To her credit, Thoresen isn't hiding her influences under a bushel. The Police's nervy guitar interplay and Fleetwood Mac's wounded-romantic harmonies are present and accounted for, filtered through Dijon's fondness for production that sounds slightly broken on purpose. The result is a track that wants to be both classic and experimental at once — chord progressions that veer off the expected path just often enough to remind you someone laboured over them, set against a vocal performance that stays mostly in the realm of conventional melancholy. It's a song straining against its own good manners, and the strain is, more often than not, the most interesting thing about it.

Thoresen has called the track her "death march," which is the kind of self-diagnosis that tells you more about an artist's relationship to her own suffering than any lyric sheet could. There's a particular hazard in writing about depression and repetition: the form can end up mimicking the content rather than illuminating it, and "Groundhog Day" occasionally falls into that trap, circling its central image without quite finding new angles on it. Recorded entirely in a home studio during what she describes as an isolating stretch in Los Angeles, the song has the slightly hermetic quality of work made in solitude — intimate, certainly, but also a touch insulated from outside editing that might have sharpened its edges.

Where the project genuinely earns its stripes is in the accompanying short film, directed by Sebastian Johnson-Deal. Released a month after the single, the video takes the song's grim subject matter and refuses to illustrate it literally, instead constructing a maximalist, garishly lit vision of time portals and professional burnout. It's a clever inversion: rather than soundtracking misery with more misery, the film supplies colour, motion, and a kind of manic visual humour that the song itself withholds. The contrast does the heavy lifting that the track sometimes can't manage alone, and it's hard not to suspect the video is the more fully realised half of this release.

There's also something to be said for the way Thoresen frames her own myth-making — the home studio, the lonely year, the apartment where apparently an entire catalogue's worth of breakup songs got written. Artists are entitled to their origin stories, but the repeated insistence that this is all terribly significant occasionally crowds out the songcraft itself. "Groundhog Day" doesn't need the press notes to tell listeners it's about spiralling; the title alone does that work. What it could use is a chorus with the courage to break the loop it describes, rather than simply depicting one.

None of which makes this a write-off. Thoresen has a clear sense of where she sits between classic rock songcraft and contemporary studio strangeness, and the instinct to pair a bleak premise with a vivid, almost cartoonish visual companion shows real curatorial intelligence, even if the song proper hasn't quite caught up to the ambition surrounding it. Two more singles like this, sharpened rather than merely repeated, and the loop might finally break in her favour.