AuraLink has a lot of moving parts, but truth be told it is mostly run off of peach Monster Energy, and han.irl<3. It is no exaggeration to say that Han’s catalog has been hugely important to the existence of AuraLink, in fact her current long-term album rollout was a huge reason I wanted to get back into music journalism, but the connection actually goes even deeper than that. You see, dating all the way back to 2021 I knew some people starting a short lived music blog, and of the small handful of articles I wrote for them, ih8usm! was the second one I ever wrote, and arguably the one that got me hooked on writing at all.
ih8usm! was the first single off Han’s joint project with Atlas in Motion, and they truly came out swinging on this project. Through a combination of bass fuzz, trap drums, and sheer malice, ih8usm! paints an incredibly vivid picture of just how far you can fall from the heights of a relationship. It’s mean, it’s petty, but above all else it’s so, so good. Though comparatively simple next to the likes of Han’s newer projects, the straightforward nature of the track arguably drives the point home even harder, scrapping a lot of the bells and whistles in the production to simply emphasize that she really, really fucking hates you. Atlas is no slouch here either, acting as lowkey backup to the whole ordeal. I’d become so used to hearing Atlas in a more acoustic-adjacent atmosphere that when I first heard this track it was total whiplash, but his deliveries are a perfect counterpart to Han’s, rounding out an overall incredibly cohesive 2 minutes that leaves you with a feeling that can mostly be boiled down to “god damn” (tone is up to reader interpretation).
It’s likely no surprise considering my history with this song that Atlas’s reappearance in Han’s current rollout quickly became one of my favourites. fmuuu always felt like almost a spiritual successor to this track, not so much in it’s lyrical contents but in it’s vibes and it’s natural progression from the old era to the new. It’s generally a really fun track that would be my #1 from the project had it not been for the existence of spaaaceee, but that’s all a story for another day. All this to say that ih8usm! walked so that fmuuu could run, and in a world where I am constantly hoping and praying that the next han.irl<3 drop is right around the corner, sometimes it’s nice to look back at how we got here.
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