I have a habit of making chaos look gorgeous in my head while it’s happening and completely indefensible when someone asks me to explain it out loud. Last spring I was deep in something that had no business going as long as it did. The guy was unpredictable and sometimes kind of an ass but I was absolutely obsessed with every second of it. My notes app from that period reads like a one-woman show about a girl who should know better and doesn’t give a damn. I kept narrating it to myself in real time – turning every bad decision into a scene worth filming and every late night into something erotic. My friends staged something resembling an intervention over brunch. I went home and called him from the parking lot. The thing is, romanticizing your own life is a skill set some of us have been refining for years, and Lucky Duck’s ‘Romanticize’ sounds like it was made by someone who gets that at a cellular level.
The synths here shimmer like lights off a pool at 2am and the 70s groove underneath is so fucking good you stop caring that you’re three drinks past the point of making sound choices. This is alt electro-pop cut through a chillwave haze, the kind of sound that makes booking a last-minute flight somewhere you have absolutely no business going feel like pure goddamn instinct. Think Clairo discovering ABBA during a George Michael phase then building something that feels like nostalgia for a decade you never actually lived in. The lyrics are cinematic as hell, sitting right in that territory where romanticizing your own self-destructive behavior is an art form and not a thing anyone gets to weigh in on. The production wraps the escapism and the wanderlust and the whole gorgeous chaos in indie chill-disco texture that sounds vintage and completely current. This is the song playing in your head when you’re doing something you probably shouldn’t and feeling absolutely fucking fantastic about it.
The opening verse lays out the situation with a specificity that I found personally attacking. “Airport lounges / on your dad’s credit card / eat at gas stations so we don’t starve / I wanna show you / the lights in Paris / You tell me / sometimes / You get a little scary” — the money is borrowed, the meal plan is a Wawa, the destination is Paris, and the person you’re bringing along has already flagged that they get a little scary sometimes. That last line is a warning you absolutely heard and decided to file away for later because the Paris part sounded better. That’s not denial. That’s prioritization.
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Then he names the whole thing out loud: “All I want is to romanticize / My current life / It gets a bit hard I admit that / I’m going crazy don’t know where my mind’s at / wanna give / You all of me / percent 1 O 3” — 103 percent of himself, which is already past capacity, which is the whole problem, which is also the whole damn appeal. He knows the romanticization is a coping mechanism. He’s aware it’s running a little hot. He’s doing it anyway because what’s the alternative, be boring about it? The way he delivers this is so disarmingly honest it kind of wrecks you, and I mean that as a compliment of the highest order.
What I love about this track is that it doesn’t let either person off the hook. “I still wanna try you on / even when you’re mean to me / Sometimes I’m a bitch I admit that / We know each other too well / So it’s heartless / the things you say / the games we play / I’m still crawlin’ back / everytime” — he’s not writing a song about a saint in love with a villain. Both of them know each other’s weak spots and both of them use them. The crawling back isn’t stupidity. It’s a choice, made with full information, made anyway. That’s the most honest thing you can write about this kind of dynamic and it’s sexy as hell in a way that takes a minute to process.
And then: “Am I drunk off my face / high off your supply” — two lines that do more work than most songs do in four verses. The question isn’t really a question. He knows. He’s staying anyway.
The second half is where the cinematic quality of this thing really opens up. “Summer wouldn’t be the same without you / rolling your eyes at the Louvre / You and your dark horse attitude / walking head down on the avenue” — the image of someone rolling their eyes at the Louvre is so specific and so goddamn funny that I had to replay it twice. He got to Paris with someone who cannot be impressed, who walks with their head down even on the most beautiful street in the world. He loves them for it. That’s not settling. That’s the whole point of the trip.
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The turn at the end is where ‘Romanticize’ earns everything it’s been building. “gunna have a good time / with or without you / Talk your shit if you have to / You do you, imma do me / As the French say, c’est la vie” — he got there anyway. Good time with or without whoever decides to show up for it. The c’est la vie landing is earned, not borrowed. You shrug like that after you’ve already been to the Louvre with someone who rolled their eyes at it and still had the best summer of your life.
Lucky Duck is a New York-based singer-songwriter-rapper who will make his full goddamn statement this summer with his debut album, a genre-blurring body of work that refuses to stay in one lane and is so much better for it. The rollout kicks off with this track which is a funk-soaked chillwave-hazy summertime record that lands somewhere between ABBA’s irresistible grooves and the breezy drift of Phum Viphurit’s ‘Lover Boy’ and if that sonic combination doesn’t immediately have your attention I don’t know what to tell you. From there he’s dropping ‘Only 1 Me’ a jazzy trip-hop track where his rap verses hit with the kind of self-assured swagger that makes you stop whatever you’re doing to actually listen and then ‘Moonlight’ — a sweeping orchestral pop-R&B ballad inspired by the Oscar-winning film that sounds like it was built to wreck you in the best possible way. Every single arrives as its own world, and the album pulls all of it into a cohesive vision that makes it pretty damn clear Lucky Duck is building something with serious range and real artistic intention behind every fucking choice.
I never fully stopped romanticizing that spring, even after it was over. That’s the thing about the skill set. You don’t unlearn it. You just add it to the catalog of things that felt incredible at the time and that you’d do again if the circumstances lined back up. Lucky Duck figured that out in four minutes of production and I respect the hell out of the economy. The documentary I was making in my head never really had an ending anyway. Some chapters don’t wrap. They just become the ones you keep coming back to.
