My phone died at a show once, the kind where you’re packed into the barricade and someone’s elbow is wedged into your ribs and the bass is coming up through the floor and into your whole body, and my first thought wasn’t “shit, my battery” it was “thank god he can’t reach me right now.” Not because I was over him. Because I’d been over him in my head for months and right back under him every time he texted, and my nervous system had been running at full alert for eighteen months like a personal crisis hotline with no voicemail and no off switch. We weren’t even together. We were whatever you call two people who tear into each other on a Tuesday and end up in bed by Wednesday and never have the actual conversation because having it would make it real and making it real would mean someone has to walk away and neither of us wanted to do it. I was his emergency contact in the unofficial, completely humiliating sense. The one he called at 2am when his night fell apart. The one who answered every single time with full knowledge of what the morning would feel like and zero intention of stopping. That is a completely unhinged kind of feral, and Chloe Star put it on a track and when I heard it I sat down on my bathroom floor and let it wreck me for three minutes straight.
The song opens like someone whose patience just snapped. Chloe goes right into it: “Shit I’m stuck in the cycle / Of hating fucking loving you / Shit it’s feels like survival / With every little thing you do / You say i am your world / Nah that can’t be true / Crazy how screaming in my face / Means i love you” and “hating fucking loving you” is doing double duty. She hates loving this woman. She also loves fucking her. Two separate statements sharing three words and Chloe puts that in the first verse like it’s nothing, like she hasn’t just named the whole damn trap in eight syllables. LA-based alt-pop provocateur, Indigenous and Persian heritage, raised between Los Angeles and her family’s reservation in San Bernardino. Her sound is built on that in-between identity and you hear it in the way she holds the raw and the controlled in the same note. The “you say I am your world / nah that can’t be true” is the moment the delusion cracks. You’ve been told you’re everything and you believed it because you wanted to. And then you hear it enough times against a backdrop of being screamed at and something clicks.
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The pre-chorus is where she gets properly nasty about it. There’s a beat shift right before the admission drops, and then: “Now we’re at the part where I usually crawl back / Begging on my knees yea I know that you want that / Looking back now I was always your number / I was always your emergency contact.” “Begging on my knees” is sitting in two places at once and Chloe knows it. There’s the humiliation of crawling back when you swore you wouldn’t, and there’s also the other kind of on-your-knees that she keeps going back to because it’s fucking good and she can’t pretend otherwise. She was always the one who showed up and got on her knees and answered the phone and none of it was getting returned. Co-written with JP Clark, who’s worked with blink-182 and Kim Petras, the track has that pop-punk backbone that makes the confession sharp as hell instead of soft.
Then she pivots and it’s so goddamn satisfying. “I don’t really care you can find you another / Saying I don’t care but part of me wonders / Nah wait never mind fuck that / I am not your emergency.” She is mid-sentence catching herself. She was about to do the gracious thing, say she doesn’t care, and then she hears herself wondering and cuts it off with “nah wait never mind fuck that” and arrives at the real answer. That is what it sounds like in your head at 1am when you’re deciding whether to reply. Chloe isn’t performing the breakthrough. She’s doing it in real time on the track and that’s the whole reason it works.
The second verse goes full spiral and she earns every bit of it. “Shit I’m stuck in denial / I’m over then I’m under you / Shit I feel like a psycho / Got me so con fuckin fused” and “I’m over then I’m under you” is doing so much fucking work. She’s done with this woman emotionally and still ending up underneath her physically, and her body is not consulting her brain about any of it. That stupid muscle memory takes over, hands and mouth and hips doing what they always do, and by morning she’s no closer to actually leaving. “Con fuckin fused” sounds like someone whose nervous system won’t honor the decision her brain already made, and hell yes, that’s the truth.
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The bridge strips the obsession down to its embarrassing basics. “I’d wait / To see if you would hit my phone / All day / Hoping you would see my post / Always / On and off and on again / And on and off and on again” is the pathetic, honest truth of caring about someone who runs you on a loop. You waited. All day. To see if she’d notice. You posted something hoping she’d see it and feel something. Chloe doesn’t dress that up as romantic. The repetition of on and off and on again is doing its job because that’s what the cycle feels like, it just keeps cycling and you keep letting it cycle because something in you still wants the high more than you want the stability.
Chloe said ‘Emergency Contact’ is “about being the person who always answers, until you finally stop.” She keeps going: “I’ve given my time, my effort, my loyalty,” and it wasn’t returned. “This song is about letting them know I’m not that person anymore.” Good for her. She spent 2024 and 2025 releasing two EPs and taking her Pride Tour across the US and the UK, building a fanbase that knows she means every ass-burning word she puts on tape. “The song itself just feels like you’re walking through the clouds with your middle finger to the sky,” she said. She pulled it off. That’s the whole energy of this track, walking away from something that was slowly grinding you down and doing it with your fist in the air instead of crying on your way to the door.
My phone eventually charged. He texted. I watched the notification sit there for a solid two minutes before I put it face down and went back to the show. That wasn’t some healed, evolved version of me. I was just too tired to keep performing okay-ness on his timeline. Chloe got all the way to the other side of it and made the song that plays when you’re standing on the edge of that decision, and sometimes that’s all you need to let the call go to voicemail.
