The opening minutes with Beth Sarah’s new single, “Love is Dead”, feel like watching a beautiful house of cards collapse in meticulously slow motion. It has all the architecture of a polished pop track, yet inside, a structural demolition is taking place. Sarah documents the aftermath of a heartbreak so profound it triggers an existential audit. The true devastation isn’t the loss of a person, but the dawning horror that the love story was a self-authored fiction, a love that was “always in my head.” This isn’t theatrical rage; it’s the quiet, gut-sinking shock of a major historical revision.

This particular ache reminds me of discovering a brilliant piece of Roman glass is actually a clever replica from the 1970s. The beauty is still there, but your relationship to it is irrevocably changed. You are forced to mourn the loss of its authenticity. Sarah’s song inhabits that same space of confounding revelation. The relationship was the forgery, and admitting it is both the deepest wound and the only way forward. The melody is the iridescent, convincing surface; the lyrics are the tell-tale maker’s mark on the bottom, exposing the whole thing.

Through this wreckage, a stubborn pulse beats. The chant of “I will live on and on” isn’t a battle cry shouted from a mountain. It’s a promise muttered through gritted teeth while searching for the first aid kit. It is the sound of pure, unglamorous survival—the messy, necessary work of choosing to continue after realising the map you were following was drawn for a place that never existed.

Beth Sarah isn’t just picking up the pieces here; she’s inspecting them to see what was ever real in the first place. What, then, does one build with the salvaged materials of a beautiful lie?

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