Tracy Pham’s ‘U WISH’ is most interesting when it focuses on the exact moment attraction stops feeling casual. Throughout her new three-track EP, the Denver artist stays close to the smaller signs that someone has started taking up too much space in your head: checking a message again, noticing what they left behind, replaying a touch, or pretending not to care quite as successfully as you thought.
Closing track ‘SECOND SKIN’ is the clearest example of this impression. Its central idea is intimacy becoming so close that the boundary between two people starts to dissolve. The important part is that the narrator still has agency. She could step back, but doesn’t, and that choice gives the song a more complicated emotional charge than a straightforward story of dependency.
The title-track is the flip side of that dynamic. ‘U WISH’ is more playful and teasing, with the artist sounding noticeably more in command. Placing the two songs alongside one another gives the EP the useful contrast that desire can be a performance of confidence one minute and an act of surrender the next.
Working with Nam Pham, she draws from the dark melodic instincts of The Weeknd, Swae Lee and Post Malone without trying to imitate their scale. The songs are more intimate, with simple lyrical phrasing and enough space around the vocals for small changes in tone to matter.
Created through nrLabel across the US, Poland, Finland and Vietnam, much of the EP was built from home recordings, rough ideas and files passed back and forth across time zones. Imperfect vocal takes were often kept when they carried the right emotion, and that decision suits a project so concerned with feelings that are messy by nature.
Rather than turning attraction into spectacle, Tracy Pham pays attention to the moments when control begins to slip, and to the fact that sometimes letting it slip is precisely the point.