Each Measure Feature: Sloane Monroe

FEATURE

Rising pop artist, Sloane Monroe had one guiding question on her mind as she penned lyrics and composed music for her newest single, WOULD U?. It was a question that snapped her out of a bout of writer's block and lit a fuse that would eventually detonate in the song’s cacophonous finale: “What would happen if I mixed classical music with recession pop?”

I’ll admit, I was a little stunned by this admission when I read it in a press release for the 2025 single. The recession pop influence is clear enough–it’s a party song on its surface, a momentary escape from daily stress mirrored in the lives of its nightlife-dwelling subjects. But classical? I hit play again, asking myself where that element might be hiding.

It turns out, on a closer listen, the classical element is there on the song’s surface as well. The song tells the story of a young woman at a club. Though, as she admits, there’s “a guy on my hip”, her attention drifts to someone else standing at the back of the room. She can’t help but let her imagination spiral: “If I was alone, would you love me? / If I was alone, would you call me?”

As her experience of the nightlife crescendos into a no-holds-barred fever dream, the instrumentation follows suit–spiralling, becoming increasingly chaotic and exuberant. A violin section, composed and performed by Monroe herself–a trained violinist–is a standout piece. It narrates the escalating fantasy until both her vocals and the track’s production reach a frenzied, ecstatic peak.

As I experienced the rising chaos of the track with the classical/recession pop framework, the fusion made sense. Oddly enough, my mind went to those classic Disney films–each seeming to contain a scene where the character’s circumstances unravel spectacularly, at which point these movies’ trademark classical scores erupt to match the scene, resulting in a cacophonous collision of strings, horns, and cymbals.

WOULD U? Works in much the same way. What starts as a night out with a date unravels into a fantastical deluge of intrusive thoughts, and Monroe lets the listener tumble right along with her. As the narrator yields to her heightening desires, the tension created in the song’s production rises ecstatically to meet it, until it all crashes to a halt at the song’s closing.

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