Let me be honest about something most girls won’t say out loud: I have given pity fucks as a hobby. Casually. With genuine amusement. There’s a particular kind of afternoon that calls for it: he’s been texting too much, your plans fell through, and you think, poor thing, let me do something kind today. The sex is fine. The problem is you’ve handed him a night he’ll be talking about for years and you’re going to forget by the weekend, and somewhere between his leaving and your second glass of wine you realize you’ve accidentally cast a spell you have no interest in reversing. Pity fucks are fun until they become a situation, and the line between “I was being generous” and “I created a problem” is thinner than you’d think at midnight. He starts to think you mean it, and before you know it he’s showing up in his feelings and you’ve got a whole mess on your hands because kindness does not live between your legs, no matter how many times you convince yourself it does. Robbie Mautner wrote ‘Pity Fuck’ from the other side of that equation, the side doing the wanting and the doubting and the staying anyway, and it is uncomfortably, viscerally fucking real.
Produced by Louis Takooree, the track is synth-heavy 80s disco pop with a vocoder running through it, bright and pulsing, slightly unreal, which is a hell of a choice for a song about shame and self-worth until you hear it and realize the contrast is doing all the work. Robbie co-wrote this with Breigh Hammel, drawing from Charli XCX, Fletcher, and Olivia O’Brien, and you can feel all three without any of them taking over. The song opens right in the middle of an internal argument – “I should tell you to go / ‘Cause you’re not the one / I know you’re not right for me / I should tell you to leave / Insecurities are dimming the light in me.” He already knows. That’s the thing about pity fucks that nobody says out loud: both people know. One person is just brave enough to admit it, and the other is standing in your doorway at midnight pretending they have no idea.
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What comes next is where the song stops being dance pop and starts being a confession. He’s not showing up polished or put-together. The pre-chorus lays it all the way out – “‘Cause I show up in my sweaty T-shirt / With all my low self-worth / And expect you to change / My problems, maybe they’ll go away / If I stay one more day / But it’s always the same.” The sweaty T-shirt detail is doing a lot of fucking heavy lifting. This is someone showing up to a hookup the way you show up to a therapy appointment you can’t afford already half-broken and already hoping one hour of physical contact will fix something structural. It’s sex as a band-aid for problems that need a surgeon.
The chorus is where Robbie stops hedging – “‘Cause what’s the use in trying / When I know we’d be lying? / But for now, I’ll settle for your touch / So good at deceiving / But once I catch those feelings / Then you won’t want me here / It’s all too much / So for now, let’s pity fuck.” That last line carries a resigned heat that is genuinely fucking something. Over a synth-soaked disco beat that makes you want to move your ass, Robbie sings about settling for someone’s hands on your body, their mouth at your neck, the whole physical heat of it, knowing their feelings aren’t in it at all. Getting fucked for the wrong reasons still feels better than going home alone to the noise in your head and that’s the dirty truth at the center of this whole song. The production makes you want to dance to the exact moment someone decides they’re worth more than what they’re settling for.
Sex has a terrible after-part that nobody writes enough songs about, and Robbie doesn’t skip it. The second verse is the comedown: “When the moment has gone / And my tears have run / There’s nothing but emptiness / In silence we lay / Two strangers who made / Use of our loneliness.” “Two strangers who made use of their loneliness” is a gut-punch dressed in pretty synth pop. The warmth drains out of a pity fuck so fast. The bodies are present and the people are already somewhere else entirely, both of you doing the silent calculation of how soon you can leave without being an asshole. I have been on both sides of that silence and it fucking hurts either way.
Something shifts in the back half and it is everything. The bridge comes in stripped bare: “So let’s pretend you are in love with me.” One line. That’s the whole confession inside every pity fuck ever given or received, the thought you have when you’re underneath someone and their hands are everywhere and you want so badly for the warmth to be real that you close your eyes and run the fantasy for a few seconds because it’s the best you’re going to get tonight and you know it. Then the final chorus burns the whole story down. “But what’s the use in trying? / The pedestal is sliding / No, I’ll no longer settle for your touch / So good at deceiving / But once I caught those feelings / You didn’t want me here / You took your stuff.” Past tense. He caught the feelings. They didn’t want him. They left. The shift from “I’ll settle” to “I’ll no longer settle” is the whole damn arc of realizing your own worth compressed into eight bars and the vocoder swirling underneath sounds like the night finally starting to clear.
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By the time the outro arrives Robbie has done something a lot of artists flinch from: he named it. “Guess you were just a pity fuck / I no longer need your touch.” The word is right there and he never buries it or softens it. He’s described this song as being about “the shame that comes with feeling like someone is only giving you physical affection out of sympathy,” and “the realization that you deserve better than someone who makes you doubt their intentions.” That part, the realising-you-deserve-better part, takes a lot longer than any song. He’s also said he’s “used sex and intimacy in the past as a way to escape” his problems, knowing deep down it was temporary, and the reason this song cuts as deep as it does is because he’s writing from inside that experience, not looking back at it from some safe, healed distance.
Robbie Mautner is a London-born independent singer-songwriter who has been commandeering talent shows and open mic nights since he was a kid. He played piano and trumpet as a kid, taught himself to write songs through pure obsession and trial and error, then decided that wasn’t enough and got a fucking Masters in Songwriting because he takes this seriously. His early stuff leaned EDM, but he eventually figured out that his voice and his stories hit harder in acoustic pop and lo-fi territory, and honestly thank god he made that call. His influences are a delicious mess of contradictions – Queen and ABBA in one ear, Britney and Kylie in the other, and somewhere in the middle a deep reverence for Julia Michaels, Fletcher, Charli XCX, Caroline Polachek, and Rina Sawayama that tells you what kind of writer he’s becoming. He writes in a conversational tone because he’s not interested in impressing you with fancy bullshit, he’s interested in making you feel something real, and that instinct is all over everything he touches. He runs his own label, RM Records, puts out his own work on his own terms, and has been building a catalog of brutally honest pop songs that don’t apologize for a damn thing.
Here’s what I know now that I didn’t at 19: the spell cuts both ways. You walk away clean and he’s the one left figuring out what the fuck just happened, sitting in the silence, replaying every moment he showed up hoping this time the math would change. Robbie Mautner took that reckoning and turned it into ‘Pity Fuck,’ and the most striking thing about it is how clearly he sees himself in it, the low self-worth, the staying one more day, the moment he finally decides he’s worth more than what he’s been given. He stopped showing up. He took the song with him.
