Sycco — “Tell Me When You're Home”

Love will have you contemplating the universe and then asking someone to text when they get home. Sycco understands the range.

“Tell Me When You're Home,” an album highlight from her newly released Look Up, catches the Australian singer, writer and producer somewhere between falling hard and checking for the nearest emergency exit. She starts from a perfectly defensible strategy: no tears if we never dive in. Unfortunately, avoiding heartbreak also requires avoiding the part where something wonderful might actually happen, and Sycco spends the rest of the song realizing she may no longer be interested in playing it safe.

Soon she's seeing stars. We're going all the way to Mars. Forever has entered the conversation. Her head is spinning, everyone else has disappeared from focus and she'd quite like this person to stay a little longer. But under all that interplanetary romance is the question anxiety always sneaks into a good night: will you still feel this way in the morning?

That's what makes the title land. For all the big feelings, “Tell Me When You're Home” ultimately reduces intimacy to one of its smallest gestures. Get there safely. Let me know you made it. Give me one more reason not to worry. Sycco has described Look Up as an album about love, distance, home and being unable to fully articulate everything you're feeling. Here, three little dots appearing in a text bubble might do the job just fine.

The production follows her right into that dizzy space, warm and psychedelic without obscuring the song underneath it. Look Up may be about figuring things out without necessarily arriving at an answer, but this particular stop along the way feels pretty convincing. See the stars. Visit Mars. Just text when you're home.