Six of us were crammed into someone’s apartment on a Saturday, talking shit about who was hooking up with who and debating where to go for drinks. The news on the TV behind us was muted and something genuinely awful came across that screen. Everyone clocked it for half a second and went right back to arguing about whose situationship was actually a relationship. I started to say something about it and then asked if we were doing the place on the corner with the curiously strong cosmos. I looked right at someone else’s suffering and chose cosmos, and I am still thinking about that. Jasmin Ahrent wrote “Inconvenient” for people who do that and know they’re doing it, and she wrote it with the kind of quiet that makes you feel personally called out.
The production is stripped to piano and acoustic guitar, and Ahrent doesn’t add a damn thing else to hide behind. She named Birdy and Aurora as influences, with Freya Ridings in the mix, and you can hear that in how much space the song allows itself. Selin Veya carries the whole thing on her voice, and the way she delivers it makes you feel like she’s talking specifically to you, which is not a comfortable experience.
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The song opens with a request the whole world has been avoiding. “Let’s sit down together / And have a serious talk / I know it’s inconvenient / But we can’t just walk.” The inconvenient conversation Ahrent is talking about is empathy. Actual, costs-you-something empathy in a world that has made it incredibly easy to feel nothing for anyone outside your immediate orbit. She’s basically saying: I know you don’t want to do this. We’re doing it anyway. Which, hell, fair enough.
The middle of the song is about what empathy looks like in 2026, which is mostly scrolling past it. Individual stories become content. Faces become headlines. She gets to “We say we can’t do more / But I’ve heard that sentence / So many times before” and that is the line that gets you. I have said that sentence. Out loud, to actual people, with a straight face. Selin says it once, low and tired, and you feel like a fucking bitch about it before she’s finished.
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Then she goes somewhere I did not see coming. She pulls The Hunger Games into it. “Do we stand with Katniss / Or quietly side with Snow.” Katniss is inconvenient as hell. Katniss is the one who makes you put down your fucking cosmos and actually deal with something. Katniss is the friend who said something when the awful thing came across the muted TV, and now everyone in the room is uncomfortable and the vibe is ruined and she does not care even a little bit. Snow is everyone who saw it and changed the subject because things were too good to ruin. Snow is the group chat that reacts with a heart emoji and moves on. Snow is deeply likable at brunch and does absolutely nothing that costs him anything. The song follows it up asking whether we’re cheering like the Capitol and telling ourselves we don’t know what’s happening out there. The Capitol had great parties, incredible fashion, zero accountability, and a very convincing story about why none of it was their fault. Ahrent is asking which side of that you’re actually on, and she’s asking it over the quietest, prettiest folk-pop production you’ve ever heard, which makes it so much harder to argue with.
Jasmin Ahrent is a songwriter and producer from Würzburg, Germany, who built this with musicians from the BandLab community, which is wild because nothing about it sounds assembled across the goddamn internet. She writes about empathy and what it costs, and says the through line in everything she does is honesty, “sometimes softly, sometimes with fire.” Ahrent chooses each vocalist carefully so the voice “matches the story, emotion and intensity of the song.” Selin Veya for this one was the right call. “Inconvenient” dropped March 27th, 2026.
We did the cosmos. They were strong, the night was good, and I woke up Sunday with zero regrets except the one. The thing on the muted TV. I looked it up the next morning hungover and alone, which is maybe how that was supposed to go. Ahrent says she writes for “the soft ones, the fierce ones, and everyone who’s still trying to put themselves back together.” All three were in that apartment on Saturday. None of us said a word. “Inconvenient” said it instead.
