The Australian singer-songwriter adds another entry to her growing catalogue with 'Running Out of Time,' a slow-burn pop R&B confection that has no business being this assured from someone who is simultaneously studying for her Year 12 exams. Already named Emerging Artist of 2026 at the Sails Festival and fresh from multiple recording stints in Los Angeles, Karlay arrives at this latest single not as a tentative newcomer finding her footing but as an artist mid-stride, deepening a sound she has clearly been shaping with considerable deliberateness. That tension — between the grounded anxieties of adolescence and the very grown-up emotional vocabulary she deploys here — is precisely what makes this record worth your attention.
Produced by LA-based Esthy, the track is built on a philosophy of intelligent restraint. The production breathes. It resists the contemporary urge to fill every available sonic space with embellishment, choosing instead to let the architecture of the song do the heavy lifting. The beat arrives unhurried, almost reluctant, as though it too understands that urgency, real urgency, rarely announces itself with fanfare. This is music that knows how to make silence feel expensive.
Karlay's vocals are the centrepiece, and rightly so. She possesses that rare quality — call it grain, call it weight — that separates a singer from a vocalist. Her runs are controlled without being clinical, expressive without toppling into the melodrama that lesser artists deploy as a substitute for genuine feeling. The influences she cites, SZA and Post Malone, are audible not as imitation but as absorbed wisdom; she has studied the architecture of contemporary R&B and rebuilt something of her own from the materials.
The feature from cam'dn is well-judged. His contribution deepens the emotional conversation rather than redirecting it — a secondary melody that complicates the primary one, the way a shadow gives a figure its solidity. Too many collaborations of this kind result in a kind of musical time-sharing, where each artist simply takes turns occupying the same space. Here, the interplay feels genuinely dialogic.
Lyrically, the song concerns that specific, vertiginous moment of recognising love's importance just as it threatens to recede — the realisation arriving not as revelation but as quiet dread. It is a theme as old as the Romantics and as current as a 3am text message, and Karlay handles it with the kind of emotional precision that suggests she has genuinely felt it rather than merely theorised about it.
The music video, directed by Esthy and shot in Los Angeles, reimagines classic visual language through a contemporary lens, and while one cannot fault the ambition, it is the audio that will linger. This is, fundamentally, a song to be heard in the dark, in headphones, at a volume that makes the room feel smaller.
Karlay has already racked up impressive credentials for someone her age — four trips to Los Angeles in six months, collaborations with noted producer Adam Moseley, and a string of performances that have steadily expanded her reach on both sides of the Pacific. These are not trivial achievements. But achievements are historical footnotes. What matters is whether the music holds up when stripped of context and biography.
It does. 'Running Out of Time' is the work of an artist who understands that emotional authenticity is not something you perform but something you cultivate. Karlay is, quite clearly, cultivating.
Her forthcoming album cannot arrive soon enough.