Musical Content – All Rights Reserved @ AY$3, 2026
Reviewed by: Daiyu Tang
Artist’s Bluesky Profile: AY$3 (@ays3l.bsky.social) — Bluesky
Artist’s Youtube Profile: AY$3 – YouTube
A Review: ‘Still Awake in a City That Pretends to Sleep’
TLDR: 3 / 5 stars – but watch out, there’s many miles of road to go and AY$3 could be a breakout hit sooner rather than later.
The EP drops with a number of tracks including ‘I’m Still Awake’, ‘Hathian is a Bitch’, ‘Were Gonna Make it Through’ and ‘If We don’t stand up’.
Track 1: ‘I’m Still Awake’ positions itself as a song of consciousness in a world the artist seems to calls dead. Dead gods. Dead crowns. Dead trust. It is not subtle, and it does not pretend to be; album art also contriburing to the theme.
Still, there is no shortage of ambition here. This opening track frames itself as an awakening, positioning the artist above gods, empires, and decay itself. The language is deliberately mythic, swollen with deities, stars, bloodlines, and collapse. In a city like Hathian, that scale is not accidental: it reflects a genuine hunger to sound conscious in a place that numbs people into silence. The repeated refrain “I’m still awake” lands not as triumph, but as exhaustion, and that is where the track is at its strongest.
Where the song falters is in its certainty. Awareness in Hathian is not clean, divine, or singular. It is fragmented, compromised, and often paid for quietly. Declaring oneself awake is easier than demonstrating it, and much of the verse leans on grand imagery. What would I have preferred? More specifics. More specifics to this City, to the Hathian that we know. To the Hoppers who scare it, to the Rejects who terrorise it, to the HPD who brutalise it. This would have carried more weight. The vocals and hooks do heavy lifting here; the ideas are not wrong, but they are announced rather than earned.
In part, for track 1, it sometimes feels that AY$L has bitten off more than the first track can chew.
Track 2: ‘Hathian is a Bitch’ is the most direct and most dangerous track. Naming Hathian outright, referencing Observer headlines, police imagery, and specific actors, it abandons metaphor in favour of accusation. This delivers on what the first track could not quite reach, grounding us a little. There is undeniable emotional truth in the anger. Anyone who has watched this city long enough knows the satisfaction that comes when predators fall (such as the Clown – fuck him) and the bitterness that justice rarely arrives, or if it does doesn’t arrive clean and without a little price. The chorus is blunt, ugly, and effective, mirroring a city that has long stopped pretending to be pretty.
But bluntness is not the same as depth. The song wants to be indictment, manifesto, protest chant, and prophecy simultaneously, and in doing so it collapses nuance. Power structures are flattened into villains, and rage is treated as proof of insight rather than a starting point for it. Hathian does not suffer from silence alone; it suffers from people speaking past complexity because anger feels purer that way. The track is compelling, but it mistakes volume for clarity.
Track 3: “We’re gonna make it through” is the albums most accessible track, and arguably its most human. Stripped of gods and collapse rhetoric, it centers on loyalty, survival, and the psychological toll of staying upright in a hostile environment, in Hathian, in the town you, my dear readers call home. The chorus functions as a genuine anthem, and more than the other two tracks the writing allows space for vulnerability rather than domination. There is something recognisable here to anyone who has carved out a small circle and learned the cost of trusting the wrong people. Who hasn’t? Did you trust a cop? Did you trust Dale? Did you trust Caisen? Did you trust someone you shouldn’t. Everyone is a hero to some, but sometimes a villain to others.
On the other hand the song undercuts itself by reaching too quickly for borrowed symbols. Matrix imagery, war metaphors, and familiar anti-police refrains crowd what could have been its most grounded statement. Hathian does not need another call and response rebellion (every protest so far ends in one way – hospital or grave); it needs articulation of what endurance actually costs. What did it cost Ay$3? Has she paid the price? Not from the Observer’s memories – does that delegitimise the observation of the price paid by others? No, I myself haven’t seen all of the awful this city has to offer and still offer criticism, but music is a little different than journalism. This track gestures toward that truth, but repeatedly interrupts itself to shout slogans it has not fully unpacked or lived.
Track 4: “If we don’t stand up” leans fully into collapse logic. Systems must fall. Chaos precedes rebirth. Standing still equals death. This rhetoric is common in cities under strain, and Hathian has heard it before, often from people who leave before the dust settles. The chorus is effective in its simplicity, and the production supports a sense of urgency that feels intentional rather than accidental.
The problem is not the message, but its inevitability. By presenting uprising as the only moral option, the song denies the quieter forms of resistance that actually sustain this city: the ones that do not burn, but document; not shatter, but endure. The track wants to speak for the streets, but speaks over them instead, flattening lived contradictions into a single, combustible narrative.
Our Conclusion
Taken as a whole, this EP is not unserious. It is not cynical, and it is not lazy. Its anger is real, its concern for Hathian sincere, and its vocal delivery often carries conviction even when the words strain under their own weight. There is a clear streak from Ay$3 through the piece… Consciousness versus sleep, resistance versus compliance, voice versus silence. These are not trivial concerns in a city where stories are routinely buried under procedure and fear (or a polyester pileup, or a gang molotov).
However, ambition alone does not equal insight. Across all four tracks, the writing repeatedly reaches for the language of revolution without fully reckoning with its consequences. The classicist in me (sorry darlings, you know who I am) thinks of Les Misérables… as it is worth noting that rebellion becomes powerful not through volume, but through consequence. Les Misérables remains one of the most enduring narratives of resistance precisely because its language is restrained by cost. Every act of defiance carries loss: lives end unfinished, ideals fracture under reality, and victory is partial at best. The barricade is not mythic; it is temporary, desperate, and ultimately overrun. By contrast, much of this album reaches for revolutionary language without submitting it to consequence. Systems fall, gods die, cities burn, but nothing is truly lost, and no moral ambiguity lingers. As a classicist, I am less persuaded by declarations of awakening than by stories willing to pay for them. This is what I write in the Observer, this is the narrative of those who seek change that swells, builds and more: ‘Did you hear the people sing, singing the song of angry men’? Until rebellion is allowed to fail on the page, to wound its own speakers as deeply as it wounds power, it remains rhetoric rather than narrative. Am I saying AY$3 needs to be bloodied more? No. Am I saying that she needs to go through her own Inspector Javert tranformation (but without the suicide), perhaps.
Hathian survives in fragments, compromises, and long, unsatisfying stretches of partial truth. The album gestures toward that reality, but often retreats into absolutes when things get complicated.
There is potential here, she is an up-and-coming artist and it’s the strongest music EP we’ve seen this year. It should not, and the topics must not be dismissed. But potential is not the same as arrival. Awareness is not proven by how loudly it is declared, but by how carefully it is carried. If AY$3 continues to refine her language, trust silence as much as volume, and allow complexity to breathe, she may yet produce work that does more than rage against the city. It might finally learn how to listen to it and then beat it. Hathian, and many of those in it are bitches. The HPD, a subject of this rage, is often full of them.
We wish AY$L well for her next punch as we’re sure, it’ll land with even more impact, although perhaps we’d tone down the million dollar supercar imagery on socials – Jean Valjean would perhaps say that strikes against the album as if success is measured by money or rides, or ‘the business’, it’ll be just another day in Hathian and as my dear readers know, we’d prefer the barricades to arise.
