Last week I found an old video on my phone of myself laughing so hard at someone’s dirty joke during dinner with my friends that my drink came straight out of my nose. Everybody lost it and I was wiping my face while still laughing too hard to care how disgusting I looked. I watched the video twice because the girl in it felt weirdly unfamiliar to me. Same face and same voice but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed hard enough to make that much of a mess. Lilia Asha’s ‘My Morbid Reverie’ lives in that sick little gap between remembering who you were and realizing you miss her. When she sings “I miss when it wasn’t me I grieve,” the whole song clicks into place because the person she’s mourning is herself.
Developed with Starcle Music in Shanghai, ‘My Morbid Reverie’ begins around piano and Lilia’s voice before the production starts to warp around her. Atmospheric layers thicken as the lyrics move deeper into her head and the sound grows more distorted without burying the melody. That slow loss of stability matters because the arrangement starts behaving like the inner world she is describing. By the time the imagery turns surreal the track already feels less trustworthy than it did at the start and the birdsong waiting at the end feels almost unnervingly clean.
She begins with “One more day drifts to fog / Another person just brush it off / Another bruise wrapped in lace.” The repeated “another” makes pain sound routine before she has even explained what is wrong. I keep getting stuck on “bruise wrapped in lace” because it gives the hurt something pretty to wear while somebody else brushes it off. Lilia can still look composed from the outside while the song tells us something underneath is slipping. That disconnect is familiar as hell when you know how easy it is to keep functioning long after you stopped feeling like yourself.
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Numbness takes over when she sings “I don’t feel anymore / Don’t hear the slam of the door / Don’t hear the rain hitting the streets / I miss my will to breathe.” Ordinary sounds are still happening around her and she feels cut off from them. The rain matters because it should be impossible to miss when it is hitting the street outside, yet even that has faded into the background. Then she gets to “And I miss living I miss life / But it’s my mind I can’t find,” and the grief finally has a location. She is physically present while the part of herself that knew how to give a shit about living feels missing.
The second verse makes the room harder to trust with “Do you walk through the crowds? / Shivering hands head down / Do you see the people, too? / The ones that hide in your room.” Public space and private fear start bleeding into each other here. Lilia never defines who those people are and I would rather leave that uncertainty alone than pretend the lyric gives us a diagnosis. The scary shit is how unstable the boundary has become between what is happening around her and what is happening in her head.
That instability gets darker when she asks “Do you see the light when it hits the grave? / Do you see it reflecting on your name? / Can you taste the soil on your face?” By then the title has stopped sounding decorative. The morbid imagery is doing real work because the song keeps pulling death closer to her own sense of identity without telling us to read every image literally. I am not going to turn a fourteen-year-old’s metaphor into a diagnosis she never gave us. What matters is that her inner world has become frightening enough for graves and soil to feel like natural scenery inside it.
Then she reaches the lyric that wrecks the whole song open for me: “And I miss patience I miss my friends / I miss when I knew when the storm would end / I miss my running bare feet / I miss when it wasn’t me I grieve.” “Running bare feet” gives the old version of herself a body before she admits that version is the person she is mourning. She remembers someone who trusted storms to end and could still move through the world without carrying this weight. Now the loss has turned inward and that is a fucked-up thing to realize while you are still living inside the person you miss.
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Water closes over the next section with “Oh the water ripples above my neck / The surface shudders at my breath / The earth collapses under my skin.” The physical world starts behaving like the distortion around her voice and the imagery keeps squeezing the space smaller. Then comes “And there I stand in my head / White walls and a death bed / So I’ll lay, let my eyes close / So I’ll lay I suppose.” The wording feels frighteningly passive after so much sensory chaos. She is no longer trying to explain the room she is in because she sounds exhausted by being trapped inside it. As the production thickens around those images the song feels increasingly sealed off from anything outside her mind.
Her final questions do not give us an exit. “Can you hear the words I fear? / Can you taste the soil on your face? / Can you see the people watching me? / You don’t see / You don’t see.” That last repetition is brutal because the song has spent four minutes trying to make an invisible inner world visible and still ends with nobody seeing it. Then the distortion disappears into birdsong and the sudden calm leaves the ending in a strange place where peace can exist without pretending everything that came before it has been fixed. The outside world suddenly sounds beautiful after four minutes of her being trapped inside a mind she can’t trust.
Lilia Asha is a 14-year-old British singer-songwriter based in Shanghai who has been writing songs since she was eight. She describes songwriting as the place where she can express what ordinary conversation cannot hold, which makes ‘My Morbid Reverie’ feel especially close to the center of how she works. Her songwriting has already been recognized by Song Academy UK and she is currently a Top 5 finalist in its International Category for ages 13–18. Her lyric-inspired paintings will also appear in an exhibition alongside a December solo concert, giving this darker material a visual life beyond the recording.
I keep coming back to “I miss when it wasn’t me I grieve” because everything else in ‘My Morbid Reverie’ seems to bend around it. The old self remains out of reach while Lilia keeps writing from the version who remembers her. After “You don’t see” the birds start singing anyway, which might be the cruelest and most beautiful choice in the whole track. The outside world can keep sounding peaceful while your head is a fucking wreck. Lilia leaves that contradiction unresolved and lets the birds keep going.
