Everything Costs Pulls Red Rowanne’s DIY Dream-Pop World into Inflation Anxiety and Analogue Despair –

Red Rowanne refuses to allow her sound to shrink into conformity with her latest single, Everything Costs, an exposition of what it means to live in a capitalist dystopia as a soul that craves what cannot be bought. There is a sense of claustrophobia within the cosmic expanse of the analog synth-driven release, visualising how impossible it feels to escape the ennui gifted by contemporary reality.

Sirening synths reverberate through the avant-garde release as a spoken-word narrative relays the frustration and sense of failure that comes with attempting to claw towards enlightenment while price tags keep appearing on survival, stability, desire, and memory. The production moves through dream-pop cloud rap with hazy guitars, warm synth glow, and bedroom-pop intimacy, giving Everything Costs the texture of a late-night spiral under the fluorescent lights of capitalism.

As an independent DIY artist, Red Rowanne writes from lived experience, identity, liberation, love, memory, and the need to reimagine the future before the present drains all possibility from it. After Fire and Sparks and the indie-rock gem Match (Made in Heaven), Everything Costs feels like her sharpest meditation on collective anxiety and our subsequent obsession with nostalgia for the times happiness didn’t seem to come with a receipt.

Everything Costs is now available to stream on all major platforms, including Spotify.

Review by Amelia Vandergast