There is always one man who thinks 59 unanswered messages mean he should send number 60. Sir, the silence was not a puzzle. It was the fucking answer. Kirrilee knows this guy. He has already fucked up badly enough to lose the relationship, but somehow he still thinks persistence is going to turn him back into boyfriend material. Then he shows up at her house looking for some old $14 H&M T-shirt he claims he left behind, acting like retrieving it required an in-person custody hearing. That is the kind of pathetic little excuse Kirrilee is dealing with on ‘Go Away (Garbage Tip)’. Now he wants to talk because apparently consequences become romantic once a man misses access to you. Kirrilee has a cleaner solution. She calls him an Uber and sends his ass to the garbage dump.
Kirrilee makes throwing him out sound almost cheerful with a bright pop arrangement that lets her roast him without dragging the track into emotional fucking quicksand. The pop arrangement stays bright while her delivery carries the eye roll, which suits a song built around realizing your ex has officially exhausted his dramatic little redemption arc. Kirrilee has said she wanted to turn ridiculous dating experiences into something funny this time, and that instinct saves the whole thing from becoming another sad postmortem. He already fucked up. She has better things to do than cry prettily about it.
His excuse for getting back through the door is almost insulting in its laziness. “Swear you left your other / Sock somewhere in my room / Said you wanna talk about us / ‘Cuz you made a big mistake / Or maybe a few.” The sock is such a pathetic little Trojan horse. He needs one object, one excuse, one stupid reason to get back through the door because apparently admitting “I ruined this and now I’m panicking” would require emotional literacy. I love “or maybe a few” because Kirrilee refuses to give the mistake any tragic grandeur. This asshole has a fucking collection.
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Kirrilee answers his little comeback tour by arranging transportation which is already more useful than anything he has brought to this conversation. “Baby / I called you an Uber / I made your destination ‘Go Away.’” That is mean in the cleanest possible way. She has already done the logistical work for him. Car’s here, sweetheart. Get in. “Hope you found the garbage tip okay” turns the breakup into waste removal, and once she offers “Garbage Tip or Sewer,” she is basically letting him choose his own little adventure in humiliation. I respect customer service this committed.
The chorus gets even better when another woman enters the shit because Kirrilee refuses to hand her the blame he earned. “She probably lives there too / But you’re the whole damn reason we’re through.” Kirrilee gets the blame assignment right. The other woman can live at the dump if she wants, but he is the one who owed her loyalty. I am deeply tired of watching women perform forensic analysis on some random girl’s Instagram while the man who created the entire shitshow quietly escapes through a side door. Kirrilee drags him back into the center and leaves him there with the trash.
His delusion gets funnier in verse two when a shit load of text messages apparently still feels romantic to him. “Did you think 59 messages would be romantic?” Silence had already answered him somewhere around message seven. By 59, he is basically submitting a grant proposal for another chance. Kirrilee follows with “I know it’s a bit decomposed / But it suits your personality,” and that is where the garbage joke earns its second life. She is not merely sending him to the dump anymore. The dump matches him aesthetically. Bitchy? Completely. Deserved? I’m comfortable with it.
Under all the jokes Kirrilee lets one inconvenient truth slip out in the pre-chorus. “I don’t wanna know right now / That you’ve been thinking / Non-stop about me / I guess that makes two of us.” She still thinks about him. Of course she does. Moving on rarely means your brain cooperates immediately. Kirrilee lets that little admission sit there without surrendering the upper hand. Missing someone does not obligate you to reopen the door when they finally realize what they lost. Sometimes you miss him and still send the Uber.
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Kirrilee Broughton is a Shepparton-born, Melbourne-based pop artist and visual designer whose music has increasingly leaned into the kind of emotional chaos that sounds like somebody leaked the group chat. She wrote ‘Go Away (Garbage Tip)’ with Brodie Travers and Ace Madden, releasing it September 4 as part of the developing Smile! You’re On Camera era. The song also became her first Triple J radio play before release, which feels appropriate for a track this committed to publicly disposing of one man’s bullshit.
Oh, I donated that t-shirt. Maybe somebody bought it at Goodwill is wearing it right now without knowing it once starred in the weakest damn excuse for a reconciliation attempt I have ever seen. Kirrilee understands that closure can be considerably funnier once you stop treating his return like a fucking rom-com movie. ‘Go Away (Garbage Tip)’ gives him a destination and saves you the trouble of pretending message 60 might finally change your mind.
