He had a rule about where I parked. Two blocks over, always, some story about nosy neighbors and a landlord who counted cars. I followed it for months because the rest of him was worth the fucking walk, and I’d click down his street at midnight in heels doing a private runway show for the raccoons. Then one Thursday his phone lit up on the nightstand with a name and a heart emoji, and the parking rule explained itself in one hot second. I was the contraband. Underneath the sting of that discovery lives a rage so pure it feels almost glamorous, and I wore mine for a whole season the way other women wear red lipstick. Softmax knows that rage intimately, because ‘Don’t Think About It’ is a dance-pop track about being the woman he keeps off the books, and it starts sleepless and ends with a galaxy in pieces.
This song is about being the other woman and realizing a hot little affair has started fucking with your whole nervous system. She is sleeping with a guy who has a girlfriend and he keeps her hidden while he plays devoted boyfriend in public. The sex is amazing enough to keep her circling him though the arrangement turns ugly once she understands she will never get the version of him with a real place in his life. She wants him and resents the fact that another woman gets to claim what she only gets in fragments. That kind of jealousy can make a woman feel feral as hell because every private moment starts to feel borrowed. By the end the hookup has become a full-blown emotional wound and her anger is bigger than the man who caused it.
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Everything starts inside the insomnia. “I can’t sleep I can’t think about it / had no witness looking out for me / and no answer could be satisfying / could be right doubt casts a shadow over everything.” The whole thing ran on secrecy, so when it curdles there’s nobody to call who saw any of it, and her brain runs the trial alone at 3am with no jury. Softmax sings it wired instead of weepy, and that choice sets up everything that follows.
Then she drags the whole setup into the light. “‘Don’t tell your girlfriend’ does she laugh with your fingers under her dress? / And she knows you got a girlfriend how much of my love dries in her mattress?” That mattress line is the most brutal damn image I’ve heard on a dance track in ages, and I had to pause the song and stare at my wall for a second. She’s picturing the two of them in the official bed and doing the math on what carries over. The jealousy here is specific and physical, the kind that arrives when you know another woman’s hands are on the same man, and Softmax refuses to sand it down into something polite.
His voice lives in her head by the next section and it’s begging. “‘Don’t tell my girlfriend’, you beg a million ways of her in my head / and I know I’m just your girlfriend / would I leave you bar nothing if I cared less?” A man asking for silence a million different ways tells you everything you need, and she’s fluent in every version of the plea. The bitterest realization sits in the middle line, a title she only gets to hold in the dark. The trap is that she can’t stop giving a shit, and she answers her own question by staying.
The bridge is where the song shows you why it’s called ‘Don’t Think About It.’ “It’s no fair / And I’m eight again / and I hate your friends / and I was born in fury / and it’s mightier than anything” Regression to the playground register is such an honest songwriting move, because betrayal that size sends every grown-ass woman straight back there, stomping. Then she stands up inside the tantrum and announces what she’s made of, and the declaration carries real menace. The line about his circle is the detail that got me. They knew. They always fucking know, and they smiled at her anyway.
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For the finale she goes cosmic and stays furious. “And the vessel breaks / and the city shakes / and no god can hold me / and I tear apart the galaxy” Woman-scorned imagery usually stops at burning his hoodie. Softmax scales hers to the astronomical, and honestly that’s the correct size for it, hell, it might be conservative. Fury at that scale becomes its own weather system, gorgeous and unhousebroken, and the dance pulse underneath turns destruction into something you can move to. I believe her about the galaxy.
Softmax is a Chicago girl who grew up on guitar and keys, pulling melody from the city’s blues heritage, and blues is music that understands being used. It came up in a system built to extract everything from Black musicians and hand nothing back, and that shit lives in her writing whether she’s plugged in or programmed. Discovering electronic music cracked her ears open to what production could do, and her heroes tell you the rest: Outkast and Eurythmics, with Roxy Music in there too, artists who ran avant garde ideas through pop frameworks and won on both fronts. Softmax claims that lineage and works it hard.
I park wherever I want now, right out front, flashers on if I feel like it. His rule died with the situation and the fury outlasted both, so I converted it into cardio and one hard rule of my own: main event or nothing. Softmax understands that conversion better than anyone making dance music right now, because ‘Don’t Think About It’ treats a woman’s rage as fuel rather than a symptom, and the blues lineage she was raised on knows the difference cold. Somewhere two blocks from his place, the raccoons are still wondering where the show went.
