Melbourne’s Way Dynamic shares ‘Officially’ from the new international release of 2025’s ‘Massive Shoe’ via JagJaguwar.
Sometimes in the blinding glow of new love, it’s tough to write anything. The darker emotions often seem easier to tackle, and that ease is exactly what has led to a whole bunch of toxic ideas about sadness as the food of artistry. The tortured artist trope has been seen throughout history, replaying over and over the damaging and foolish belief that it is only through struggle and pain that beauty is made, or the suggestion that mining yourself for your most devastating thought is the only true introspection.
But on ‘Officially’, Way Dynamic is defying that, delivering a love song that is both considered and also blissful. Written in the week Melbourne’s Dylan Young met his girlfriend, it’s a song that basks in the sunshine feeling of having found someone special. The major chords and powering drum beats feel exactly like that – thumping like a heart, fluttering like butterflies in a tummy. Like a Nick Drake song on a summer day when there’s that perfect cooling wind blowing through a green landscape, ‘Officially’ sonically captures the same feeling.
Yet the lyrics refuse to stop at just that. You could take the chorus lyric of “officially addicted” as nothing more than a twee statement on love’s infectiousness. You could take it at a surface level of simply being about wanting to spend every waking moment with a new love, never leaving bed and abandoning all responsibilities to just hang out and hold hands and drink wine. But it’s in the little moments, the dark tinge across some of the verse imagery, that Way Dynamic brings in a more sinister feeling, managing to capture the bubbling anxiety and self-doubt that are often part-and-parcel of a new and good thing.
We all know it well. When things are going right, that voice chimes up saying “surely not” or even straight up, “you don’t deserve this”. In the modern age of love with all its overthinking, a good dating even comes along with a minefield of contemplations about how to proceed, leaving you to wonder how you can luxuriate in that indulgent feeling of being addicted to someone new without feeling obsessed, or without feeling like an addict.
Here, Way Dynamic is wondering all of that. It’s a love song through and through, and a joyous one at that, but in the undertones, it’s also a song about addiction and modern anxiety. So if you ever needed proof that good feelings can be just as fruitful as the bad stuff, look no further.
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