Ok Alva 🇸🇪 - Dust (single)
- Harriett Claire Torreon
- 6 hours ago
- 2 min read
Alt-pop is not hard to love, especially those with really catchy upbeat melodies. For this day’s review, we’re jamming to Sweden-based solo OK Alva’s newest single, “Dust”
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Like I said, alt-pop is easy to listen to. So when you’re like us who get pretty much immune to the all-too familiar beat of something we could all love, we dig deep at the lyrics.
OK Alva is expressive. A pronounced, smooth voice paired with really pronounced diction, it’s easy to resonate with what she has put into words. The first line already feels loaded.
“I was the dust wasn’t I” That’s not a question meant to be answered but a moment you look back and understand you were the thing someone wiped off their shiny surface so they could look polished again.
What this song reminds me of is being slowly edited out of someone’s life. Not in one dramatic blowup but in subtle ways you don’t notice at first but eventually do and it all hits you like a trainwreck at one point. You try to say the right thing. You try to think like they think. You try to be what they need. And then one day you realize you were never really in control of the story.
“Change what you need to change / Break what you need to break.” At first it sounds
supportive. But by the third time it was repeated, it sounded like a surrender. And “You should come with a warning.” That one lingers. It feels like the kind of clarity you only
get after the damage is done.
There’s something quietly devastating about the tone. It doesn’t beg to be chosen. It doesn’t demand fairness. It just accepts the role it was given and names it. Dust. Something that settles. Something that gets brushed away when it’s inconvenient. But here’s the thing. Dust also lingers. It’s everywhere. It never really disappears.
That’s what makes this song stick with me. It’s not about being destroyed. It’s about
recognizing how easily someone tried to erase you. And deciding to say it out loud anyway conclude, I didn’t realize how “Dear Diary” this review had become. It just ached and made me look back at a time in my life where I experienced the same thing that OK Alva was writing about. Maybe that’s the power of good songwriting, and that’s why you should listen to it now.
Her other songs tug at your heartstrings, too. So go ahead and give her entire discography a listen if you’re masochistic like that.
Release Date. 25th January
Social Links. Instagram