I have a thing for men who drive fast and know it. I don’t mean the performative shit, the guy who revs his engine at a red light because he wants you to look over. I mean the one who already knows you’re watching and doesn’t need to prove it. He just goes. I dated one last summer, a fucking disaster of a human being in the best possible way, and the thing I remember most is not the arguments or the 3am drives through Midtown with no destination, it was the way he drove like he owned every inch of road between us and wherever we were going. Hands easy on the wheel. One thumb doing all the work. Looking at me instead of the road at moments that should have terrified me and somehow didn’t. There is a specific exchange that happens between two people when speed enters the room, when adrenaline is doing something to your blood and someone is right there watching it happen to you. It goes straight to your core. You want him before you can even think about it. Kayla Williams wrote ‘Ride’ about that feeling and I’m mad at myself for not writing it first.
On ‘Ride,’ Kayla sets the mood with visuals of Atlanta street racing and raw intensity that has you soaked before the first verse ends. The thing about street racing is that it is completely about one thing, the need to feel it all the way between your thighs at once, and Kayla understood that when she made this track. This is a song about a man who knows how to use his hands and build the pressure until you are wrecked and riding him all the way to the finish line, and she is not playing coy about any of it. The way he shifts gears on you, the speed climbing until your whole body is screaming, it is all right there, dripping, and Kayla’s vocals ride the whole thing like she has done this before and she is absolutely doing it again tonight. This is the sound of wanting someone so badly you stop giving a fuck about anything else, the city blurring past at a hundred miles an hour, stunts in Little Five Points and Moreland Avenue while he takes you apart. Atlanta knows this feeling. Kayla fucking owns it.
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The song opens with “Love it how you movin’ / Love it how ya / Love it how you do it” and she’s already in it and turned on by how he moves before anything physical has even happened. That is such a female thing to write. We get wet watching a man who moves with intention. The production underneath these opening lines is all low pulse and atmospheric electronics, Kayla’s vocals floating over it like she’s describing a dream she keeps having. Then “Hand on my thigh now you’re speeding on / You had a try now you’re fiening for it” and the whole song shifts into a higher gear. The craving in that second line is so damn honest it’s almost embarrassing the way wanting someone turns into needing them in a matter of seconds.
Then Kayla gets into the mechanics of it, and this is where the double meaning earns its keep. “I give you bass cause you need that noise / You turn it up put the pressure on.” She feeds him what he needs to push harder, and he does, and the pressure builds, and the production here reflects it perfectly, the electronics tightening, the fucking bass sitting lower in the mix. “Shifting your gears until your first is in second / All your desires no wait and no limit.” This is the point in sex where you have stopped thinking about anything else in the world. Every desire, no ceiling on any of it. Kayla is not interested in restraint and the production proves it.
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The chorus hits and it is almost unbearably good. “Caught in the rush baby don’t slow down / I’ll show you how but you know your way around.” That line is doing filthy work. She’s telling him she could teach him, but he already knows the route. He has been here before, on her specifically, and the familiarity is the whole damn point. The intimacy of someone knowing your body well enough to navigate it in the dark is a completely different category of sexy, and Kayla captures it in two lines. Then “Your touch soft skin on mine / Your mind got me intertwined / Oh my don’t you let me go” and the song drops its speed and goes tender for just a moment. She’s physically and mentally tangled up in him and not trying to get out. She is holding on.
Kayla Williams grew up across five countries and landed in Atlanta with a sound that absorbed everything she heard along the way. She started on piano at eight and never stopped, and what she’s making now pulls from BANKS and FKA twigs territory, atmospheric electropop that feels deliberately dark and like it’s working on you before you realize it is. She’s not picking a lane between pop and alternative R&B because the combination is the whole point, and she does not give a shit about fitting into a format, period. She’s already at 215K on TikTok, which makes sense because this is the stuff that spreads on its own, music that finds you at the right moment and makes you feel like someone finally put your experience on record. Kayla is in the studio constantly, chasing the kind of music that actually fucking means something to the girls who need it.
The man from last summer moved to Austin in September. I found out from his roommate, which is very much a whole thing. But I played ‘Ride’ at full goddamn volume on 85 South the night he left and I swear to god it hit like a shot of something expensive going down. Kayla is making music about the men who wreck you in ways you are actively complicit in, and she is celebrating every second of the speed and his hands on her as the city disappears behind her.
