My body has a playlist nobody else has access to. Part mood board, part vibe collection, and every song on it belongs to me before it belongs to anywhere or anyone. I play them Sunday mornings, alone, in whatever I slept in, music so loud I can feel it in my thighs. Moving around my kitchen half-dressed, not dancing for shit except myself. I protect that ritual like a controlled substance. The other version I know too, the 1am version where I’m deep in the music and have forgotten my name and my body is doing what it wants, and then someone’s eyes find me and the whole thing cracks. I was fucking dancing for myself and now I’m a performance. I have walked out of clubs over that rupture. CERULEAN SAPPHIRE’s ‘Not Shy’ starts right there. The Danish-Finnish duo built this track around that whole feeling.
The track is dark, hypnotic electropop with hyperpop and lo-fi house threaded through it and it has a pull that goes straight to your hips and stays there. Vocalist Ellen Krogh opens with “Not shy / just don’t want your eyes / on my skin” and I need you to sit with what she’s actually saying. She’s deep in her body, dancing, and she doesn’t want to be watched while she’s there. That’s a different thing from shyness and she knows it, and honestly so do we.
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Dancing, for Ellen, is completely fucking physical. “One sore / beauty when I dance / I dance and forget / your embrace” – she’s using movement to get out of whatever grip someone has on her. Her muscles are doing what her mind can’t. The dance floor is the one place she’s not accountable to anyone’s memory of her and you can feel how much she needs it.
Here’s where it gets complicated in a way I actually love. “I feel / so hopelessly romantic / brought up to believe / in their dream” – she absorbed every piece of romantic mythology she was handed and genuinely believed it. The word “their” is the gut punch. Whose dream was she living? I have stood in a bathroom at a party thinking about the exact same shit. You spend so long inside someone else’s idea of what love looks like and at some point you’re on a dance floor at 1am trying to locate what you actually want underneath all that choreography.
The chorus is where everything breaks open. Elmeri Kunnas built something that presses against you, bass sitting low enough to feel in your thighs and your lower belly, and Ellen’s voice rides the whole damn thing like she’s been here before and she owns the room. Then: “I’m dancing / I swing myself around feels so good / then I notice your eyes / please don’t look at me.” The way she delivers “feels so good” should be studied. She’s inside her own pleasure here, hips moving, body doing what it wants, and the eroticism of it is the kind that doesn’t need a partner. A woman alone and turned on by her own movement is one of the hottest things going and Ellen captures it without even trying. Then someone’s staring. The whole interior world collapses.
The line she keeps returning to is the one that really moves you – “Am I wrong / to believe in a dream / so painfully blurred and / carefully rehearsed.” “Carefully rehearsed” is the phrase I can’t shake. She’s describing a dream that has been practiced, shaped, performed for consumption. A version of love she was handed as a script and delivered faithfully. The blurring and the rehearsing happening at the same time, which means she was performing something she couldn’t even see clearly, and there’s a particular kind of heartbreak in that I find hard to put down.
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CERULEAN SAPPHIRE is a Danish-Finnish duo who met in theatre school in Norway, because of course two people who were going to make music this atmospheric found each other in the most dramatic setting possible. Elmeri Kunnas produces while Ellen Krogh sings and together they built their whole first era around something they call “Mediterranean melancholy,” that specific ache of growing up between cultures, between countries, between the version of your life that feels like a vacation and the one that feels like reality. Their DIY debut racked up 50,000 Spotify streams, which is not a small fucking number for two theatre kids with a dream and a laptop. Now they’re pivoting hard into something groovier and punchier with ‘Not Shy,’ an electropop track with hyperpop and lo-fi house in its DNA, and honestly the sonic glow-up makes complete sense. They figured out who they were in the soft and dreamy era, and now they’re done being quiet about it.
The song doesn’t end with confrontation or resolution. Ellen steps outside: “I walk outside / into the night / neon lights all around me.” Then: “I breathe in / the air is cold.” She left the room. She left the eyes. Cold air on her face and her body back to herself, and the song knows that’s enough.
I started this talking about the ritual that belongs to me before anyone else gets a vote, the Sunday morning version where the apartment is mine and nobody’s watching and I’m moving around my kitchen half-dressed dancing for shit except myself. Ellen ends this song standing in cold night air having walked out of a room full of eyes, and that’s the same fucking feeling. The moment that belongs to you before anyone else can claim it. CERULEAN SAPPHIRE built a whole track around that feeling and Ellen delivered it like she’s lived every second of it. I believe her. Damn right she walked out.
