Emily Pierce Turns Grief Into Ghost Story on “Pretend You Died”
30 May 2025
Newsdesk
Emily Pierce’s latest single, “Pretend You Died,” doesn’t ask for closure — it buries it.
The 19-year-old indie-pop songwriter, already making a name for herself with a diaristic, cinematic touch, continues her emotional excavation on this third release from her debut EP Letters Unsent. If her earlier tracks flirted with heartbreak, “Pretend You Died” sits alone at its funeral. Set to a spare, somber arrangement from producers Mandi Perkins and Francesco Rigon, the song is as much an exorcism as it is a ballad—a brutally honest meditation on how we learn to live with absence.
“I pretend every day / That losing you doesn’t hurt,” Pierce opens, her voice barely above a whisper, anchoring the song in denial turned ritual. But the heartbreak creeps in sideways: in the shock of hearing a loved one’s voice in a video, in the recognition delay that hurts more than the memory itself.
The chorus hits like a wave of amnesia: “I forget your voice / It’s not my choice / It fades as you grow farther.” It’s not melodrama—it’s neurological grief. The pain is clinical, but the ache is deeply personal. When she sings, “Making letting go harder,” you feel the weight not just of love lost, but of an entire imagined future dissolving.
The post-chorus delivers the track’s gut-punch refrain: “Pretend you died / There’s nothing left to say.” It’s the kind of lyric that makes you freeze. Cold, surreal, and numb—just like the grief it’s describing. But Pierce isn’t being flippant. She’s capturing what it feels like when the living cut themselves off so completely, they may as well not exist. It’s self-defense dressed up as mourning.
In the second verse, she retreats inward: writing, sulking, hiding under emotional ash. “We still run and play in my dreams,” she confesses, and it lands like a heartbreak hallucination. By the time she delivers the bridge — “You dug your own grave / Took a piece of me too” — there’s no hope left, only aftermath.
It’s hard not to draw comparisons to artists like Gracie Abrams or early Phoebe Bridgers, but there’s a clarity in Pierce’s delivery that’s entirely her own. She doesn’t over-sing. She doesn’t over-explain. She just bleeds.
“Pretend You Died” is a brave, unflinching look at what happens when love ends without explanation—and the only way to cope is to fictionalize the ending. It's not a song about moving on. It's a song about surviving in spite of not being able to.
With Letters Unsent, Emily Pierce isn’t just writing about heartbreak. She’s chronicling emotional survival. And if this is how she processes grief at 19, the world should brace itself for what she does next.
