There’s a Friday night that happens after every bad relationship ends, and if you know, you know. I’d spent months with someone who had opinions about everything I did and zero flexibility about anything he did, and the night I finally stopped giving a shit about any of it, my whole body felt different. Tightest dress I owned. Out the door. Some guy with excellent forearms handed me a drink before I even made it to my friends, and the old situation crossed my mind exactly once before the music took over. The best way to get over a guy is to get under a hotter one, and I mean that with zero caveats. Kate Anstey’s ‘Not That Serious’ should have been playing that night, and I’m a little offended it wasn’t in my life yet.
Kate opens with the most devastating non-goodbye in recent pop history. “I just wanted to let you know / I don’t miss you” and she delivers it the way you’d text someone back three days late. Breezy with zero urgency. She’s already thinking about something else. The disco-house production from JUNO Award-winning Ron Lopata kicks in underneath it and the whole thing feels like the first drink hitting – that warm loosening where suddenly the world is smaller and you are bigger.
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Then she makes it official. “I’m letting go of you tonight / Don’t need to know if you’re alright” and that second line is doing the heavy lifting. She’s not checking on him or hoping he’s struggling. His wellbeing is a closed tab. Damn. I want to cross-stitch that onto something.
She actually clocks what she was dealing with in the verse. “I’m not too concerned / But what you think you heard / You like to criticize / But you don’t compromise” which is a character study of the guy who could dish criticism all day and never once applied the same standard to himself. We’ve all sat across a table from that man. Kate decided she was done sitting. Hell yes, girl.
The chorus is what this whole thing was built for. “Just thought you should know / It’s not that serious! / All part of the show / Having fun fo sho / Read my lips like a ventriloquist” and that last line is fucking genius. She’s performing and owning every second of it. Co-written with Tia Brazda, who has millions of streams and international cred behind her name, this chorus was engineered to live in your skull. I’ve been humming it in places I’m not even embarrassed about.
She keeps going. “I’m feeling like I’m in the flow / Got no worries / Don’t need your yes don’t need your no” and this is the part where you close your eyes on the dance floor because it’s so fucking right. His approval was never hers to need. She’s out on that floor and she is untouchable.
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Then the rap comes in and this is where the whole track just goes scorched earth. “Yeah I know you know my name / Yeah it’s engraved inside your brain / Your confidence is shot / But as for me I’m feeling hot / You talk ’bout how I shouldn’t be / How everybody laughed at me / Well can’t you see, it ain’t that deep” Preach, bitch. He ran his mouth about who she was and who she was to other people and his confidence is apparently in pieces while she’s out here feeling hot and living. That “it ain’t that deep” is the verbal equivalent of turning around and walking away mid-sentence. She didn’t even look back.
Kate Anstey grew up in Newfoundland’s arts community, trained her voice with Shallaway Youth Choir, studied with Michelle Chippett at Dynamic Sounds Music Studio, danced at The Dance Centre and Kittiwake Ballet, and graduated from George Brown College’s Dance program in 2024. She’s 21 years old. Twenty-one. Already putting out shit this good with Lopata and Brazda behind her. The dual background in dance and music is all over this track. The way the lyrics move against the production isn’t accidental. She choreographed a whole exit and wrote a song about it.
Forearms guy and I closed the bar. The old situation texted at 1am and I read it the next day between someone else’s sheets, mid-mimosa, and felt so little it was almost funny. That’s what Kate actually put on tape. The moment you stop performing indifference and just actually feel it. You walk out, the night takes over, and the only thing left to do is close the tab.
