XS

"XS" turns luxury into a punchline and a panic attack at once. Sawayama builds it on a chassis of early-2000s R&B-pop — sleek Timbaland-adjacent programmed drums, a coy plucked riff, breathy layered harmonies — then rips a nu-metal guitar through the seams of the chorus like a receipt being torn. That collision is the whole argument: the song sounds like a luxury commercial hijacked by a scream. Her vocal moves between registers with startling agility, cooing "gimme just a little bit more" in a sugared, almost infantilized coo before dropping into a sneer, so the desire and the disgust share a mouth. Lyrically it's a satire of consumption on a dying planet — flexing diamonds and gold while the ice caps go — and the satire lands because she performs the greed convincingly rather than lecturing from outside it. The context matters: a Japanese-British artist who grew up on Y2K pop-R&B, weaponizing that exact nostalgia to indict late capitalism, released in 2020 as the world's supply chains buckled. Best heard loud, headphones on, while doom-scrolling a shopping app you know you shouldn't open — it makes the impulse audible and slightly ridiculous, which is a kind of mercy.