Okay so three weeks ago I met someone at my friend Mia’s birthday pregame and I want to be fully transparent with you all: I have been absolutely useless ever since. I’m talking showed up to work Monday morning with his Instagram still open on my phone, walked into a glass door at Sephora because I was reading a text from him, texted my group chat a seventeen-word update that was entirely lowercase and ended in three exclamation points at 11:47pm on a Tuesday. He has this specific laugh and I swear to god my brain just goes completely offline every single time I hear it. I know three things about this man. His first name, his go-to brunch order, and that he smells like something I would commit serious fucking crimes for. That is the entire file. I have thrown all my rational thinking out a moving vehicle and I am at peace with this. My friends keep asking me reasonable questions like “but what does he actually do?” and I have no answer because the sex is good and the second he walks into a room I forget every damn word I’ve ever known. This is ‘Honeymoon Phase’ by sad alex. This song is a medical document.
The production is warm and buzzy as hell with this low electric hum underneath everything, like that moment after last call when you’ve both decided you’re leaving together but nobody’s said it out loud yet. The synths have this honeyed pulse that just stays on you. It’s electro-pop with actual heat baked into the mix – real physical heat you feel between your thighs when you already know how the night is going to end.
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Then the lyrics come in and I feel personally targeted. “I don’t care if we just met, you just live all up in my head / Drive me wild like a red Corvette / Hot and bothered, no common sense / I just want you with every breath / Dirty dancing let’s make a mess” is the thought process of a woman whose better judgment has packed a Miu Miu Aventure bag and left the building. A red Corvette doesn’t get you anywhere faster, it just makes your pulse do something stupid on the way there. That’s the whole point. Hot and bothered with no common sense is her admitting the arousal showed up before the judgment did. And “dirty dancing, let’s make a mess” is a direct callback to a movie about a good girl who spent a whole summer using a dance floor as foreplay before ending up where everyone knew she was going to end up. sad alex is Baby. Except she’s not waiting for the last act. I respect the honesty so damn much.
She follows it with “I got my blinders on / Got perfume, Yves Saint Laurent / I want the vibe you on, these butterflies ain’t wrong” and listen, the blinders are doing real work here. She dressed for this and that’s all the awareness she needs. The butterflies have staged a full goddamn coup. She’s Yves Saint Laurent’d up and completely locked in, choosing to live inside this feeling even knowing it might crash and burn.
The chorus is where the whole confession lands. “Baby, can we stay in this honeymoon phase? / Lock it with a kiss, throw the key away / I don’t even care if we go up in flames (uh-oh) / Because I love the way you got me feelin'” – she is asking to stop the clock at the best possible moment, before reality shows up uninvited. The fire is coming and she is the one holding the lighter and she is choosing this because the feeling is worth every single bit of the risk. “Lock it with a kiss and throw the key away” is wildly romantic and also kind of unhinged and she doesn’t care which one you think it is.
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The way the final verse gets vulnerable is what takes this whole track somewhere real. “I love your face, love your sticky sweet talk, got me saying oh my god / Been so long since I felt it this strong, I don’t want to be wrong but / I hear forever in the way you laugh and say my name / So shoot your shot I’ll play the game” – “been so long since I felt it this strong” hits different because the infatuation is real but what’s underneath it is relief. She’s scared of how real this is. Hearing forever in someone’s laugh before you know their middle name? Terrifying and completely addictive. ” Shoot your shot I’ll play the game. “ That’s a woman who has weighed the odds and decided the odds can go fuck themselves.
Sad Alex is a Delaware-born LA-based indie pop artist who has been writing songs since she was twelve and clearly never stopped. She spent years building under the name Alxxa and racking up songwriter credits for people like Kelly Rowland and landing on Spotify’s biggest playlists. As sad alex she signed to Red Bull Records in 2019 and started releasing the kind of music that sounds like if emo and trap had a baby and that baby was also really good at pop hooks – confessional, witty, emotionally devastating in the best possible way. Her 2021 EP Crydancing put her on the map, collabs with gnash and Duckwrth expanded her universe, and her debut album I Thought That I’d Know by Now dropped in August 2024 with 20 tracks and zero filler. She draws all her own artwork, sold out Madame Siam, and has 239K Instagram followers who are absolutely losing their shit over her.
The guy I mentioned earlier texted me this morning before my alarm went off. My phone lit up at 7:12am and I woke up smiling like a complete idiot before I was even fully conscious. I canceled plans with my girlfriends on Saturday because he asked if I wanted to come over and the answer was never even a question. I have mentioned him to my therapist twice in one session. I still don’t know his middle name or what he does on weekends when I’m not there, and I am wearing my blinders, and my YSL is on, and the butterflies are absolutely wrong in all the best possible ways. sad alex wrote this song about me personally and I am choosing to take it as a sign.
