When love becomes something alien, when love exposes the secret system of its power, Exzenya does not recoil. Ugly When You Love Me is surgically unveiling romantic illusions, with a sense of disgust being transformed into art by dark and glittering electronic landscapes that are precise and unstable at the same time.
It is not a song to cry in heartbreak. It is the time when clarity makes its unwelcome appearance--the time when you notice manipulation disguised as concern. The vocals of Exzenya cut through the smooth production of the song with a clear sense of restraint; every word comes as a heartbeat striking with its softness and indisputable power. This anger is not emotional--it is cold, it is condensed into something much more effective: knowledge.
The production is based upon tight electronic pulse use and glittering synth textures to create a mood that is danceable and discomforting. The arrangement is willfully cold, as were the distance of feeling it requires in order to clearly perceive the facade of loving as what it is- shallow, corrosive, suffocating. None of the sounds seems accidental and add to a particular tension that is almost palpable, as one walks on ice that you are aware is breaking under your feet.
The most fascinating aspect of the approach that is taken by Exzenya is her unwillingness to round out the corners. By using her background in psychology and analysis of behaviour, she does not dramaticize but dissects and provides the listeners with a mirror and not a melodrama. The consequence is the painful truth, the type of confrontation which makes you gasp--the reflection of yourself in a reality you would prefer to deny.
To Banks lovers, FKA twigs or Billie Eilish fans, the song provides that same union of emotional intelligence and musical filming. It is music that knows that there is no opposition between beauty and decay, they exist together, intertwined. And occasionally, the most heroic thing to do is to prefer disgust to delusion.
