I was at a rooftop party last month that peaked around 11pm and fell apart by midnight. The DJ was committing crimes, someone spilled something pink on my white top, and I’m standing at the edge of this roof staring at the city thinking about someone I had no business still thinking about. We’d ended things three weeks before. I was supposed to be done, out here having the time of my life, fully moved on. The world has been genuinely unhinged lately and I’d been using all that noise as cover so I didn’t have to sit with how much I wanted to be somewhere quiet with him. One drink too many into the night, I put my headphones in and Charlotte Andersen’s ‘SWIM’ came on, and I swear this girl crawled inside my head. She’s doing a BTS cover here and she’s turned it into something so fucking personal it almost doesn’t make sense. The girl is 18. She has no goddamn right to understand this particular ache so well.
This is a sexy R&B cover of BTS’s ‘Swim’ with extra hot girl energy to keep the boys bricked up, and Charlotte opens it slowly, the image she paints damn near cinematic. “Swim, swim / Water falling off your skin / I could spend a lifetime watching you / This is how it all begins / I just wanna dive” and the R&B production moves slow and honeyed around her voice in a way that makes the whole thing feel like a slow exhale. She’s watching this man and she could do it forever and she’s saying it out loud with total unflinching desire. “I just wanna dive.” She wants him. Full stop. The simplicity of that is its own kind of sexy.
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Then she gives the context and the context makes everything feel heavier. She starts with “Bad world gone away and I still wake up in this mad world / Name a place that I could breathe on this map world” and I feel that one. The world is genuinely fucked and she can’t find a way to breathe in it. Then “Lookin’ like a goody goody in this bad world / Don’t know how to act boy,” and that line is doing serious work. She looks sweet and she knows it and she’s using every inch of that gap to her full advantage. She lays it bare: “I’m in the deep tell me where the hell you at boy? / Oh you ain’t even gotta love me bad boy / You know that I’m never holdin’ back boy.” She’s already underwater and she went in willingly. “You ain’t even gotta love me bad” is the most unapologetically forward thing she could have said on this track. She wants him there while he swims up inside her and she takes everything she came for. That’s the whole ask. That confidence is hot as hell. Write it down.
The production stays hot and unhurried heading into the chorus and Charlotte makes the ask feel loaded. Charlotte gives us “So easy, don’t make it so hard / Nights like these, I just wanna get lost / Right here with the moon and the sharks / I ain’t gotta think ’bout a thing, baby,” and “right here with the moon and the sharks” stopped me cold the first time I heard it. She’s choosing a place that is beautiful and dangerous and her ass is staying in that water regardless. She wants to be consumed, and the danger is part of the draw. Obviously.
Here’s where she commits and the song gets properly hot. Charlotte goes all the way in with “Water so deep / Take it off the ground I ain’t never gettin’ cold feet / Yeah you know me / Sittin’ on the shore now I’m ready for the whole sea.” Been watching, been waiting, and now she wants all of it and she’s saying it directly to his face. “Yeah, you know me” feels like a dare. He does know her, and that knowledge is the whole seduction. Then: “I can feel the high waves comin’ / Why you run away? You can run in / Salt on my tongue, he’s stunnin’ / You’re the only place that I wanna be.” “Salt on my tongue, he’s stunnin'” might be the sexiest double entendre I’ve heard all year. Sensory and sudden and completely unexpected. She’s tasted the ocean and she’s describing his taste in the same breath. The intimacy of that is its own kind of heat. I need to sit the fuck down.
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The outro is where she stops asking and starts moving. It open with “Splash, drift / I make waves with my two fins / Splash, drip / I just wanna take it across the line.” She’s in the water and she’s going somewhere on purpose. Then she pulls back to something honest: “Under here, we don’t chase the time / Baby, everything can’t be so sad / Turn my face from the land / I just wanna dive, I just wanna dive.” “Everything can’t be so sad” is the realest thing she says on the whole track and she slips it in between the most charged lines in the song. This is some seriously sexy shit dressed up as an escape plan, and Charlotte makes you feel every bit of it.
Charlotte is an 18-year-old Danish singer, songwriter, and model who is absolutely not waiting for anyone’s fucking permission to take up space. She’s been putting out music at a pace that should embarrass artists twice her age, dropping singles consistently through 2025 and 2026 while running a Mariah Carey impersonation side hustle on Instagram because why the hell not. She’s got the Christmas album, the collabs, the relentless releases, and the kind of shameless grind energy that makes it clear she’s playing a long game and she already knows she’s going to win it. 2.2K monthly Spotify listeners right now, but she’s the kind of girl who’s going to make you feel like a goddamn idiot for not knowing her name sooner.
I didn’t call him that night. Stayed on that roof until my phone hit 11% and I genuinely did not care about anything except what was in my headphones. Three weeks of pretending I didn’t still want him dancing in my sheets, and Charlotte cracked it open in four minutes with a BTS cover. She’s 18 years old and she already understands that wanting someone this much is its own reason, no justification required. By the time the Uber pulled up I’d played it four times and was still not ready to stop. I went home alone. The only thing I regret about that night is showing up in a white top.
