Not A Love Song

You dig through a lot of garbage to find anything worth keeping. Rappers everyone’s already moved on from, producers working out of bedrooms with the same preset plugins, safe indie that knows exactly which buttons to press. And then something like Not A Love Song comes through and you remember why you keep digging at all.

Megan Bülow was seventeen when that track hit #1 on Hype Machine in 2017. She’d grown up scattered—Canada, Germany, Britain, the States—before landing in the Netherlands for school. By the time she released this, she’d already worked with serious producers like Lowell and Nate J, people who understood that melody and proportion still mean something.

The song is just pop. Not complicated, not deconstructing anything, not winking at you. It’s built right. She put out Damaged Vol 1 as her first EP, and there’s something in those tracks—clarity, restraint—that lives in the same space as Sigrid or Astrid S. Nothing borrowed, just competent in a way that feels scarce.

I remember the video was shot in Berlin. Just her in empty rooms and hallways. The kind of sparse space that works better than any production design because it doesn’t distract. The song plays and you get what she’s doing. She’s not performing at discoverability. Not trying to be the next anything.

What stayed with me was how much she trusted the song. No production busyness, no vocal tricks, just someone singing something true. That’s harder than it sounds.