I found out I was the villain of someone’s life story at a party while being cornered at the bar by a friend of a friend with a vodka soda sweating in my hand. She told me, with the delight of a woman holding a grenade, that my ex had been informing everyone I “destroyed” him which is funny considering he’s the same man who kept a framed photo of us on his shelf so guests could admire the relationship he was actively torching from the inside. I had two choices in that moment. Cry about the edit and beg the jury to reconsider, or pick up the role he cast me in and play it to the back row. I took a slow sip and smiled like the Antichrist. Some men hand you a knife and call you dangerous for holding it, and honestly, the role fits better than the apology ever would. Elizabeth Kostiakina built a whole song out of that decision and ‘Lucifer’ is the most satisfying middle finger set to a beat I’ve heard in ages.
The track is dance-pop with a dark little pulse under it – the kind of production that sounds chill on the surface while something colder moves underneath. Elizabeth sings like a woman who already left the room and is narrating it from the doorway calm and a touch amused at the damn wreckage. The whole thing runs on the power flip, a man wanting confession and ownership from a woman who has decided she owes him neither. A voice this composed over a beat this moody could talk me into walking out on someone mid-sentence.
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She opens by refusing the one thing he wants most, her repentance. Elizabeth sings “Goodbye my lover please don’t make me confess / I’m not a goddess / Don’t have no regrets / Those are feelings I just can’t suppress / Time goes by so fast / I’m out of my breath,” and the goddess line is the whole game right there. He wanted a muse – a perfect woman he could put on a pedestal and then resent for standing on it. She’s telling him she’s flesh and appetite and she’s leaving, and she will not perform purity so he gets to feel clean about the part he played. A woman who refuses to apologize for wanting things is the scariest fucking creature most men will ever meet, and she knows it.
Her chorus is where she becomes a ghost in his apartment on purpose. She lifts into “She took a midnight train going nowhere / She left her picture on your shelf, don’t be lonely / She took a midnight train going nowhere / You can call her Lucifer and say you’re sorry” and the picture left on the shelf is the detail that kills me. She’s physically gone and still haunting the room he has to live in. The train going nowhere is her running without a tidy recovery plan, leaving because staying got unbearable, destination be damned. And that “say you’re sorry” lands like a woman watching a man apologize to an empty chair. Too little, too late, and she’s already on the goddamn platform.
Verse two drags the whole thing back into the body with one domestic little knife. Elizabeth delivers “I was feeling kinda strange this morning / i drank your coffee, you like it so sweet / Goodbye my lover, you said you love me / why don’t you really, no I can’t repeat,” and drinking his too-sweet coffee is how you know this was real. Morning rituals, shared habits, the intimacy that makes leaving hurt like hell. Then the love turns hollow under her and whatever he actually did sits in that “no I can’t repeat” like a bruise she won’t press for him. She’s protecting herself from saying it out loud and you feel the ugliness she’s stepping over on her way to the door.
By the bridge she stops bleeding and starts collecting. Elizabeth sings “Bye bye boy don’t make me yours / I won’t clap after your voice / Seeing you is not my choice / Bye bye boy you’re now my toy / My soul feels like corduroy / I’m Helen of your Troy,” and good lord, the refusal to clap after his voice is so deliciously cold. She’s done being the audience for his ego, done rewarding the performance, done being the little crowd of one for whatever he’s been staging. Then she flips it and makes him the toy, the small thing, the possession. Calling herself Helen of his Troy is the masterstroke, because Helen always gets blamed for the war men chose to start. She’s telling him he can paint her as the face of his destruction but that doesn’t mean she lit every fire he’s standing in.
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Elizabeth Kostiakina is a Ukrainian singer-songwriter based in Paris who writes emotional pop with a dark pulse and a real taste for romantic wreckage. Her 2025 single ‘Eyes’ introduced her as an artist drawn to confession and tension – the kind of songwriter who lets heartbreak keep its lipstick on instead of forcing it to behave. There’s a cinematic mood running through her work – intimate enough to feel whispered and sharp enough to leave a mark – carried by a voice that knows damn well softness can still have teeth. On the strength of ‘Lucifer,’ she’s the rare writer who can make a clean exit sound like a curse she’s casting on her way out.
I never did set the record straight about being someone’s villain origin story. Turns out correcting a man’s mythology is a full-time job and the pay is shit. So I let him keep the framed photo and the dramatic retelling, and I went and built a whole damn life he doesn’t get to narrate. Kostiakina’s woman does the same thing, except she set it to a beat you can dance to, which is frankly the upgrade I needed. He can keep the picture and the apology nobody asked for. She’s already on the train, wearing the name like it was made for her.
