she’s requesting that the person who hurt her be the one who stops her. The man used to be good at that, which is the whole cruelty of it. Nobody talks about how deranged it is to lose the one person who knew how to talk you down when they are the reason you need talking down. That’s the shit that keeps you up until four.
Here’s where the song goes properly dark and I respect it enormously. “I spiral into descent / Like I’m planning your death / Like the pre-game of the sleeping / That I won’t partake in”. She said the thing everyone thinks and immediately takes back. The fantasy is the release valve. She’ll never follow through and she wants you to know she has thought about it in detail anyway, which is a hell of a thing to admit on a record with your name on it.
Okay but the two lines after that are the ones I keep rewinding. “I don’t even know how to make it feel better / The cauterised cold cut or the slow-burning taper” is a woman choosing a method of healing the way you’d choose a way to end things, quick and brutal or slow and merciful. Then she follows with “Don’t even think I was scratching the surface / The way you shot through me like you did it on purpose”. Being wounded is one thing. Suspecting he aimed is a completely different injury and it’s the one that turns a sad girl into a woman with fucking plans.
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Everything sharpens on the bridge, and of course he called it working on himself. Men have been running self-improvement as public relations for as long as women have had group chats. “You hand out your name / But you hate when I use it / Like I’m the one to blame / For why your imagine is ruining”. This one goes out to every man who wants the credit and none of the fucking consequences. He gave her his name and then acted violated when she put it in a sentence he didn’t care for. Then she closes the section with the most chilling moment on the track, dropped so casually you almost let it slide past – “Wanted the time and the space just to “work on” / But a pile of bodies is an interesting sidebar”. He wanted space to work on himself and she noticed the body count instead. The press notes talk about politically violent undertones and saying the quiet part loud, and that’s the line they mean. She delivers it in the flattest voice on the record.
By the final chorus everything has shifted and you have to be listening for it. Early on she can tell the universe to cut him out. Later it becomes “And I will tell”, moving from capability into commitment. The last round rewrites the sentence altogether with “Thought you really got away with it” before turning the request into “cut you down” and finishing on “‘Til you’re feeling ’bout as useful as your willpower”. She stopped measuring herself against him and started sentencing him. That’s a fucking verdict and she reads it out in the same tone she used to describe her clothes not fitting.
Naturally I went looking for whoever writes this coldly without flinching, because that’s a skill and I wanted to know where the hell she got it. Born in Perth and raised around Fremantle, ALEIA got her first formal taste of music through compulsory primary-school classes, then absorbed everything from rap and indie folk to heavy metal and pop through three older brothers whose playlists apparently refused to pick a fucking lane. She debuted with ‘Had Your Fun’ in May 2025 before issuing ‘Pretty When I Cry’ later that year. Her five-track debut EP, Public Humiliation, arrived in November after ALEIA wrote most of it within one gloriously messy post-breakup week. Her songs may begin as scattered voice memos or spill out during an improvised piano session, which feels right for a woman who says they are “fuelled by female rage towards men who disappoint me.” Influenced by Fiona Apple and Amy Winehouse, ALEIA earned a 2026 West Australian Music Song of the Year nomination in the Rock category for Public Humiliation.
The Hinge screenshot is still buried in my camera roll and the spare key went back through his letterbox two days later. I kept the revenge list because deleting it felt too generous to him, though every line of it stayed private. His carefully managed image became his own damn problem the second I stopped helping him protect it. ALEIA lets every violent thought finish on ‘Willpower’ and hands the punishment over to the thing he was always weakest at, which is a better ending than anything I drafted at midnight. By the next Sunday the toothbrush was gone and my willpower had finally done something useful.
