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Jun 26, 2025 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Sveta Spekos

Singer-songwriter POLI NIKA draws from soul, jazz, and folk to craft a soft-focus, glassy style of indie pop, citing rising voices like Lianne La Havas and Lizzy McAlpine as influences. She returned earlier this year with her meditative new singles, “Nothing Belongs To Us” and “Rain in Lisbon,” and today she’s sharing another new track, “Don’t Mean To Hurt You,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“Don’t Mean To Hurt You” plays in the evocative and crystalline corners of alt pop, letting POLI NIKA’s vocals ring outwards atop subdued keys and hypnotic, arpeggiated guitar lines. The track’s verses exist in a murky expanse, with negative space and echoing keys dominating the spacious mix. In contrast, the chorus fills the vastness with thudding synth percussion and flickering guitar tones. Eventually, the track fully blooms into a new ethereal mode, dousing the track’s organic instrumentation in dreamy electronic accents as it swirls towards a ruminative climax.

Lyrically, the track deals with fears and lingering pains around romance. POLI NIKA says of the track, “The song emerged from a very personal struggle with fear and intimacy. I was caught in this painful loop where I desperately wanted to be close to someone I loved, but I was terrified of showing them the parts of me that felt too much, too anxious, too imperfect. What if I shared my fears and worries, and it was overwhelming? What if those darker thoughts in my head were too much for them to handle?

But keeping quiet felt equally impossible. How can you truly connect with someone when you’re constantly editing yourself? The distance I was creating to “protect” the relationship was actually suffocating it. All those unspoken fears had created this static, this tension that neither of us could name.

Then I sat down and wrote ‘Don’t Mean To Hurt You’ — essentially as a letter to him. I wanted to say: ‘I’m not trying to hurt you. I just don’t know how to express what’s happening inside me without risking everything. I’m scared of losing you.’ The song’s protagonist finds herself facing a choice: to remove the mask and reach out, to open up — or to remain alone with the monsters in her head that torment her.

The song became my way of rising above this painful situation — to look at it from a cosmic height, where you can see that love matters more than fears, and true intimacy is only possible through honesty, even when it’s frightening.”

Check out the song below.