I watched LA burn from my apartment in January 2025. The Smoke was so thick you couldn’t see the hills. Ash falling like snow. Everyone’s phones blowing up with evacuation alerts. Thousands of homes just gone. Then in March, I’m getting coffee and there are federalized National Guard troops on the corner in full tactical gear. ICE raids turning my city into something that feels like occupation. The whole vibe shifted from natural disaster to deliberate control and it fucked with my head in ways I still can’t fully process. What do you do when your home stops feeling safe? When everything external is actively collapsing? You reach for whatever used to make you feel okay, even if that thing already destroyed you once. My brain went straight to texting my ex who wrecked me so thoroughly I blocked him on three platforms and deleted our entire chat history. Didn’t send it. But I typed it. Julia Campbell gets it. On ‘Almost Did,’ she’s fighting that exact same impulse while LA falls apart around her.
This dark dance-pop production sounds deceptively upbeat. Feels like Rose Gray and Julia Michaels made your new favorite track to dance-cry to. The song opens with her ex checking in because he heard about the fires. “You ask me if I’m okay / heard my city’s on fire / I was hoping you would / but now I don’t know how to reply.” That contradiction hits so hard. You wanted him to care enough to reach out and spent months imagining what you’d say if he did and now that he actually texted you have no fucking idea how to respond because his concern feels simultaneously validating and invasive. Julia’s delivery here is so casually devastating. She wanted this exact thing to happen and now it’s happening and she’s paralyzed.
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Then comes the admission that wrecks me. “Won’t say that I need you / but I’m scared that I might / cause when I heard the news / you’re the first person that came to mind.” When the fires started her brain went straight to him. She’s scared she might need him because needing him means admitting the breakup didn’t actually change how she responds to crisis. He’s still the first person she thinks of when shit goes sideways. That’s the uncomfortable truth we don’t talk about enough. You can know someone is bad for you and still want them when you’re scared.
The chorus captures that whole mess perfectly. “We didn’t work but we almost did / still the closest I’ve ever been / as I watch the world go to shit / I forget why we ended it.” The world is literally falling apart and suddenly the reasons you broke up feel less important than the fact that he understood you in ways nobody else has matched since. Almost working feels better than definitely failing when your city is on fire and federal troops are patrolling your neighborhood. The production stays light here, this infectious dance-pop beat that makes the emotional devastation feel almost celebratory. You can dance to this while processing your worst impulses.
Julia Campbell is a Los Angeles-based songwriter and producer who moved from Philadelphia to make music in the city she watched burn. She’s written for Sadie Jean, Chelsea Jordan, Trevor Dahl from Cheat Codes, and she’s collaborated with Erik Aukstikalnis from Galantis. The woman knows how to craft a hook that destroys you. ‘Almost Did’ landed her first Spotify editorials as an artist including New Music Friday, Pop Sauce, and they made her the cover of Next Gen Singer-Songwriters. She’s writing from inside the specific chaos of LA in 2025 when the fires were followed by what felt like military occupation and that dual trauma informs every line of this track.
The track continues and the shift matters. “Didn’t call but I almost did / and I’m strong but I almost wish / you could hold me to get through this / yeah, I know that we didn’t fit / but we almost did.” She didn’t call. That’s the win here even though it doesn’t feel like one. She wanted to call so badly she can taste it, wanted him to hold her through the fear, wanted the comfort of familiar arms even knowing they’d hurt her again. The repetition of “almost” throughout this whole song is genius. Almost called, almost worked, almost fit. Almost is the space where we live when we’re trying to be healthy while everything in us wants to regress.
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Then Julia does something devastating. She plays out the whole scenario in her head. ” You could come over / and we could catch up / and you’d tell me it’s gonna be fine, but it never was. “ She knows exactly how it would go. He’d show up, tell her everything’s fine the way he always did, and she’d believe him for approximately twenty minutes before remembering why she left. That “it’s gonna be fine” probably worked on her for months while they were together. The fires and the troops in the streets don’t make her forget that his reassurance was always a lie. She’s already lived this disaster movie and she knows the ending.
The bridge is where Julia gets clear. “So now on my worst day / you’re not where I’ll run / cause even the end of the world / couldn’t change what you’ve done.” This is her worst day. The city she moved to is burning and occupied and terrifying. But what he did to her was bad enough that even actual disaster can’t make her go back. That line about the end of the world hits different when you’ve watched your neighborhood evacuate and seen armed troops on your street corners. She’s not choosing herself in some triumphant empowered way. She’s just damaged enough that even the apocalypse can’t override the memory of how bad it was.
The situationship I almost texted during the fires? He spent six months telling me he wanted something serious while actively keeping his dating apps. When I saw the National Guard troops in March, I thought about him again for exactly ten seconds before remembering I’d rather face federal occupation alone than with someone who made me feel needy for asking if we were exclusive. Julia gets that specific calculation. The world can be falling apart. Your city can be unrecognizable. Federal troops can be raiding your neighborhood. Sometimes the person who wrecked you is still worse than facing all of that by yourself.
