Pop music in 2025 operates like a vending machine, insert coin, receive dopamine hit, repeat. Paris WYA knows this. She also knows how to short-circuit the machine while still dispensing the candy. “Only Time Will Tell” lands somewhere between algorithmic bait and actual human feeling, a trick that seems simple until you try pulling it off yourself. Personal wreckage gets the Instagram filter treatment here, all gloss and glow, but the bruises still show through if you look close enough.

The opening moments fake you out. Everything sounds feather-light, like it might blow away if you breathed wrong, but there’s scaffolding underneath, serious engineering disguised as accident. Paris WYA stacks her voice in ways that suggest conversation, argument maybe, the kind you have with yourself at 3 AM when sleep won’t come.

Her main melody weaves through backing harmonies that feel less like support and more like shadow selves, alternate versions of the same confession. When the chorus hits, her voice splinters into cascades, becomes percussion, becomes synth, becomes itself again. In the bridge, this vocal splintering peaks, you lose track of where human ends and machine begins, which feels intentional, maybe the whole point. Here’s the thing about singing about lost love returning someday: everyone’s done it, badly, repeatedly, forever. Paris WYA dodges the cliché by wrapping melancholy in party clothes.

Either way, that origin story adds texture you can hear, a rawness that expensive production usually sands away. Paris WYA threaded a needle here: commercial enough for playlist inclusion, weird enough to remember, familiar enough to trust, strange enough to replay.