I went through this phase where I stopped getting ready for anyone else. Genuinely stopped. Mirrors were purely functional. Lip gloss because I wanted it, not because anyone was gonna see it. Outfit chosen for how it felt walking out the door, full stop. There’s this specific electric thing that happens in your body when you stop performing yourself and just ARE yourself. Men feel it before they understand it. You walk into a room and you can literally watch someone’s brain short-circuit, their hands starting to shake, their voice going too smooth, their eyes doing that thing where they try not to look and absolutely look anyway. That’s the shit EL V. is bottling on ‘Magnetic Anyway.’ She’s a London-based Afro-pop diva deep in Afrobeats and Afro-fusion territory and she built a whole track around the slow burn of being irresistible before you even open your mouth. I’ve been playing it on repeat for three days and I’m not even a little sorry about it.
EL V. opens the track walking in late, lip gloss fresh, the whole entrance calibrated to nothing but herself. “Walked in late / Lip gloss / Fate / You clock my face / Then you look away.” He sees her. Of course he does. And then he does the most predictable thing a man can do when he’s overwhelmed and panicking – he looks away. She keeps moving. “I don’t chase / I glide past you / You feel that pull / You pretend you don’t.” The pull is real and he’s standing there pretending his ass doesn’t feel it which honestly makes it worse for him. Women who move through a room without needing anyone to clock them are always the ones everyone clocks. EL V. knows this. The groove knows this.
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Then his body starts telling on him completely. “You’re talking cool / But your hands shake / Tryna play safe / But your pulse stays racing / I’m on my way / You just don’t know / I’m that someday you been praying for.” The man is totally bricked before she’s said a single word to him. You feel a man’s want before you see him standing at attention below the belt, it shows up in his whole body going fucking stupid first. She’s standing right in the middle of all that completely unbothered and already knowing how this ends. She doesn’t have to do anything but exist in the room and he’s already thinking about what she tastes like.
She plants her flag in the chorus: “I’m perfect as I am / Magnetic anyway / You don’t see it yet / But you’re already changed / You feel it when I laugh / You feel it when I stay / I’m perfect as I am / And I’m yours someday.” The pull is already doing its fucking work with or without his cooperation and he doesn’t have enough self-awareness to know it yet. That laugh line gets me every time because she’s not even trying and he’s already catching the kind of feels that keeps a man up at 3am staring at the ceiling trying to figure out his next move. That’s a woman who stopped competing and just started existing and it’s sexier than anything he’s seen all night.
The 118 BPM groove here is hot but unhurried with the kind of tempo that loosens your hips and your better judgment in equal measure. The Afro-pop influence gives it this grounded, earthy sensuality that Western pop production alone can’t reproduce, and EL V. rides it with the same unhurried confidence her lyrics describe. Bedroom-low and late-night-rooftop in its energy it’s the sound of one more drink and an intentional accidental brush against his stiff and throbbing predicament.
The second verse has a line I want to get a tattoo of on my inner thigh so he can see it every time he’s down there. “I choose me first and always / Still I see you in all my days / You’re not ready but that’s alright / I’m the blessing you meet on time.” She’s holding all of self-possession and the want at once and she’s not conflicted about either. He’s not ready and she genuinely does not give a shit because she knows the timeline isn’t his to set. That last line is the kind of casual devastation that makes grown men reconsider their entire approach to women.
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She flips the energy in the second pre-chorus – “But your eyes say / ‘Please don’t leave yet / Don’t just walk away’ / I know my worth / I don’t chase ghosts / But I know worlds where we get close.” His eyes are completely betraying his ass now. His mouth is doing one thing and his whole face is doing another. “I know my worth” delivered over this production is almost obscenely satisfying. “I know worlds where we get close” is where it gets genuinely hot. She’s already played the scene in her head and knows what it feels like when his shaking hands stop shaking and start doing something else entirely. She’s holding her ground and waiting and the knowing itself is hot as hell.
Something shifts in the rap verse. “If you move calm, that’s silence in the breeze / Got me thinking of fate, not guarantees.” Suddenly we’re inside the pull from his side, feeling it from where he’s standing. “Every glance you throw feels tailor-made / Got lessons in your eyes, I ain’t afraid.” He’s paying attention now, fully. “I’ve been riding through nights on a humble pace / Trying to level with peace, not the paper chase.” This man isn’t chasing status. He’s chasing something real, and then she walks in. “World loud, but you calm, cut through the sound / You the type make a lost man found.” That second line is a full confession. He keeps going: “Ain’t rushing what’s real, I let it breathe / If it’s ours, no force, it don’t never leave / You talk light, but your soul speaks deep / I’ve seen gold, but this one I keep.” He’s seen other women. He’s keeping this one and that’s the shit that separates real want from convenience. “So I stay still, let the story unfold / You the warmth in the night I can’t control / Some days cool, I don’t need it now / Just a moment with you ..” That ellipsis does more emotional heavy lifting than most entire bridges. He doesn’t have to say what the moment means. She knows. We all know.
I eventually did walk into that room in my lip gloss, for myself, on my timeline. Watched his hands shake. Smiled into my drink and didn’t chase a single damn thing. EL V. understood the assignment before I even had the vocabulary for it. This London-based Afro-pop force is making music that lives in the space between self-possession and sexual gravity, and ‘Magnetic Anyway’ is proof the two have always been the same thing. You choose you first. The pull does the rest.
