Listening to the opening of Michellar’s “Truth Over Lies” is like being dropped mid-sentence into a conversation you desperately need to hear. This track, which features Frankie El, doesn’t ease you in; it puts you on the “shaky ground” it sings about, a state of profound vertigo that reminds me of the low, anxious hum an old CRT television used to make just before the picture tube fired up. For an artist to reappear after a 40-year hiatus is one thing, but to then unleash 22 singles in nine months speaks to a creative pressure that has finally, thunderously found its release valve.
The song’s initial spinning chaos is, of course, the whole point. It’s the fog of disorientation that makes the sudden appearance of a “light on the hill” feel so galvanizing. Here, the track’s alternative rock-pop architecture transforms from something hazy into something forged. A determined, unifying pulse takes over, building a sound not for quiet contemplation but for bodies in motion. It’s music that marches, and you find your own feet keeping time, an unconscious solidarity with a cause you’ve just been handed.
This isn’t a polite request for change; it’s a full-throated summons. The lyrical journey from isolated confusion to collective power has the strange, sudden cohesion of a starling murmuration, that breathtaking instant when thousands of disparate points become one fluid, undeniable shape against a darkening sky. Michellar weaponizes rhythm to rally the scattered, turning individual frustration into a shared cadence that pushes back against the noise.
So, what happens when a voice, dormant for four decades, finally decides it has something vital to add? You get this. You get a reckoning set to a beat.
