Misty Jean’s debut ‘I Wanna Know’ sits in the sweet spot between huge pop hooks and the alt edges of indie rock.
I have a soft spot for pop songs that sound like the person making them has listened to more than just pop.
The kind where there’s a great chorus, obviously, but also a guitar tone or production choice that suggests someone somewhere has spent a bit of time digging through older records, picking up strange little ideas and carrying them forward.
Misty Jean’s debut single ‘I Wanna Know’ is one of those songs.
The opening got me first. There’s something slightly vintage in the reverb, something a little scuffed around the edges, and for a moment I was hearing Eels before the track opened itself up into something much brighter and more immediately pop.
That balance is probably my favourite thing about it.
We’re in a particularly good moment for pop right now, where artists can pull from indie rock, goth, singer-songwriter music and whatever else they grew up loving without having to sand the edges off it.
Olivia Rodrigo can nod toward The Cure. Phoebe Bridgers and Clairo can sit somewhere in the same listening universe as enormous pop hooks. Nobody really needs to choose a side anymore.
‘I Wanna Know’ feels like it understands that.
Jean grew up on the Gold Coast and started piano lessons at six, before writing her own songs from the age of 15. She jokes that some of those early efforts should probably never see daylight, which is likely true of almost anyone who started writing songs as a teenager.
What clearly stuck was the need to write things down.
Jean now studies Creative Writing, and songwriting remains a way of working through whatever is happening around her.
‘I Wanna Know’ comes from one of those situations that almost everyone has encountered at some point: two people circling around each other, clearly invested, neither willing to actually say what they want.
It’s a summer romance without the clean ending.
It’s that murky middle ground where nobody says what they actually want, so you end up reading far too much into every text, every pause, every slightly loaded sentence.
There’s a nice tension between that uncertainty and how confident the song itself sounds.
Produced with Gold Coast multi-instrumentalist Benny D Williams, ‘I Wanna Know’ is full without feeling overworked.
The vocals have plenty of space around them, the guitars bend and shimmer through the track, and the chorus arrives exactly when you want it to.
It’s great pop.
Not “great for a debut” pop, either. Just great pop.
I kept coming back to the production because there are details in it that stop the song becoming too clean.
Williams helped Jean translate the ideas she had in her head into the finished track, and his guitar work gives the song much of its personality.
Especially at the end.
That final guitar moment is killer. It arrives after the song has already done everything it technically needs to do, then gives it one last flash of character on the way out.
That’s the moment that tipped me over.
There are influences you could point toward here. A little Phoebe Bridgers in the emotional openness, some Olivia Rodrigo in the instinct for making guitar music feel properly pop-sized, maybe even a faint bit of older indie rock buried beneath it all.
But Jean doesn’t really sound like any of them.
And that’s important, particularly on a first release. ‘I Wanna Know’ feels less like somebody trying to establish an identity by announcing all their influences and more like somebody who has already absorbed them and started moving somewhere else.
I’ve been thinking lately about how much more interesting pop has become again because guitars are allowed to be weird, choruses are allowed to be huge and nobody seems particularly embarrassed about loving both.
‘I Wanna Know’ sits right in that sweet spot.
A little vintage, a little indie, very pop, and confident enough not to make a fuss about any of it.
For a debut, it’s a very convincing first move.
And yes, I think I’ve found my next pop crush.
