For a while, “Sirens” could have stayed vague. XTINE‘s new single, out September 11, could have played as just another moody breakup track and nobody would’ve asked too many questions. That’s not the song she wrote.
The follow up to “In The Falling” and a continuation of everything she started on her debut album All The Ways We Loved, “Sirens” is about a mentor. About the kind of relationship that starts with someone telling you you’re special, that you’re different from everyone else in the room, and slowly turns into something you don’t have a name for until years later. XTINE has a name for it now.
The song opens in a classroom. “You called me bright, said I stood apart, stayed after class just to play the part,” she sings, and already you can feel where this is headed. By the time she gets to “you taught me rules, made the perfect crime possible,” it’s not subtext anymore. It’s testimony set to a beat that hits like an actual siren.
What makes this one land differently than her earlier work is the ending. XTINE has never been an artist who shies away from pain, her whole debut record sat inside it: borderline personality disorder, self sabotage, the specific ache of learned abandonment. But “Sirens” doesn’t ask you to sit there with her. It asks you to stand up. The flashing lights she once mistook for something else become, by the bridge, proof that the truth finally caught up.
For anyone who’s followed her career, the twist is almost poetic. XTINE built her whole path on being seen by the right person at the right moment, she was 12 when she tweeted at Sia and actually got a reply, encouragement, even a video of Sia dancing to one of her early songs. That kind of attention shaped her. So did the other kind, apparently, the kind that took years to unlearn.
“Sirens” doesn’t explain everything and it isn’t supposed to. It’s a reclaiming, not a confession. XTINE spent an album learning to survive her own mind. Now she’s using her voice for something else: naming what was done to her, out loud, on her own terms.