Arden Alexa’s “Crush (Remix)” is what happens when a crush gets a film score, and the remix is the song stepping out of the audio and into the apartment where the artist lives with her cat. Arden, who has Hans Zimmer and Breakfast at Tiffany’s in her ear, builds the song out of cinematic pop with strings that sound like they were scored for a film, and the cat who appears in the video, named Liza, is a symbolic stand-in for the female friendships the song holds onto when the crush itself gets complicated.
The contradiction inside “Crush (Remix)” is that the song is supposed to be light and the song is anything but. A crush is the kind of feeling a person hums to themselves in the back of a car. Arden turns the same feeling into a film scene, with strings, an apartment, and a cat who plays the role of the friends who keep the speaker grounded. The bio calls Arden a “control freak (in the best way),” and the song is how the artist takes the crush seriously. The crush gets a whole cinematic universe, and the universe is the song’s argument with the word “crush,” which was not built to hold this much. The remix is the part where the argument becomes visible.
“Crush (Remix)” leaves the listener in the apartment, with the cat, the strings, and the kind of crush that has outgrown the word. Arden’s debut album HOPE YOU’RE WATCHING is built on the idea that women artists do not have to stay in the box the industry puts them in, and the remix is the part where the song climbs out of the box. With the small, deliberate detail left on the table, the song ends the way Breakfast at Tiffany’s ends, and the speaker is already walking into the next frame.
