Clarity Liao turns unspoken feelings into an intimate confession on ‘Have You’, a tender bedroom-pop track that captures the quiet desperation of loving someone from afar. Rather than leaning into grand gestures or dramatic heartbreak, Liao finds power in the small details: the overthinking, the self-conscious attempts to become more noticeable, and the lingering hope that the person you care about might somehow realise what you’ve been trying to say all along.
There’s an immediacy to the songwriting that makes ‘Have You’ feel less like a conventional pop song and more like a private diary entry accidentally left open. Written about a friend Liao never found the courage to tell she liked, the track embraces the awkwardness and vulnerability of feelings that have nowhere to go. Her decision to frame the song as an unsent love letter gives the track an especially poignant quality, allowing longing and insecurity to exist side by side.
Musically, Liao keeps things deliberately restrained. Spacious arrangements and understated instrumentation create plenty of room for her expressive vocals, allowing every lyrical detail to carry emotional weight. The production never overwhelms the central confession; instead, it gently surrounds it, creating the sensation of listening in on a conversation that was never meant to be heard.
That restraint also makes the song’s more obsessive edges feel surprisingly natural. There is something wonderfully honest about admitting just how much effort can go into wanting to be noticed by someone who may never see you in the same way. Liao doesn’t attempt to romanticise that experience, instead capturing the strange mixture of hope, self-doubt and frustration that accompanies unrequited affection.
Her background as the principal songwriter of Navillera is already marked by considerable recognition, but ‘Have You’ demonstrates why her solo work feels like such a compelling next step. Here, she allows herself to move further into bedroom pop and indie-pop territory, prioritising intimacy over spectacle and emotional specificity over polished perfection.
The track is another piece of the puzzle that is her forthcoming seven-track EP Dear…, a collection built around musical love letters addressing love, jealousy, rejection and loss. If the project’s premise is about conversations that never quite happened, ‘Have You’ may be its most convincing example yet.
Ultimately, ‘Have You’ succeeds because it understands that unrequited love rarely arrives as a dramatic cinematic moment. More often, it is a collection of tiny decisions, imagined possibilities and things left unsaid. Liao transforms those fragments into something tender and relatable, proving that sometimes the most affecting love songs are the ones written for an audience of one.
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