From its opening lines, the song establishes its emotional geography with startling clarity. "Nothing's familiar here / But the newspaper smell and cigarettes, coffee" — these mundane sensory anchors become totems of alienation, the only constants in a world that refuses to cohere. Olina's voice carries the weight of someone who has learned to swallow homesickness like medicine, bitter but necessary.

The genius of "Newspaper Smell" lies in its refusal to wallow. Where lesser songwriters might indulge in self-pity, Olina opts for dark humour and unflinching observation. The image of "hosing down rich guy's vomit" despite having "a degree like a good daughter" is both grotesquely funny and devastatingly precise—a perfect encapsulation of how qualifications become meaningless when filtered through class and circumstance.

Musically, the track pulses with the energy of someone dancing through their own existential crisis. The guitar work is punchy without being showy, creating space for Olina's vocals to weave between resignation and defiance. The production wisely resists over-polishing what is essentially a raw nerve ending set to music.

The song's central refrain—"I'm not a nihilist but I see the appeal in it"—might be the most honest line written about millennial anxiety this year. It captures that peculiar state of suspended animation that defines so much contemporary experience: caught between cynicism and hope, between belonging nowhere and everywhere.

Olina's background as both jewellery designer and cancer researcher adds layers to her artistic persona that feel entirely authentic rather than calculated. This isn't dilettantism but the reality of creative survival, and "Newspaper Smell" channels that multiplicity into something coherent and urgent.

The track builds to its repeated declaration of "I'm winning," but the repetition feels less like affirmation than incantation—as if saying it enough times might make it true. It's a devastating and ultimately moving conclusion to a song that finds poetry in the mundane brutalities of modern life.

"Newspaper Smell" announces Olina as a voice worth following, someone capable of finding the universal in the intensely personal. The comparison points to Phoebe Bridgers and Courtney Barnett are apt but not limiting—Olina has her own sharp wit and particular perspective on displacement and belonging. This is indie rock with genuine intelligence behind it, unafraid of its own contradictions and all the more powerful for embracing them.