I have this thing where I can feel a night before it starts. My pulse does something weird around 9pm, and I’ll be standing in front of my mirror mid-mascara and just know. Whatever the hell is coming for me tonight is going to matter. I’ve stopped questioning it. I follow the feeling wherever it’s pointing and let the evening show me what it came to say. Sometimes it leads to the best night of the year. Sometimes I end up in the back of an Uber at 3am with someone else’s jacket still on me and a whole lot of feelings I don’t know what to do with yet. The in-between space – that charged window before the night fully unfolds – is the sexiest thing I know and KEKA bottled it on ‘Feel It Like I Do.’ I found this track on a random Tuesday and I’ve been slightly feral about it since.
The setup is a ferry from Valencia to Ibiza. “Smoke in the air, wind movin’ like a preacher / the time was sweet, like somethin’ was near / the whole damn world was about to appear.” The whole damn world was about to appear. KEKA is in the in-between here, the destination still a glowing thing on the horizon, the anticipation so thick you could press your hand into it. She’s on the water. The shore hasn’t arrived yet. Everything is still possible and that is its own kind of fucking euphoria. The production carries that same suspended energy. Warm synths that feel like heat coming off pavement after sunset, a bassline that moves steady and deliberate under the whole thing. RÜFÜS DU SOL vibes, Lane 8 energy, but with more emotional grit than either of them usually brings. This is what that sound feels like when someone is actually feeling it instead of just constructing it.
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Then the chorus. “I will show my love to you / every word I sing is true / I got nothing left to lose.” She’s decided. That’s the whole thing. No testing, no hedging, no waiting to see if he’s going to match her energy before she commits. She’s already gone, already all the way in, and the drop falls right there under her declaration like it was waiting for her to say it out loud. I’ve had that feeling in my body before, standing somewhere with someone and deciding I didn’t care what happened next, I was going to let it. It’s a specific kind of terrifying that is also the most fucking alive I ever feel.
KEKA is originally from Kosovo, lives in London, has been building her sound in a DIY studio since 2017 with producers she actually trusts. She said she writes from “real-life moments, people, memories, and the emotions they leave behind.” I believe every word of that on this track. She also mentioned lately building songs live in the studio, letting the moment shape the music, and you can hear that. ‘Feel It Like I Do’ sounds like it came together while the feeling was still raw. That’s shit you can’t fake in post-production, and KEKA clearly isn’t trying to.
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The second half is where she does something I wasn’t ready for. “Just like magic, but the moment was less / we touched the shore, then it faded too fast / like a dream that you won’t forget / but the feeling still lasts.” She’s not pretending it went on forever. The landing was softer than the buildup. The shore arrived and the spell started dissolving before she was ready to let it go. I’ve lived inside that experience more times than is probably healthy for a person. The night burns so goddamn bright and then Tuesday morning arrives and you’re just standing in your kitchen in a big t-shirt wondering where the hell the magic went. KEKA holds both sides of it, the ache of the thing slipping away and the fact that the feeling doesn’t fully leave your body even after the moment does. That’s not easy to write. Most people pick one feeling and stay there.
“Do you feel it like I do?” The whole song lives in that question. She’s not asking if it was real. She knows it was real for her. She wants to know if he was in it the same way, if the heat was mutual or something she was carrying alone the whole time. I have asked some version of that question in every damn relationship I’ve had, and I don’t always get the honest answer. KEKA doesn’t get one either. She wrote a euphoric dance-pop track about the uncertainty instead, which is honestly the most emotionally intelligent response available to a person.
Around 9pm last Saturday my pulse did the thing. I followed it to a rooftop party with a bluetooth speaker on the table and someone standing closer than necessary. ‘Feel It Like I Do’ came through the speaker at some point in the second hour, and that question she keeps asking, whether he feels it like she does, answered itself somewhere between the drop and his hands pulling me into the bathroom while his tongue found somewhere worth finding. KEKA knew.
