Bacchanalia Magazine

by Reb Jordin

Stella Scholaja, an upcoming pop singer songwriter, is set to release her fifth and final single ‘Lost In The Dunes’ from her upcoming album ‘Sexy, Insane & Might Ruin Your Life’ on October 4th . ‘Lost In The Dunes’ is a song of strength in the face of a selfish man. The single conveys the manipulation women face within a situationship, where they are led to believe that the man has good intentions and values their heart but in reality, are just being used for his own cruel gain. Women everyday fall for the same nonsense lines and give great value to the bare minimum as they are forced to believe that this is all that they deserve. Stella gives an outlet for the resulting hurt emotions; the emotions you think you don’t have the right to feel as you were never ‘official’ with the person to begin with. Stella casts a spell of healing, normalising the pain of the situationship as something that is ok to feel as these emotions are real.

The single opens with an acoustic guitar and the thunderous raindrops of a storm immersing the listener in the atmosphere of a lonely rainy day of contemplation in London. A steady drumbeat is added bringing the song alive, instilling a 90’s R&B sound to the track urging listeners to get up and move even if the lyrics are painfully relatable. Standout lyrics from the chorus, ‘you look like a mirage, the desert in my heart flowers for you’ conveys that the relationship between them is so fragile that it seems like just an illusion. She’s thirsty for his love and he appears always when she is at her most vulnerable. Yet she can’t resist the warm sunlight of his affection, as he so easily gaslights her into forgetting that she is mostly left alone in his cold darkness.

In her most iconic move yet, Stella leaks audio from her own tragic experience within a situationship, exposing the reality that men can’t handle being worthy of a woman’s time and holding themselves accountable unless they are in an official relationship. A situationship is clearly just too much for their brains to process what is right and wrong. A man who is small can’t handle a woman who is great, so maybe they should just stop trying because in years to come people will only remember how he embarrassed himself in that situation.

The single closes with a powerful outro whilst Stella chants, ‘not all vampires suck blood, some just suck the life out of you.’ This presents the exhausting desperation of a situationship when you are fighting for the attention of someone who was never really yours to begin with. You don’t know that you are dying under their control until you are already dead. ‘Lost In The Dunes’ is for the sentimental girls who reflect on past experiences constantly. For the girls who fall hard so fail to see the red flags. ‘Lost In The Dunes’ is for the girls who feel like they’ve died after a situationship so use this single to become a phoenix rising from the ashes, reborn stronger.

So go and pre-save Stella’s Scholaja’s upcoming single ‘Lost in The Dunes’ to become
obsessed with her lore and healed by her poetic lyrics whilst we anticipate her debut album.