I can’t understand
What’s going on in my mind
Sorrow can make you miss yourself. You remember how easily you once spoke to people, the plans that gave your days direction, the feeling of being present in your own life. Losing that familiarity leaves you trying to explain a change you can barely understand, while the people who know you best seem to be speaking to someone you remember being. The distance becomes harder to bear when you start blaming yourself for it.
That estrangement runs through Crygirl, the latest single from Berlin artist Rosa Damask. Nastia Reigel, the musician behind the project, sings of a mind she struggles to understand, the effort to belong, and the sense that her old dreams have gone on without her. The refrain keeps returning to how different she feels, worrying at a realization she cannot quite account for.
The title might be an admonition muttered at her own reflection. Crygirl has the sting of a name that makes a complicated sadness sound childish, something she ought to have learned to bear more elegantly. Heard that way, it adds a second wound to the song, the shame of needing comfort when she has already begun to lose patience with herself.
Reigel’s smoky, intimate vocal carries a PJ Harvey sultriness, the words unfolding slowly over a bass line that hums and throbs. Drums land with a heavy thump, cymbals splash through the spaces around her voice, and a thick guitar riff with the romantic weight of The Cure leads into the chorus. Sighing synth pads deepen the ache, giving the refrain a weary tenderness. Her voice stays close through the swell, inviting the listener into a vulnerable moment while she is still finding the words for it.
Andrii Kaplia’s video for the song surrounds Reigel with burgundy carpets, patterned wallpaper, and gilt mirrors. In a black suit with pale ties trailing from her cuffs, Reigel crawls across the floor, folds into corners, and raises her hands beside her reflection. Her restless movements disturb the rooms’ faded formality. The mirrors keep placing another version of her in the frame, turning each private gesture into an encounter with herself.
Watch the video for Crygirl below:
Listen to Crygirl below and order the single here
Rosa Damask is the solo project of Nastia Reigel, a Berlin-based musician and producer who came up in St. Petersburg’s techno scene. She founded the queer club night Грань (Grahn’) there in 2018 and has composed music for art-house films. Rosa Damask appeared on Vatican Shadow’s Berghain Mix 09 before releasing music through his Hospital Productions label. Recordings Reigel made between 2018 and 2020 became the basis for her diary-like 2021 release on DKA, Memorials.
On Adore You, her album for Downwards Records, Reigel brought the economy of her electronic work to guitar-led post-punk. The album’s “Bored” appeared in Versace’s Fall/Winter 2025 runway show in Milan. Kaplia directed the title-track video and filmed Reigel’s live performances at Morphine Raum and Silent Space.
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