There’s a version of every ambitious woman that lives in the bathroom mirror at 2am, and mine has scared me more than once. She’s the one who shows up after a brutal week, after the rejection email and the situationship that evaporated and the friend who forgot to text back, and she looks at me and goes, what if you just stopped caring. What if you burned the soft part down to the fucking studs and became something that can’t be hurt. I’ve never actually let her drive, but I know her voice, and I’d be lying if I said the offer never sounded good. Saylem made a whole song about saying yes to her. ‘ifeelstrange’ is the sound of a woman looking at her own breakable heart and deciding it’s a liability she can’t afford anymore, and I have never felt more called out by a dark-pop track in my life.
The production, built by Japanese producer TOKI, does this thing where it feels gorgeous and deeply wrong at the same time, all glossy synth menace with something rotting underneath. Saylem comes in with “I feel strange / There’s something very wrong / I’ll rearrange my organs and my bones / No regrets, I won’t repent / You can’t keep me inside anymore” and immediately you understand this is not a breakup song where she cries and grows. The “no regrets, I won’t repent” is a flat threat. She announces the change is already underway and stares down anyone who’d try to stop it. She caps the verse with the most violent image on the track, “I release from my broken ribcage what remains of my wicked heart,” and that’s the act the whole song is built on, a girl cutting out the part of herself that can still be wounded.
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Then the chorus goes full ascension. “Metamorphosis / Giving my body up ’cause I don’t have no need for all this mortal flesh / Ritualistic shedding of my skin ’cause corporeal is boring and I’m over it / I’ll become a God.” The audacity of it is so fucking delicious. She’s framing her own transformation as a religious event, shedding the human parts like they’re last season, deciding that being a regular feeling person is too small a thing to keep being. And the way she sneers that being made of flesh is just boring? That’s the whole megalomaniac energy of this project distilled into one line. I respect a woman who looks at the human condition and rates it mid. And right when the god fantasy peaks, she clips it down to the rawest version of itself, “I feel strange, I feel rage.” That’s the whole engine under the glamour. The transformation is powered by fury.
Quick tangent. I went through a phase in my early twenties where I thought going cold was the same damn thing as healing. I stopped answering texts, stopped letting things land, told everyone I was “so much better now,” and what I’d actually done was just shut the whole system down and call the silence peace. Saylem clocks that same lie and then leans all the way into it on purpose, which is somehow more honest than my version was.
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The second verse is where Saylem stops being a girl in crisis and starts being a damn deity with a vendetta. “You tuck your tail and run for cover / You can’t hide from me / I’m everywhere and everyone I’m in your DNA / Don’t avert your gaze keep your eyes on me / I’m your precious jealous deity.” This is where the song flips from internal to predatory, and it fucking rules. She’s not heartbroken anymore, she’s omnipresent and watching, demanding worship from whoever made her feel small enough to do this to herself. “I’m your precious jealous deity” is the kind of line you scream in the fucking car when someone’s done you dirty and you’ve decided the appropriate response is godhood.
Saylem is the love-crazed and megalomaniacal dark-pop alter ego of Orlando singer Jackie Skillet, who also fronts the pop-rock duo Bad Valentine, and the whole project is built as a cinematic universe where each album is its own self-contained story and every song is a chapter inside it. The name itself is a wink to Salem – witch trials and all – which fits the dark theatrical world she’s building. Her catalog runs through tracks like “CAGED,” “Teeth,” “Buried Alive,” and “ur not ugly ur broke,” with the 2022 album Dark Night of the Soul behind her and the ifeelstrange EP marking her latest era. Her own Instagram frames the entire thing around fueling a “goddess complex,” which tells you everything about the lens, dark and obsessive and glamorous and a little unhinged, built for character-driven pop instead of plain diary-entry songwriting. The current era pulls from Jennifer’s Body, Black Swan, and Akira, and you can feel all three in the body-horror glamour of it. Speaking on the track, Saylem says it’s the latest chapter in an ongoing story where, after “suffering countless heartbreaks and disappointments, they decide it’s better to rip their own heart out and leave what’s left of their humanity behind.” That’s the thesis, stated plainly, and the song earns every word of it.
The bridge is the part that’s been living in my head. “This may look self-destructive / Don’t expect your primitive mind to under, understand / I’m doing better than I ever did.” That stutter on “under, understand” is such a sick little detail, the transformation glitching in real time. And the flex of insisting she’s thriving while she rips herself apart? I know that delusion personally, the way you can convince yourself the coldest version of you is actually the healthiest, that everyone who’s worried about you just has a primitive mind that can’t keep up. Saylem doesn’t resolve that tension and she shouldn’t. The bathroom-mirror girl never tells you she’s lying. She just tells you she’s finally free, and on a song this hypnotic, you almost believe her, which is the kind of dangerous I want my dark pop to be.
