There was a dinner party a few weeks ago I should have left two hours before I actually did. The kind where you know everyone well enough to smile correctly but not well enough to say anything real. I was doing the thing where you hold your wine glass and nod and perform a completely convincing version of yourself that has no rough edges and no inconvenient wants. Then someone’s playlist shifted and ÆM’s ‘Written In the Stars’ came through the speakers and I went still. Not visibly, I kept the smile running. The song was saying something I’d been keeping so far below the surface I’d almost convinced myself it wasn’t there. I put my glass down and said something about an early morning then got out. Drove home with the volume up and windows down and felt more like myself in twenty minutes than I had in the previous three hours. Ema Macara, born in Portugal and raised in Luxembourg, makes experimental hyperpop for exactly that moment.
This shit hits immediately. ÆM drops you straight into two people at the edge. ” Right on the cusp / We’re undecided / Falling in love / It’s unrequited / You wanna trade up / Position rising / Shut the fuck up / We are misguided. “ That ‘shut the fuck up’ is desperation at full volume. The sound of someone telling their own feelings to calm the hell down for five seconds because they’re getting too loud in public. “We are misguided” is the word the world uses when desire doesn’t fit the approved categories. Two people on the cusp of something real, being redirected by everything around them.
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ÆM isn’t having it. “Is there a reason you don’t wanna be yourself? / Take off the irony and listen to me yell / I wanna dress up like the movies on the shelf / I wanna make you feel like you need no one else to.” “Take off the irony” is one of the sharpest damn lines I’ve heard all year. Irony is armor. You say the real thing but wrapped in enough distance that nobody can hold it against you. Ema rips it off and yells anyway. The movies on the shelf line is gorgeous and specific, all those images you absorbed growing up, looking for yourself in the story. She delivers the whole verse and then just: “All night / I’ll dance with you.” Six words and the entire promise is there.
Here’s where it gets physical. “Run / Outlast / I wanna mess around / Before our secret’s out” and I love it for that. There’s a clock on this. The world is about to find out and there’s going to be a cost, but right now we have tonight and we are going to use every second of it. The urgency in “before our secret’s out” is sexy as hell. Makes everything more charged, more alive.
She pulls back from the urgency and drops something beautiful. “Broken bottles / Are diamonds on the ground / There’s beauty to be found / In concrete-covered walls.” Ema is seeing worth in everything the world labels shattered. Broken glass catching light. Graffiti on concrete. This is the song’s whole philosophy applied to the people it’s written for, everything the world labels wrong or misguided. She finds the diamonds.
Ema Macara makes experimental pop that goes after the parts of human experience most songs won’t touch and ‘Written In the Stars’ delivers on that completely. She wrote this as a celebration of queer self-expression in a world actively working against it and the hyperpop sound amplifies that defiance into something you feel physically. That gap between what the body wants and what the world permits is where the whole song lives and the emotional stakes feel enormous. She also manages to write a political track without it being too obvious which is genuinely fucking hard to pull off.
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The bridge opens the song all the way up. ” If you wanna write it / Write it on a star / If you wanna love / Take it way too far / If your heart is beating / It’s not too late to start / You wanna make me feel it / Turn it up a notch. “ This whole section makes me want to do something inadvisable. Write it on a star means make it permanent and undeniable. Love taken way too far is an instruction. “If your heart is beating, it’s not too late to start” sounds simple and then it just sits in your chest for three days. “Turn it up a notch” is physical and demanding and I mean that shit.
She doesn’t close the song quietly. “We’re sacrificing this view / I’ve got a feeling this isn’t new / Repeated lies on the news / Bruised flesh will never quiet the truth.” ÆM names the political reality and doesn’t dress it up. The attempts to suppress and legislate. And then she brings it home: bruised flesh will never quiet the truth. That’s a promise. The body knows. The truth survives every ass-backward attempt to silence it.
I’ve been back to that dinner party friend group once since then. Still doing the wine glass performance, still smiling correctly at the right moments. I leave when I want to now. Drive home with this on full volume every time. ÆM already knew something I’m still figuring out how to say out loud. Add this to everything.
