B-Side Guys

The hook asks “is heaven what you thought it’d be” over goosebumps and molly and a morning sun that won’t stop haunting, which is either a genuinely theological question or the most honest description of a bad comedown ever put to a trap beat. Rich Delinquent, the Australian producer-vocalist who Triple J’s Dave Ruby Howe has compared to The Weeknd, doesn’t bother distinguishing between the two. The blurring is the whole point.

“Heartbreak Afterparty” is structured around a familiar but well-executed premise: the dance floor as an anesthetic, the party as the thing you do instead of feeling. What keeps it from being generic is how precisely the production mirrors the emotional state it’s describing. The moody, euphoric beats float in a way that feels genuinely dissociative, neither fully dark nor fully celebratory, which is exactly the headspace of someone who has gone too far past the pain to know what they’re feeling anymore. “All I needed was a taste / muting my emotions so I ain’t gotta feel a thing” opens the track with unusual self-awareness for a song that then watches that self-awareness dissolve verse by verse.

Tyla Yaweh’s feature lands as a tonal pivot. Where Rich Delinquent’s verses spiral inward, Yaweh pushes outward, turning the same paranoia and numbness into something harder and more kinetic. The contrast doesn’t split the track so much as complete it, two different responses to the same situation occupying the same space without resolving into each other.

By the second verse, Rich Delinquent isn’t asking questions anymore. “Girl take a look what you’ve done” is the sound of someone who has stopped trying to figure out where the heartbreak ends and the habit begins.