The fastest way to lose me is to tell me how impressive you are. I’ve sat across from men who narrated their own résumé for fun – listing the watch and the square footage like I’d requested a fucking brochure. They always read my silence as the sound of it landing. What it actually is, is me running the clock on how long I’ll let a man perform before I change the subject to something with a pulse. A particular calm comes over a woman when she realizes a guy is doing a whole bit for an audience that already walked out. Men get weird around that calm because they can feel themselves losing and have no idea why. Imaria built a whole house track out of that calm, and ‘Take It’ struts in with the unbothered nerve of someone who clocked the bluff before the music even started.
This is a dancefloor banger about a woman who walked in ready to run the fucking room and clock every fake flex from some cocky little man whose car and ego do not make him untouchable. Imaria gives him all the attitude he earned, making it clear she will not shrink or let anybody mistake her confidence for an invitation to test her. It has that old-school house pulse that has you practicing the moves you’ll try later with someone between your sheets. The whole damn track moves with a woman who knows she is hot and powerful enough to put somebody back in their place.
Advertisement
She lays her cards down before the beat even gets comfortable. “I didn’t come here to play or mess around / I came to show you what I got while you all drop it down / You think you’re ready? Ha! / Let’s wait and see / You should have known by now not to underestimate me.” What gets me is that she frames the whole night as a performance she’s headlining while everyone else is background choreography. She’s not asking for the floor, she took it on the walk in. And that little laugh she drops in the middle is pure feminine menace, the sound of a woman who has already run the math on a man and found him fucking adorable for trying. God forbid a girl have pattern recognition this sharp. The man walked in thinking he had a shot at running this, and she already filed the whole night under handled.
Then she reads the costume right off his back. “I know that you ain’t what you are / Despite you driving in that car / You think you’re a real big superstar / Let’s see how you roll.” The whole flex economy of a certain kind of man lives and dies in these lines. He built an identity out of the things he owns and she sees straight through to the empty wiring underneath. I went out with a guy once who name-dropped his lease payment within ten minutes, and watching his face fall when it didn’t move me was better than the date ever could have been. Imaria does that to him on a loop. She hands him just enough rope to keep strutting and pours herself a drink to enjoy the show, because nothing exposes a hollow man faster than a woman who refuses to be impressed on schedule.
The chorus is where the heat curdles into a standoff that’s honestly hotter than any love song. “You ain’t ever gonna make me stop / And I know that you’re never gonna make me take it / I know that you think you’re hot / But you’re never gonna be that one to shake me / I know you know that I won’t take it / You know I know that I won’t take it.” She keeps circling back to the same promise because she wants it somewhere he can’t pretend he didn’t hear it. The man is used to women who bend if he leans hard enough, and she’s telling him the foundation doesn’t move no matter how pretty the pressure gets. Here’s the thing about a woman this immovable, it drives a certain man absolutely feral. Getting turned down barely dents a guy like this. What ruins his whole damn week is being read this accurately while she’s still smiling at him. You can hear the moment a cocky man realizes he’s out of his depth and switches from flirting to negotiating.
Then she gets specific and the temperature genuinely spikes. “They think they know me well / You don’t know me at all / You got a lot of nerve acting so comfortable / You really wanna try me? / You really wanna taste? / You push me once and I’ll make sure you’re put back in your place.” Calling out his comfort is the sharpest cut on the track, because his whole game depended on assuming access he was never handed. He got familiar uninvited and she’s revoking the privilege in real time. Then she does the filthiest thing on the whole record. She dangles the thing he wants in the same breath she promises to humble him, so wanting her and getting wrecked become the same gamble. A woman who can make desire feel like a dare she might not let you win is operating on a different frequency than the rest of the room. All the tension on the track lives in that little gap she leaves open, the one where he’s still hoping right up until she shuts it.
Advertisement
Imaria has been putting in work around Newcastle long before the Y2K gloss got this fucking polished. After early performances at McDonald Jones Stadium, she launched her original run with 2021 debut ‘Love You Less’ and kept building through pop and dance releases while regional radio and Triple J Unearthed kept her name in the conversation. Now she is making the kind of career pivot I fucking love to watch, trading darker electronic edges for high-fashion pop with Britney-era nerve and Pussycat Dolls-level strut. ‘Take It’ is the reset button, kicking open a debut-EP era built around high-fashion Y2K glamour and the kind of strut that makes a girl look hot walking away. Newcastle has had a pop girl building in plain sight, and she is clearly done playing small.
I keep coming back to that resting-pulse calm, the version of walking into a room where you’ve already decided you’re untouchable and you let the doubter figure it out on his own time. ‘Take It’ is three and a half minutes of staying exactly that unbothered while a man flails to get a reaction he’s never going to earn. When the house beat finally turns you loose you’ve stopped thinking about him entirely, which is the whole point and also the worst thing you can do to a man like that. What stays is the hum of being the one nobody in the building could shake, and the itch to go find your own dance floor and prove it.
