Higher

"Higher," closing out *For Broken Ears*, is the record's exhale. The production drifts on sustained keys, a slow, almost gospel-adjacent chord movement, and drums that enter late and stay soft, giving the track the shape of a hymn that never quite commits to being one. Tems sings mostly in her lower register but keeps drifting upward across the song, the ascent doubling as the lyric's argument: that survival is not resolution but altitude, a matter of getting far enough above the wreckage to breathe. The words are addressed partly to a lover and partly to herself, and the ambiguity is load-bearing — the plea to rise reads as both invitation and self-instruction. Her phrasing is loose and behind the beat, vowels stretched, occasional cracks left in rather than sanded down, which is much of why the EP landed as a document of feeling rather than a product. *For Broken Ears* in 2020 was the release that made her a national figure and drew the international attention that followed within the year. This is dawn-facing music — the end of a night that went badly, sitting near a window with the light coming up, deciding to keep going without saying so out loud.