Running at a breathless 170 BPM, the track announces itself with the confidence of someone who has spent considerable time alone in a room, arguing with their own demons and winning. Olie N. wrote, produced, and performed every element themselves — a fact that would be merely interesting trivia if the resulting record weren't so remarkably coherent in its vision. Bedroom production has given us plenty of navel-gazing oddities over the years, but *CONTROL* operates at a different altitude entirely. The heavy synths land like fists. The cinematic textures — drawn, fascinatingly, from the vocabulary of horror film scoring — create a sense of dread that makes the eventual chorus feel not just catchy but genuinely earned, like surviving something.
The sonic lineage Olie N. claims is a bold one: Lady Gaga's theatrical grandeur, Billie Eilish's intimate menace, Halsey's genre-dissolving restlessness, Demi Lovato's raw-throated emotional power, Ellie Goulding's electronic pulse. Lesser artists invoke such names as aspiration; here, the influences feel metabolised rather than imitated. The dark electro-pop tension that defines the track's verses — bass-heavy, brooding, coiled — does carry something of Eilish's structural intelligence, that sense of a song deliberately withholding release until the moment of maximum impact. When the chorus finally detonates, it does so with the anthemic certainty of someone who knows exactly what they're doing.
Lyrically, *CONTROL* charts a familiar but urgent journey: subjugation to liberation, silence to declaration. Lines like "I took control, I break the rules" risk tipping into cliché in lesser hands, yet Olie N. delivers them with sufficient conviction that they register as lived testimony rather than slogan. The more evocative passages — "Chaos sings like a lullaby / 'Cause everyone's living a lie" — reveal a writer capable of genuine unease, of locating the specific, uncomfortable poetry inside a feeling everyone recognises but few can articulate. The song is, as its creator describes it, confrontational but danceable. That is a genuinely difficult balance to strike, and they strike it.
The decision to bring Studio 206 in for mixing and mastering proves quietly significant. The production retains all the gritty, homespun urgency of its origins while acquiring a clarity and punch that allows it to compete on any stage. The horror-cinematic textures — the move that most distinguishes *CONTROL* from its contemporaries — are given proper room to breathe, creating an atmosphere simultaneously intimate and vast.
*CONTROL* functions as the opening chapter of a larger conceptual work, *Shadows of Chaos*, due in October 2026, and will lead eventually to *The Ritual of Chaos*, a fully staged theatrical concert at Le Ministère in Montréal. That broader ambition is already legible in the single's DNA. This is not an artist releasing a song; this is an artist constructing a world.
Whether that world proves as expansive as Olie N. clearly believes it to be remains to be seen. For now, *CONTROL* stands as a remarkable statement of intent from a genuinely singular voice — uncompromising, urgent, and considerably harder to shake than you might expect from four minutes of dark electro-pop coming out of a bedroom in Québec. Keep watching.
*CONTROL* is out now. *Shadows of Chaos* arrives October 2026.