I cover pop music for a living and my job description basically doubles as my personality at this point. I write about parties, sex and sound all day and then I go live it at night, and last week those two things crashed into each other in a way my editor would absolutely not sanction. I was halfway through a second glass of something red, wearing the oversized shirt I’d grabbed off Jake’s floor that morning because I’d done that thing where you leave before the alarm goes off and tell yourself you’ll text him later. My inbox had the Alivia Clark single sitting there and I pressed play. Then again. By the third time I was cross-legged on my bed, completely focused on the fact that this woman had just described the fucking power I’d been running on all week, the specific kind where you know someone is losing his mind over you while you’re just going about your day. Jake texted at noon and again at 2pm. I ignored both. I was busy having a full personal reckoning with a four-minute pop song that understood my life better than I did.
Alivia’s been gone a year and ‘Breathless’ is how she announces she’s back. She wrote the whole thing herself and handed it to producers David Mason, Harry Nelnick, and Maxim Laskavy, and what came back is an up-tempo EDM and house track with electropop bones and R&B soul baked into it. The bass is filthy and I was on my feet thirty seconds in. Opening her new era with something this loud and this confident is a statement that borders on aggressive, and I mean that as the highest possible compliment. The bar she just set for herself is her own problem now.
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Pure confidence is her opening move. “Take a peek / It’s alright / Honestly even justified” is the energy of a woman who knows he’s already been staring and has decided to make it worth his while. She’s been caught and her response is to lean in harder, daring him to keep looking, and the audacity of “honestly even justified” is what makes it land. He was right to look. She’s telling him that.
Obsession kicks in on both ends in the pre-chorus. She lays her credibility on the table first with “My love / I promise you / My word is always true,” and then admits what she’s actually been doing with her time, “That I spend every minute / 24 hours / 7 days week / Thinking about you and me.” I know this feeling and it is genuinely inconvenient. He just walks back into your brain like he owns the place – while you’re in a meeting or three drinks in with your friends or doing literally anything else. Alivia says it with the confidence of a woman who has assessed the obsession and decided it’s worth every fucking minute of her time, and honestly? Correct.
In the chorus she collects what she’s owed. She’s already been to heaven with this man and she knows he’s coming back because she took him there. “Imma leave you breathless / Now you’re crawling back for seconds / Imma leave you breathless / Take you all the way to heaven / It’s so nice you’re all mine till sunrise / Till we’re breathless.” Crawling back for seconds is so fucking delicious because she describes sex with the certainty of someone who already knows the review in advance. That “till sunrise” detail is where it gets graphic. The hour after you’ve both burned through everything, nothing left to perform. She owns that hour. The production swells here and the bass drops into something full and throbbing, her voice riding it all the way into the floor.
Her second verse is where the humor gets sharp enough to draw blood. She’s grateful for whoever trained this man up. “Thank god / For a gentleman / Doing the bare minimum / Send my love / To Mrs. / Teach ’em how to wine and dine and give the finer.” That “send my love to Mrs.” is the cattiest shit I’ve heard this year and I mean that as a compliment. She’s thanking a woman she’s never met for civilizing a man she’s currently benefitting from, and she takes no ownership of any of it. The payoff comes in “Spend every minute / 24 hours / 7 days week / Asking me / Baby is there anything you need” and the reversal is complete. The obsession that started as hers is now entirely his. She flipped it.
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Then she drops the whole thing and walks away – “Don’t waist my time / I’ve got a lot on my mind / And if I’m gonna be a star by 22 / I’ve got things to do / Other than you.” I needed a second after that. She’s been all over this man, consumed by him, taking him to the edge of his sanity and back, and then she remembers she has a career to build. The “star by 22” line is the whole damn thing. He’s a pleasure she’s choosing and she’ll stop choosing him the moment her attention is needed elsewhere. That’s the cold sexy truth underneath all of it and she wrote this track solo because the ambition was always hers alone.
Alivia Clark is the kind of girl who makes guys do things they’ll have to explain to their therapists later and that’s before a single note plays. She’s a singer-songwriter and actress moving across EDM, Pop, and R&B/Soul like she owns all three zip codes, writing melodies that get into a man’s bloodstream uninvited and lyrics that find the parts of him he specifically told himself were off-limits. The resume is intimidating as hell: seven years as a featured soloist at Carnegie Hall, Broadway, Rockwood Music Hall, she opened for Mariah Carey at the World Trade Center, and sang at galas for Joe Biden and Michael Bloomberg. The acting credits are just as fucking stacked: lead roles in the feature films Buttons, A New Musical Film and 18 to Party, and TV appearances across Law & Order: Organized Crime, SNL, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and the Late Show with David Letterman. She also voices Skye in Paw Patrol and Coco in Bing, which is almost funny given how goddamn dangerous she is in every other context. ‘Breathless’ is the shit she’s been building toward her whole career, and it was worth the wait.
I texted Jake back around 8. He came over and I put ‘Breathless’ on, watching him hear it without knowing I’d spent the whole day living inside it. That’s the thing Alivia gets about this kind of power, how it runs completely underneath the surface while you’re just pouring wine and acting casual, how you can be consuming someone and also moving toward something so much bigger than him. She built a song out of that space, and if ‘Breathless’ is the opening move on what’s coming next, the rest of the music world has no idea what the hell is heading their way.
