When I was in college I dated this guy who smoked and along the way I started smoking too which had nothing to do with cigarettes and everything to do with him. I did it socially back then which is just a pretty way of saying I smoked whenever he was around because those two things had become the same thing. A cigarette gave me something to hold and a reason to stay outside just a little longer. Every situationship I ever let wreck me ran on that same shit. The beginning was so damn good I kept coming back even when I knew better, even when I could feel exactly what was happening. Nicotine spike. Dopamine hit. He texts “miss you.” Same chemical cocktail, different packaging. “Hit straight to my head, your kiss is a cigarette / and I’d die” — yeah. Eliza Prymak, I see you.
‘Cigarette’ opens with “You held my hair when I spit out the toothpaste” and honestly, she’s already made her case. He’s seen her at her most unglamorous and she is completely fucked. Real talk, nothing breeds attachment faster than that kind of intimacy. The gross bathroom stuff that happens when the performance is over and you’re just two people existing in the same bathroom. That one line does more psychological work than most songs do in four minutes. That’s genius.
Advertisement
From there she admits what it feels like to know you’re in too deep and trying to bail but keep coming back. “I run from you, I get scared of you, I tell you I need space.” That line right there did it. She knows she’s hooked but comes crawling back anyway. Every girl who has ever sent the “I need space” text and then shown up at his door four days later lives in that line. The wanting to leave and being completely unable to. That’s what a dependency feels like from the inside.
And then the line I cannot stop thinking about. “I miss you when you’re sitting right there.” What she’s describing is pure craving, wanting is more desirable than having. She can be mid-inhale and already aching for the next one. I’ve felt that. He’s right there, you have everything you wanted in that moment, and somehow you’re still aching. The wanting doesn’t stop just because he showed up. This fucked me up. Full-blown dependency she’s completely at peace with, and somehow that’s the most honest thing I’ve heard all year.
The bridge is where she signs the lease on the whole addiction. “I fought it hard, but you’re a star, need your atmosphere / our gravity is real to me, you’re pulling me.” She tried to quit. Actually tried. And then physics happened. Something that burns that bright generates its own orbit and she stopped resisting. You can hear it in her voice, this resigned, almost relieved surrender. This feels so familiar I had to put my phone down for a second, I feel seen, attacked, and incredibly validated.
The college dorm energy is not accidental — “dorm room double bed” is right there in the lyrics, and she’s writing from inside the experience without cushioning any of it. See, a cigarette is like a situationship rolled in paper. It burns hot and looks sexy but it’s gone in five minutes and isn’t healthy, and Eliza Prymak knows it well enough to make it do both physiological and poetic work in the same song. The way you promise yourself you’ll quit tomorrow? That’s the same voice that says you’ll stop answering him after tonight. She put it on a record so the rest of us don’t have to explain it anymore. Pulitzer-worthy oversharing. I mean that.
Advertisement
Eliza Prymak is a pop artist who said fuck the genre rules and started mixing hip-hop, jazz, and pop like they’re a damn throuple. She’s classically trained in voice, plays jazz guitar, graduated from Interlochen Arts Academy (the kind of place where everyone’s weirdly talented and slightly unhinged about their craft), and now she’s at Belmont University in Nashville studying songwriting because apparently she’s not done learning how to destroy people emotionally through music.
She grew up in rural northern Virginia pulling inspiration from Lana Del Rey’s cinematic sadness, Amy Winehouse’s raw fucking honesty, Tommy Genesis’s genre-defying chaos, Charli XCX’s pop maximalism, and Ariana Grande’s vocal gymnastics. She’s toured nationally, opened for The Voice finalist Joshua Davis, and performed with Dust Box Band during her Interlochen days. Eliza’s whole thing is proving that pop doesn’t have a ceiling, it has a damn launching pad.
I quit the cigarettes senior year. The situationships took longer. But I understand now why both were so damn hard to walk away from and it had nothing to do with willpower and everything to do with how good the pull felt. That guy I smoked for in college is probably still out there somewhere, still standing too close to someone at a party, still handing her a reason to stay outside just a little longer. And she’s going to take it. Because that’s what you do when something hooks you that good — you already know how it ends and you light it anyway.
