Okay, so I’m cleaning out my camera roll last week—you know that thing where you’re just gonna delete some screenshots but suddenly you’re three hours deep in old photos? Yeah. There I am, staring at this video from late February 2020. Me and my roommate doing tequila shots in our kitchen at 2pm on a Tuesday, dancing to some remix, completely fucking oblivious to what was coming. We look so carefree, so young, planning spring break trips we’d never take. Two weeks later, we’d be in the same kitchen, same tequila, but everything had shifted. The world shut down and we were trying to recreate that feeling while six feet apart from everyone we loved. And fuck, I’m actually crying a little because that before-and-after hits different now. That exact feeling—that beautiful disaster of trying to hold onto normalcy while everything transforms—that’s what Amira Mercury bottles up in ‘Patterns (in the sky).’
This Manchester artist just went there. She took our collective lockdown experience and turned it into this dreamy, fucked-up lullaby that sounds like Frank Ocean had a baby with those lo-fi study playlists we all lived on. The production floats in this hazy summer space, all these analog synths wrapping around you like that weighted blanket you panic-bought in April 2020. But underneath that soft exterior, there’s this hip-hop backbone keeping shit grounded, like Tyler during his Flower Boy era when he figured out how to make vulnerability sound cool as hell.
“Absent / All my friends are gone and so is my mind”—damn, she just drops you right back into it. Remember that specific brand of insanity where you’d forget what day it was but somehow knew exactly how many days since you’d seen another human? Amira gets it. She’s singing about “Spend my days in ignorance / Don’t want to leave my house” and suddenly I’m back on my couch, rewatching The Office for the ninth time because going outside meant acknowledging everything was actually happening.
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And listen, we need to talk about how she’s not trying to make this pretty. She could’ve written some sanitized “we’re all in this together” bullshit, but instead she’s like “yeah, my brain was melting and I pushed a shopping cart around for entertainment.” That’s hot. That’s real.
The whole middle section is where she really fucks with you though. “Subaru crosstrek / Cruising in my shopping trolley / Teacup full of trip / Patterns in the sky”—she’s painting the exact hallucinatory quality of those months, when getting groceries felt like an acid trip and we were all finding meaning in absolutely nothing because what else were we gonna do? She’s talking about pushing shopping carts on socially distanced walks like they were luxury vehicles, getting high off whatever we could find, seeing patterns in the sky because our brains were literally rewiring themselves from isolation.
Then she hits you with “Tell me all your stories / I’ll lay my head on the pillow and imagine it before me” and holy shit, remember when other people’s lives became our entertainment? When your friend would FaceTime you about their grocery store adventure and you’d listen like it was Game of Thrones? We were living vicariously through each other’s mundane bullshit because that’s all we had. We were so fucking desperate for connection that a pixelated FaceTime felt like physical touch. God, remember being that touch-starved? Amira does, and she’s not pretending it was cute.
The production keeps building these layers—live instruments bleeding into electronic textures, creating this wall of sound that feels both suffocating and freeing. It’s giving bedroom rave energy, that thing where you’d blast music at 11pm because time was fake and your neighbors were probably doing the same thing. Amira and her label A Different Kind of Dough clearly understand that pandemic nostalgia carries the weird beauty we created in the middle of chaos.
“Surgeon’s mask, dystopia I question my existence / Everybody went away, my life changed in an instant”—she’s not romanticizing it. She’s just stating facts. We wore medical masks to buy bread. People disappeared overnight. Life completely fucking shifted and we just… adapted. The way she delivers “Keep your distance / Things are different” with this matter-of-fact exhaustion captures exactly how we all became robots repeating safety phrases while dying inside.
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But the bridge is what destroyed me: “Pinging and crying to my best friends / I just wanna see them.” Pinging. Not texting, not calling—pinging, like we were satellites bouncing signals off each other hoping for connection. The desperation in wanting “normal life and little summer time” when we all thought it would be over by summer.
The ending though—“Dancing in the kitchen everything shall pass / and this too”—that’s the whole thesis. We danced in our kitchens because where the fuck else were we gonna dance? We told ourselves it would pass because the alternative was unbearable. And it did pass, but we’re different now. This song knows that.
Amira’s created something that feels essential for anyone who lived through that collective mindfuck. It’s nostalgic without being sentimental, honest without being brutal. She’s processed our collective trauma through this ethereal lens that makes you want to cry and dance at the same fucking time. The video apparently shows footage from then and now, her pandemic self versus her current self surrounded by friends, and that growth—that’s what this track is really about.
Stream this immediately. Save it for 3am when you’re wine-drunk scrolling through old photos, missing people you haven’t talked to since 2020. Play it when you need to remember you’re a goddamn survivor who made it through the weirdest shit imaginable. We earned the right to be nostalgic about surviving the unsurvivable. Amira Mercury just gave us the perfect soundtrack for processing whatever the fuck that was.
