Lady Gaga told us everything we needed to know about the kind of men worth every bit of fucking trouble they cause: “And baby, when it’s love, if it’s not rough, it isn’t fun.” Is he a disaster? Obviously. Is he worth it? Every single time, and you already know exactly why. The sex makes you stupid in the best possible way, and the frustration is just the price of admission, and the math still works out in your favor. Good decisions feel like a responsible grocery run. Bad ones feel like whatever the hell is about to happen when he walks in the room. Emma Teufel’s ‘Enemies’ lives in that space and she is not apologizing for a single second of it.
‘Enemies’ is the song that happens when you know somebody is completely wrong for you and you genuinely do not care even a little bit. Emma’s writing about that specific toxic chemistry that is so stupid good that your brain just clocks out and your body takes over and she’s wrapping the whole confession in dance pop built on an old-school house foundation that sounds like it should be playing in a club where bad decisions get made at 1am. The production sounds like it should be soundtracking the best night of your life not a situationship your therapist would be visibly stressed about. Emma, Matt Browning, and Kurt Thum built this thing around a bassline you feel in your hips and synths that wrap around the whole damn thing and her vocals are doing this whole knowing, too-cool-for-this thing that makes it clear she knows the situation is a mess and she finds that fucking hilarious. That’s the whole energy of ‘Enemies.’ Fully aware, zero remorse, absolute banger.
She establishes the whole situation in about six lines flat. She’s got him on her mind, they’re not together, they kinda hate each other, and she cuts straight to “Can we make this short? / ‘Cuz I like you when your shirt is on my floor.” The Billie Jean reference she opens with is doing heavy lifting because Billie Jean is about obsession, about someone living rent-free in your head with zero official claim on you, and Emma’s essentially admitting this man is occupying mental real estate he has absolutely no right to. Getting from “we kinda hate each other” to “get your shirt on my floor” in the same breath is the whole song in miniature. She knows the shit she’s doing. She wants him anyway. Moving on.
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Then the pre-chorus walks through the door and I had to put my phone down. “You hate my hair, but love to pull it / Just the way I like / You like to stare, pretend you own it / When you stay the night / That’s your specialty / ‘N I’m begging you to take it out on me.” The hair-pulling has a very specific and very enthusiastic audience and we are all accounted for. That “pretend you own it” energy is the particular brand of possessive bullshit that works in bed and absolutely nowhere else in daily life, and she’s not bothered about the distinction. “Begging you to take it out on me” is genuinely one of the sexiest things I’ve heard in a pop lyric in a while and she dropped it in the pre-chorus like it costs nothing. This feels personal and I don’t know her.
Emma pulls off something goddamn clever in the chorus. She builds the whole thing around finding each other, keeping it undercover, and “we could never work as lovers, only under covers / ‘cuz that’s the only place we agree.” The undercover / under covers double meaning sounds effortless and absolutely isn’t, and “the only place we agree” is the most brutally honest description of this particular arrangement I’ve ever heard set to a dance beat. Then she delivers the whole premise in five words: “Let’s love like we’re enemies.” That’s the thesis. The tension IS the connection. The disagreement IS the foreplay. She figured out something a lot of people never say out loud and said it over a bassline that won’t leave your body for three days.
A self-described professional oversharer, she makes the second verse proof of concept. She describes declining his calls, holding out for maybe thirty seconds, then: “I hit decline, but not for long / I gotta get my fix.” I know that feeling so well it’s embarrassing. The “I hit decline, but not for long” is every one of us who has watched his name light up our phone, made a very principled decision, and reversed it before the call stopped ringing. “‘Round and ’round we go / ‘Cuz I like it when we’re at each other’s throats” is her admitting that the fighting is part of the high. She sounds completely fine with that information. Correct response, honestly.
She moves the situation to a car in the second pre-chorus and gets explicit fast – “we like the heat, but hate the chill / Turn out the dashboard lights / Push back the seats, I love the thrill / Let’s keep it out of sight / It’s just you and I / Forget tomorrow, ‘cuz tonight we come to life.” What she’s describing is the specific thrill of disappearing from your own shit-show of a life for a few hours. Lights off and the whole world paused outside that car window. The agreement between them is unspoken and absolute – tonight exists in its own pocket of time and neither of them is going to ruin it by talking about tomorrow. The production gets urgent here and the bassline stops being coy about where this is heading.
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‘Enemies’ comes from her alter ego, she said. She called it “a silly little song about silly little affairs,” which is casual framing for something doing a lot more work than that. Then she goes further: “to dance your soul free from the captivity of boring entanglements.” That’s the real thesis underneath the thesis. The bridge is where she proves it. “We’re opposite like / Hot, cold / Fast, slow / New, old / Yes, no / I love it all.” The contradictions are the seduction. The friction between opposites is what generates the heat, and she’s figured that out and decided she’s keeping it. “We go together like / Warm ice / Bright nights / Wrong right / Calm fights / You love it all.” Warm ice, bright nights: impossible things that work anyway. She’s building a case that this whole arrangement operates outside the normal rules of logic, and she’s winning that argument. Then the third stanza drops the philosophy entirely and goes somewhere more physical. “Fast rides / High climbs / New heights / Good times / We want it all.” She’s not talking about roller coasters. The whole line is about the physical payoff of the arrangement, the specific rush of a body that knows what it wants and takes it. Every line climbs higher than the last and lands on “we want it all,” which is the most honest thing she’s said in the entire song. “When you hate them but can’t deny the lust, and you refuse to let it stop you,” she said. That’s a whole damn worldview and I respect every word of it.
Emma Teufel is a California girl out of Westlake Village who only started dropping music under her own name about two years ago, which is insane when you hear how locked in she already sounds. She went to Moorpark College, she calls herself a “professional oversharer,” and honestly that tracks because the girl writes about love and heartbreak and girlhood with the kind of specificity that makes you feel like you’re reading someone’s diary and you cannot put it down. Her first single ‘Parking Lot’ blew up on her socials before anyone even knew who she was, racked up over 16,000 Spotify streams out of nowhere, and she’s been building from there ever since with tracks like ‘Delete,’ ‘Heartbreak Season,’ and ‘Dive In’ pulling hundreds of thousands of streams collectively. The whole thing she’s chasing sonically is that addictive early 2000s and 2010s pop sound, the stuff that got stuck in your head for three weeks straight and you were furious about it, and she’s fucking nailing it.
Lady Gaga’s math from the top of this is the whole thesis, and Emma did the work and showed it. Some situations don’t resolve cleanly. They keep running because the good parts are worth the cost, and everyone involved knows it, and nobody’s stopping. Emma made a song about choosing the chaos on purpose with her eyes wide open and her standards right where she wants them. I said what I said and I’d say it again sober.
