At just 22, Chloë Wilson is already offering the kind of single that most artists spend entire albums circling around. Her new release “Broken Me” is something rare: emotionally precise, uncomfortably honest and shaped by the kind of songwriting that sits with you long after the last piano chord fades out.
Written when Wilson was 16, and reworked across six years, “Broken Me” feels like a diary entry she wasn’t sure she’d ever let anyone read. It’s not concerned with making heartbreak sound palatable. This is a song that asks the hard, ugly questions and doesn’t rush to answer them. “Did I not show enough mercy / When you tore into my soul?” she sings in the opening verse, already on the edge of something heavy and willing to go there.
Built around a beautiful piano line, the track leans into the restraint of classic 70s ballads, without borrowing their nostalgia wholesale. The influence of Stevie Nicks and early Tori Amos is there in the bones, but Chloë’s voice is her own: fragile, frustrated, and clear as glass. She doesn’t shout her pain. She sharpens it.
There’s something remarkably self-aware in how she handles the song’s emotional weight. “I gave you everything / Now you own a little bit of broken me” is a brutal admission, not only of loss, but of ownership, of the quiet ways someone can leave, and still hold power. It’s a song about heartbreak, yes, but more than that, it’s about the betrayal of being unheard. You get the sense that this track was rewritten as ChloëWilson grew up, each line gaining clarity the more distance she had from the person who made her feel this way.
She’s spoken about how, for years, she’d create characters to mask what she was feeling but this is the first time she let the mask drop. “Broken Me” doesn’t offer redemption or neat resolution. It’s better than that; it just tells the truth.
With her debut EP arriving in October, “Broken Me” is a powerful preview and not because it promises a polished pop career. It’s powerful because it sounds like someone who’s finally tired of hiding behind metaphors and has decided to speak plainly instead.
If this is the sound of Chloë Wilson coming into her own, it’s going to be worth listening very closely to what comes next.
