He texted “you up” at 1:47 on a Saturday morning and I buzzed him into my building before I finished pretending to think about it. This man is a walking bad idea with a big dick and I’ve been fluent in that dialect since high school. We didn’t make it past my kitchen. His hand slid under my shirt and straight up while my back found the refrigerator and the magnets scattered across the takeout menus, and I could feel how hard he was against my crotch before either of us said a word. Neither of us named it out loud. He wants me and I want him right back and we both know this ends with somebody crying in an Uber eventually. The knowing makes it fucking hotter. iamkitty built an entire song out of that late-night math on ‘u want me i want u’ and I felt personally subpoenaed by the first thirty seconds. She’s singing about the man you keep a drawer for even though you’d never claim him in daylight.
She built the mood straight into the sound. ‘u want me i want u’ is dark alternative R&B cut with hood trap, late-night music for the hour when your judgment clocks out and your appetite takes the wheel. It belongs in a parked car with the engine off, his hand down the front of my jeans while I grip the door handle and stop pretending we’re still deciding. Nothing about this production begs for your attention. It waits for you to come to it, which is the hottest shit a track can pull, and if a beat could hook a finger through your belt loop this one would.
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Then she starts naming the problem out loud. “You want me like water but you’re drowning / You want me like fire but you’re burning.” He wants the thing that takes him under. I’ve met this man. Several times actually, in different fonts. The last one had my jeans unbuttoned before my front door clicked shut and the dick was genuinely worth the emotional overdraft, and he still couldn’t text back in daylight. He craves the intensity, can’t survive it, and keeps showing up at her door anyway. She keeps going: “You want me to stay but you’re leaving / You want me to have faith not believing.” That’s the resume of every man who wants a ride-or-die while keeping one foot out the door. He’ll ask for everything and offer a maybe. She reads his file back to him line by line and lets him sit in it.
My favorite stretch is where she flips the table and shows her own cards. “I feel it / Don’t think that / I see you / don’t come back.” She clocks everything. She sees the whole game and tells him to stay gone, and there’s a loophole tucked inside it, because “don’t come back” from a woman who wants you translates to a door left cracked. I’ve said it myself with my hand on the deadbolt and his palm flat against my stomach sliding lower. Telling a man to stay away while you’re grinding back into him is its own kind of foreplay and this song fucking knows it.
The confession arrives at the end and it’s the whole track. “You want me / I know you do / And the hardest part baby / Is I want you too / And we keep falling.” She’s holding receipts on his wanting and then she hands over her own. Admitting you want him back is the scariest line a woman can sing because it kills the power fantasy and puts you both in the same burning building. The question circling the center of the song, “we want each other baby, what we gonna do?”, never gets answered because the answer is already happening, her bra on the floor and her hand feeling how bad he wants her through his jeans while the chorus loops. Everybody involved knows damn well what they’re gonna do.
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So who is she. iamkitty is a Y2K-coded pop girl who arrived fully formed, sugar-coated hooks with a hard drive full of attitude, built for a generation that scrolls faster than it feels. She came up through Unicorn Pop and introduced herself on ‘Daily,’ a collaboration with Wengie, before stepping out solo with this one. Her world runs on internet culture and visuals dipped in glitter and gloss. Her songs are sized for the replay button and her persona, she claims, comes straight out of the “Y2K dimension.” She explains none of it, which is the smartest move on her resume. Mystery is a currency and this girl showed up rich.
While I was drafting this he texted again. Same hour, same man I’ve renamed in my phone four times trying to trick myself out of answering. I buzzed him up before the second text came through and met him at the elevator, and by the third floor his hands were under my shirt and I could feel him hard through his jeans against my ass, both of us watching the numbers climb. I had ‘u want me i want u’ playing loud enough that the song could do the talking for both of us. iamkitty made this for girls who already know how the night ends and press play anyway, and the elevator ride back up was the best fucking part.
