Are you an avoidant?
Have you ever heard of the word “avoidant”? Probably, if you’re Gen Z, you have. More likely through somebody explaining it on TikTok. Otherwise, if you’re older, probably not. Avoidant is a psychological term used to define a person who is attitudinally distant from others. And that’s a trend among the latest generations, which have turned escapism and coldness into something necessary. That’s another keyword of contemporary times: coldness. A form of armor, almost. And this framing has been captured and interpreted by the London-based artist Lewi SWiPER and his latest hip-hop EP, Coldwire, which feels less like a project and more like a confession left half-open.
A dark room, LED lights, calming scents. Whatever is needed to relax our nerves and be 100% focused. Once, I’d argue, the aesthetics of teenagers and young people were completely different. Messy rooms, posters, clothes all over the floor, and rock or punk music played out loud on the speakers. Chaos was visible, shared, and almost celebrated. Now, instead, everything is softer, quieter, controlled. Sound has shifted into chill, down-tempo beats directly plugged into our ears through AirPods at 2 a.m., isolating us even when we’re surrounded by people. Why? Because everything is more about us, ourselves. We all must succeed in whatever we want to achieve, and the only way seems to be through extreme discipline and detachment from the external world. A constant self-monitoring that leaves no space for noise or for others. I’d say that in many cases this practice could work, at least on the surface, but the outcomes are not always worth the price. Being avoidant, in fact, makes you doubt everything that surrounds you and keeps you living in solitude. Or, even worse, it makes you experience whatever happens to you not as a real victory, but as a void.
Despite success and goals, you feel like there’s something missing; you feel empty and drained from reality, as if you’re watching your own life from a distance. Lewi SWiPER, in his song “Say Goodbye,” says: “’Cause I’ve been all alone, getting money with these bitches on the side, but I think it’s time to find me a ride or die.” The point here is that, at a certain moment, no matter the height you’ve reached, you still want more, yet different. You want to fill in the emptiness that surrounds you, no matter the mass of people around you. Because when you do not cultivate real relationships, it’s easy to end up with people who are just interested in gain, status, or proximity to success. In the end, we all end up aiming for somebody who really matters, somebody who can make us feel high in a way that feels real and grounded. That’s the message conveyed in Lewi Swiper’s EP, and it feels urgent to understand it now. Because the other face of the coin is pain. And since we suffer, we don’t want others to get close to it, because deep down we are convinced they wouldn’t understand our vulnerability, or worse, they would judge or use it against us. As Lewi Swiper sings in “I Wonder”: “It’s a whole lot of pain when you live this high, don’t get too close now.” Distance becomes a defense mechanism, not a choice.
Coldwire opens a window onto a theme we’re not really ready to explore yet. Sonically, with a mixture of R&B textures and dark rock vibes, this EP perfectly portrays the tension between letting go of everybody and desperately looking for connection at the same time, embodying the whole emotional sense of the release. Distance and detachment are features that are more and more characteristic of our contemporaneity, yet nobody really wants to give them a label. We are afraid of exposing our feelings and thoughts out loud, and for this reason, we repress all of this. Coldness is what we tend to think can save us. But at a certain point, we’ll feel the urge to express it and choose to live in a real state of highness, caused not by hallucinations or success metrics, but by the simple, fragile pleasure of somebody else next to us.