There is something inherently liminal about Cruel Summer – a song trapped between elation and devastation, where desire and destruction coil around each other like ivy on a crumbling façade. In Taylor Swift’s original, this tension is lacquered with glossy synth-pop, an anthem of reckless passion rendered in neon and moonlight. Yet, in Rockstar & Elise’s Emily AF Version, the song undergoes a metamorphosis – a descent into something darker, grittier, and, paradoxically, truer.
By infusing the track with a subversive grunge aesthetic, Rockstar & Elise amplify the song’s inherent contradictions. The original Cruel Summer always teetered on the edge of an abyss – its fever-dream euphoria always tainted by the knowledge of its own inevitable collapse. Elise does not merely cover the song; she exhumes it, peeling back the bright polish to reveal the bruises underneath. The dark synths pulse like a fading heartbeat, the rough edges of the production mirroring the jagged nature of love on the brink of ruin.
The choice to release this version on Valentine’s Day is both ironic and profound. Love, at its most intoxicating, is never just about roses and sonnets – it is also the late-night longing, the reckless abandon, the self-destruction masquerading as devotion. In Rockstar & Elise’s hands, Cruel Summer becomes less of a doomed romance and more of an existential meditation: what does it mean to crave something that is destined to slip through your fingers? To willingly trade stability for the kind of passion that burns everything in its wake?
Vocally, this is a revelation. Rockstar & Elise lean into the rawness, each lyric an invocation of the ghosts of grunge past – the yearning of Cobain, the defiance of Love, the spectral detachment of Yorke. The refrain, “It’s new, the shape of your body, it’s blue, the feeling I’ve got,” which once glowed with the sheen of ephemeral joy, now feels like an incantation from the edge of oblivion. The ‘blue’ is no longer the color of excitement but of drowning. The ‘cruelty’ is no longer a fleeting emotional wound but a wound that refuses to heal.
Integral to this transformation was the collaboration with vocal producer Lo Marie, who helped bring new dimensions to the rising star’s performance. “Truly, working with a vocal producer opened my eyes to how much I needed to grow, and how far I did grow over the course of production,” Emily of Rockstar & Elise reflects. “Lo Marie really made me shine, and I had so much fun adding the small voices as counter responses in the second verse. It was a breakthrough moment for me vocally, and I embraced a sexier, bolder part of myself in the process.” This newfound confidence is evident in the track’s delivery – haunting, impassioned, and unapologetically raw.
If Taylor Swift’s Cruel Summer was an ecstatic free-fall into doomed love, Rockstar & Elise’s version is the aftermath – the moment you hit the ground. It is an elegy to reckless romance, a love song for the ones who know that every high has a comedown, and that sometimes, the fall is the only thing that feels real. This cover does not merely reimagine the song – it resuscitates it, breathes in its darkness, and, in doing so, makes it more alive than ever. We have added the cover to our New Music Spotlight playlist, and our TIMELESS and TRIPPY playlists, whilst we continue to explore Rockstar & Elise’s wider discography, including Push, and Cry.