Gretel (fka Gretel Hänlyn) is calling herself delusional for wanting what used to be baseline: someone to actually court her. That framing tells you everything about where we are.
The West London artist has announced her debut album Squish, out 10th April via Breadcrumb Records/AWAL, and its title track refuses to pretend hook-up culture is working for anyone.
Recorded live across five days at RAK Studios with producers Seth Evans and Margo Broom, ‘Squish’ is eclectic and intense in equal measure.
The verses carry traces of PJ Harvey and Kate Bush, while the choruses lock into something closer to Pulp’s ‘Babies’ — urgent, almost frenetic, and impossible to shake.
Underneath the noise though, the song documents surrender to a specific kind of cultural fatigue. She wants intensity over irony, commitment over casual.
That she frames this desire as “oversized dreams” speaks to how thoroughly detachment has colonised romance.
“What happened to courting and giving things a go?” she asks plainly. The song’s hook circles around drowning in love, being squished, accepting harm as preferable to numbness.
It is not subtle about its thesis: modern dating’s protective distance leaves everyone protected from nothing that matters.
The contradiction sits at the song’s centre. Gretel positions herself as the romantic fool, the “delulu” dreamer Instagram warns against becoming.
Yet the song never treats vulnerability as weakness. Instead, it weaponises that supposed delusion as critique.
If wanting emotional risk makes you delusional, what does that say about the alternative?
Since her 2021 debut single ‘Slugeye’, Gretel has built a reputation for gothic storytelling filtered through grunge textures.
The album’s twelve tracks cover protection, pressure and survival across themes of girlhood, jealousy and rage.
Following sold-out shows at Village Underground and Mercury Lounge, she headlines London’s Oslo on 14th April, four days after the album lands.
Squish arrives when everyone has theories about why dating feels broken but few solutions beyond opting out. Gretel’s not offering answers.
She is simply documenting the cost of a culture that mistakes fear of disappointment for sophistication.
Squish Tracklist:
- Squish
- Fire Blooming Trees
- Maybelline
- Unbloom
- Laurali
- Drunk on the ballroom floor
- Darkness, be my friend
- Pick your heart up
- Oh Well
- Witch hunt
- Nervous driver
- The perfect body