An apartment is just four walls until somebody fucks you there and leaves a toothbrush behind. Then the place starts collecting evidence. The couch knows what happened after midnight, and the bathroom mirror has watched you rehearse conversations you never actually had. I’ve lived in rooms that felt bigger because someone I wanted was inside them, then strangely empty after he stopped coming over. Tricky FM’s ‘Apartment’ is the final single from a record Hana Freed says draws its energy from relationships and ordinary life, which makes those four walls feel loaded before you know a damn thing else.
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Breakbeats twitch beneath Freed’s dreamy vocal, giving ‘Apartment’ the nervous movement of a brain that keeps wandering after the room has gone quiet. She has pointed to The Postal Service and Imogen Heap as inspirations for this era, and you can understand the attraction. There is softness here with enough electronic weirdness underneath to keep the whole thing from turning into bedroom wallpaper. It is intimate as fuck without getting sleepy.
That domestic scale is where ‘Apartment’ gets me. Sex gets domestic faster than anybody warns you. I’ve watched a man go from somebody I fucked after drinks to somebody whose shampoo somehow lived in my shower, and there is something insanely intimate about realizing his shit has quietly joined yours. An apartment turns casual intimacy into physical evidence because somebody eventually starts belonging in the room. Then one day he doesn’t, and the fucking room notices before you do.
Hana Freed has been building Tricky FM around what she calls “emotional computer core” since releasing ‘Peace, Love, Unity, Rave’ in 2023 through Cherub Dream Records. She made that first record from cut-up samples in Ableton and has described its energy as anger and motion. ‘Twin Star Fantasy’, due September 29, pulls closer to relationships and the mundane. That shift makes sense for an artist who can make a computer feel this personal. The technology still twitches underneath everything, while the emotional scale has moved closer to home.
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Freed has also talked about music becoming a new kind of intimacy with herself. In an interview this summer, she admitted she is literally standing in the mirror in her apartment telling herself, “Let’s freaking do this.” I fucking love that detail. The apartment becomes the place where somebody else can get close enough to leave traces, and it is also where she has to face herself when nobody is there. That tension feels right for a project called Tricky FM because the computer is suddenly sharing the room with all this very human shit.
I’ve had apartments keep men around longer than I did. His side of the bed still looked occupied in my head, and one stupid thing in the bathroom could make the whole place feel haunted as hell. Eventually the room becomes yours again, but it remembers what you did there for a while. ‘Apartment’ gives that private scale enough electronic space to feel enormous, which feels fucking accurate when four walls have held somebody you wanted and the version of you who wanted him.
