You ever get so deep in your feelings about someone that the whole world starts doing things it has no business doing? Colors get richer. Air feels heavier. You’re walking to get coffee and suddenly everything smells like him. I had a situationship last spring that rewired my entire sensory experience for about four months, and I don’t mean that in a cute way. I mean I couldn’t hear a certain song without my whole body doing something embarrassing and I couldn’t look at certain shades of blue without my brain going places I had no business going in public. It’s that particular kind of obsession that wraps around your nervous system and just lives there, rent-free and completely unbothered, while you’re trying to function like a normal person. I became a walking mood board for one specific man and it was both the most humiliating and the most intoxicating thing I’ve ever done to myself. That’s the exact fucking territory Rozsa is operating in on ‘Almost Purple,’ and the second I heard it I felt seen in a way that was honestly a little inconvenient.
The song opens on color the way obsession opens on sensation. “Almost purple, kind of blue / like those flowers / like thunder, kind of hue / heavy showers.” Rozsa wrote this from a synesthetic place, where sound becomes color and color becomes feeling, and that dark janky guitar loop from Sébastien Graux does something to your nervous system before she even opens her mouth. The production is hazy and unhurried and it has this weight to it that makes you feel like you’re moving through something thick. It sounds like the inside of that feeling, not a description of it.
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Then she goes somewhere so goddamn specific it almost hurts. “I always walk around, around, around / in my head / hoping to catch you when you cross my mind / chasing shadows instead.” That repetition of “around” is doing actual fucking work. She’s stuck in the loop and circling. The image of hoping to catch someone when they cross your mind is so accurate to how obsession functions. You’re not even in control of the thought but waiting for it to show up so you can catch it and hold it for a second. That’s not romantic pursuit, that’s full haunting. And the dream catcher verse that follows, “put you in a dream catcher / head to head / dancing under street lamps / orange-red,” brings a warmth that cuts through the haze. Orange-red under street lamps is so specific and so physical, like a memory that’s more feeling than image.
Rozsa lives in a decommissioned hospital near King’s Cross and says that slightly unhinged creative energy bleeds into every second of her music. She swiped right on neo-soul, jazz, and hip-hop and apparently hooked up with all three. Her 2023 EP Songs For Myself landed on Spotify’s New Music Friday and pulled airplay from BBC 6 Music and Jazz FM and she built a cult following that showed up so hard she sold out The Jazz Cafe twice. By 2025 she was playing three sets at Glastonbury and performing in front of the European Parliament, which is a hell of a glow-up from pub shows. The live electric harp over 808s thing is cool as shit and it’s all over ‘Almost Purple’ in the best way. You can feel the texture of it in the production even when it’s not overtly announcing itself.
The chorus does what the best choruses do. “Got me in this feeling / heavy atmosphere breathing / it’s you that I’m feeling / it’s you that I’m dreaming of.” Heavy atmosphere breathing is the whole damn song in four words. That’s what it feels like when someone takes up so much space in your nervous system that the air around you starts to feel different. You’re breathing him in, and that’s a level of possession most of us have experienced and none of us have ever described that cleanly.
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Then the bridge goes somewhere genuinely dark and I love it. “And I’m lost / can’t see the woods for the trees / I’m looking to religion / but I can’t see / down into my skin / I whisper into darkness / into deep within.” She’s lost in it looking for something to anchor her and she finds nothing external that works. The only place left is inward. That’s deeply erotic in a way you don’t see coming. She disappears into the fucking darkness of it.
The closing verse is where Rozsa earns every bit of the atmosphere she built. “Life yellow like lemon / your blood black like venom / fills me with momentum / I’m looking for heaven / bruise like a peach / bruise kinda blue / true colours show / I’m waiting, waiting for Godot.” The venom line is the sexiest thing in the whole damn song and it knows it. His blood is toxic and it fills her with momentum. She’s not running from it. She’s running on it. And ending on Godot, on the waiting, on the bruise that never quite resolves, that’s the whole emotional logic of the song made explicit. She’s bruised. She’s still waiting. She doesn’t seem particularly interested in stopping.
That situationship from last spring resolved itself the way they always do, which is messily and at 2am with a conversation nobody was sober enough to remember. The colors went back to normal. The air stopped being heavy. I stopped smelling him in places he’d never been. But I remember what it felt like to be that consumed, and ‘Almost Purple’ pulls it back up with zero effort and zero warning, and honestly I’m not even mad about it. Some feelings deserve a song this good. Rozsa made one
