Che Aimee Dorval’s “Carnal Needs” Is the Midnight Song You Didn’t Know You Were Missing

Che Aimee Dorval exists somewhere between the beautiful and the unsettling, and “Carnal Needs” is content to live in that space without ever choosing a side. This is dream pop built for midnight, anchored by a trap style beat that gives the song a slow, hypnotic pulse, lush synthesizers filling the atmosphere around it like something breathing in the dark. The production is spacious and deliberate, leaving room for the vocals to exist on their own terms, never crowding them, never competing with them. And those vocals demand every inch of that space. R&B in their melodic sensibility but otherworldly in their delivery, Dorval moves from the depths of her range to soaring, heaven reaching highs with a fluidity that makes the whole thing feel effortless even as it is clearly anything but. There is an edge running beneath the beauty, something dark and slightly haunting that gives the song its tension and stops it from drifting into the purely decorative. “Carnal Needs” is gorgeous music with something lurking inside it, and that combination is exactly what makes it so magnetic. Che Aimee Dorval is doing something genuinely rare here, making music that is as easy to get lost in as it is difficult to forget.