There was a whole version of me I put in storage for a guy. I deleted the playlist he called “too much” and shoved the tight black lycra dress to the back of the closet because he said it was “kinda slutty.” I didn’t even notice it happening in real time which is the most embarrassing part. You think you’d feel yourself getting smaller but you don’t, you just wake up one day and realize the best shit about you has been sitting in a box under the bed for two years. I found that box last spring. Ripped it open on a Tuesday, which felt appropriately chaotic. And then Sjana Rut dropped ‘Burn the Matches’ and I played it in my car with the windows down at a volume that was absolutely a lot, and I felt every fucking word of it.
The track runs on that sweet uptempo R&B energy where the beat feels retro but the attitude is completely now. It’s nostalgic enough to feel immediately familiar but current enough that it doesn’t feel like a throwback. There’s a heat to the production that sits underneath Sjana’s vocal and gives the whole thing a slow-burn confidence – the kind of sonic backdrop that makes a line like “access denied” land like a fucking door slamming in slow motion.
Sjana comes in swinging. “You lit the flame / burned the matches / you think you took away all the magic” is Sjana calling out the specific manipulation of someone who starts the fire and then acts like the smoke is your fault. He lit it. He burned the matches. And the absolute nerve to think that means your magic left with him? That opener is a whole legal argument in three lines.
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Then she lands this: “I can’t let you get the best of me / no not tonight.” That “no not tonight” is defiant as hell after you’ve had all the other nights. The ones when he did get the best of you. When you spent the next morning second-guessing your own instincts because he was so convincing about yours being wrong. Tonight is different. She’s fucking decided.
“I owe it to little me / to see through your lies” is where Sjana does something that gets me every time. Framing the whole decision as a debt to a younger version of herself is so specific it almost hurts. Little her believed in her own greatness before anyone got their hands on it. She’s making promises to the girl she was before all of this. That’s the most grounded kind of loyalty there is.
Then she exhales. “Finally chasing the dream / we’ll see what I find / I won’t repeat history / I won’t give you the time of day or night” lets her breathe for the first time. The “we’ll see what I find” has this delicious playfulness to it like she already knows what she’s going to find and she’s just enjoying the fact that she gets to find out again.
Then she delivers the gut punch. “I don’t wanna lose my mind / it took some time to find it again / I had hidden away all the things that made me great / oh I’m just getting started” is the thesis of the whole song and honestly the thesis of every woman who’s ever made herself smaller for someone who didn’t deserve the full version of her. The things that made her great. She knew they were there the whole time. She buried them. And now she’s pulling them back out with both hands. That “oh I’m just getting started” is so fucking good because of how casual it sounds. A statement of fact delivered like it’s already done.
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Here’s where she flips it. “Well I am here to stay / I ain’t going away / so stay in your lane / burn the matches” turns the fire metaphor right back at him. He burned the matches thinking it would take her out. She took the title and handed it back with interest. Fireproof now. And she wants him to sit with that.
Second verse and she goes ice cold. “You won’t get to hurt me again / you call I decline / I will not let you back in / access denied” is the energy every girl who ever answered a 2am text she shouldn’t have needed to hear out loud. Access denied is a policy. He forfeited his clearance and she’s enforcing the terms. Then she doubles down: “through the day or night / I’m not gonna waste my time.” Earlier she was refusing to give him her time. Now she’s protecting her own. The language has moved. She does it without announcing it.
Sjana Rut is an Icelandic singer-songwriter who broke through on The Voice Iceland in 2017 and has been building something real, ass-kicking album by album, ever since. Broken and Unbreakable tackled survival in a way that felt autobiographical and unflinching, and then she spent 2023 and 2024 releasing Icelandic-language music before the album Raunheimar. The return to English pop with singles like ‘Game Over,’ ‘Love Me,’ and now ‘Burn the Matches’ feels like the earned next act of all of that. She makes pop that’s “fun,” she says, and then she pauses, because it also has to be “deeply personal.” The fun is all over this damn track. The deeply personal is underneath every single word of it. She pulls off both.
I pulled the “kinda slutty” dress out two weekends ago, put on my highest fuck-me stilettos, and showed up at the club where I knew he’d be. He saw me. I looked incredible and I knew it before I walked in the door. Sjana had already told me what I needed to hear on ‘Burn the Matches.’ You don’t negotiate with someone who called your magic too much. You just take it back, put it on, and walk through the door.
