Alex Lahey’s “You Don’t Think You Like People Like Me” Is Highly Likable

This single by Melbourne’s Alex Lahey has got to be one of the peppiest songs about rejection ever—a song about being disliked, and yet it is only likable. Stomping and sprinting the whole way through, “You Don’t Think You Like People Like Me” is funny in the way that self-deprecating songs by underdogs tend to be: “All I want is to have cleanskin wine and watch Mulholland Drive with you,” Lahey sings defeatedly. The opening riff is a taut study in Room on Fire-era Strokes, and her writing lands somewhere between the charming specificity of Courtney Barnett and the soulful, emphatic delivery of fellow Aussie rockers Royal Headache.

Revved and ready, the big chorus goes, “You don’t think you like people like me/I know, I’ve heard this one before/Maybe I’m the one exception that can last forever/But that can only happen if you let us be together.” With levity, her words roll so fast and easy, as if speed is the only way one could be this vulnerable. Lahey hones on the pain of an evasive response, how those can hurt more than bad ones when you’re hung up on a person. The sentiment is simple and familiar—and yet so is the wind that whips through your hair while racing down a highway in the summer with friends, and who ever gets sick of that?

Comments are closed.