Vince Leigh’s Single Review: 20 Seconds by Piper Waillin
Once in a blue TikTok-soaked moon you get a pop song that doesn’t sound like it was squeezed out of a toothpaste tube in a Spotify boardroom. Piper Wallin’s 20 Seconds hits like an uppercut you didn’t see coming — it’s messy, loud, pissed off, and too alive to sit quietly next to the “self-care” playlists. Piper’s not here to whisper confessions through AutoTune about how she’s “healing.” Nah. She’s here to smash the healing crystal against the wall and carve your name into the drywall. Straight out of Adelaide’s sidewalks and wineries (yeah, really), she walks into the pop world swinging her bruises like brass knuckles. 20 Seconds, produced by Liam Quinn with a surface gloss just greasy enough to slide under your defences, builds from a taunting pulse to a full-on cataclysm by the second chorus.
And the words: Try ‘felt so frustrated but I still waited’ — the sound of someone realising too late that they were holding the door open for a ghost. Wallin sings like she’s pulling the syllables out of her gut. There’s no pristine, detached sadness here. It’s clingy, yet beautiful because of it. If 20 Seconds were just a perfect pop song — which it almost is — it’d still be worth a listen. But it’s more than that. It’s a young artist refusing to sterilise her emotions for mass consumption. It’s a middle finger to the curated heartbreak economy. It’s a three-minute reminder that feelings don’t come wrapped in Instagram captions. Piper Wallin doesn’t want to be your chill breakup soundtrack. She wants you to feel every stupid, humiliating, enraged, magnificent second of the collapse. And if there’s any justice left in pop, she’ll have a whole room of strangers screaming along with her soon. 20 Seconds is raw. It’s reckless. It’s real. And right now, that’s about as rare as hope.
