WØLFFE's 'Favourite Song' takes back what someone else tried to ruin

There's something particularly vicious about somebody damaging a piece of music you once loved, and WØLFFE builds 'Favourite Song' around exactly that kind of theft. Emerging from the wreckage of a noxious relationship, the track begins with the feeling that even music has been contaminated by somebody else’s presence: "You took my favourite song, changed the words, made it your own, now I can't sing along".

It's a brilliantly simple image for losing part of yourself inside another person, but 'Favourite Song' isn't really about surrendering that part forever, as WØLFFE pushes the track from heartbreak towards reclamation, building tender piano, experimental electronics and hypnotic melody into something increasingly defiant. Her dark, cinematic production gives the song the atmosphere of a psychological thriller, but underneath all that shadow is the surprisingly euphoric idea that eventually, you get to take your own life back.

Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' becomes central to that transformation. As her own favourite song, its familiar refrain initially carries the weight of the relationship and the cruelty attached to it. However, by the end, the same reference has changed meaning. What belonged to the hurt is reclaimed as an expression of freedom.

WØLFFE’s work often exists somewhere between character, confession and cinematic fiction, and 'Favourite Song' uses that ambiguity particularly well. Influences ranging from Björk to David Lynch help explain the strange atmosphere surrounding her music, but there's something deeply direct beneath the presentation here.

Co-written and co-produced with Dan McDougal, it also provides a compelling glimpse into her forthcoming 'YUCK' EP, a project created during her first experience of depression and shaped by punk-rock, industrial sounds and film music.

In all, the relationship may have changed the words, but WØLFFE eventually remembers that the song was hers all along.