Wednesday May 21, 2025
It’s common for pop music to gesture toward transformation — that word gets thrown around like glitter in marketing decks and festival bios.
But few songs linger inside the discomfort of change quite like Changes, the latest release from Melbourne producer, songwriter, and practicing medical doctor, Echolily.
This isn’t a triumphant coming-of-age track. There’s no seismic key change, no massive build. Instead, Changes coils in on itself, unspooling slowly with the anxious hush of someone whispering a truth they’ve only just admitted to themselves. The song opens on a line so subdued it feels like an afterthought: “snow season, slow motion.” That tension — between beauty and delay, desire and dislocation — runs through every note of the track. Echolily’s production is subtle and meticulously constructed. A crisp house groove pulses beneath melancholic piano chords, the rhythmic framework shifting slightly with each verse. Synth textures stretch across the stereo field like fog across a dark highway. Percussive fill
s come and go like fragments of thought. Her voice is ghostly, almost reluctant, buried just low enough in the mix to make you lean in. The emotional centre arrives not in a climactic chorus but in fragments: “so low in the midst of all your highs” and “remember not to let the good go by.” The refrain — “changes, changes” — is repeated like a spell or a stutter. Nothing is certain here. The track doesn’t resolve. It drifts. It insists. It disappears and returns. Echolily’s story—doctor by day, indie producer by night—lends weight to her sonic worldview. You can hear the measured breath of someone who’s stood at the border of crisis, literal and emotional.
Her influences (Robyn, Massive Attack, Sia) haunt the song’s periphery, but the voice at the centre is hers alone. Changes is not trying to be the song of the summer. It’s trying to be the song of right now — restless, reflective, half-broken, still dancing.
