WPGM Commentary: Estella Dawn Rebuilds From Ruins On ‘Wicked Game’

There’s a hush that stretches across Estella Dawn’s version of “Wicked Game” – one that never fully settles. That feels like it might tear itself apart if you breathed wrong.

She slips in on the tip of a clockwork piano, every note clicking soft and sharp like gears left running inside an abandoned watch. There’s no rush to the way she builds it. She stretches the space between sounds until the silence gets heavy, brushing her voice against it like someone tracing drawings on a fogged window.

Estella doesn’t hide from the hurt. She makes a place for it to sit. That first breath into “The world was on fire and no one could save me but you” pulls the whole room with it. Her voice carries that same velvet-and-smoke tone she’s known for, but here, it holds more than melody. It carries the weight of wanting, of not having, of standing still when everything inside you is burning to move.

The drums creep in by the third bar – taut and deliberately a little lower than you might expect. You can feel the air change when they hit, shifting the song’s gravity without ever breaking the spell. From a place that’s hard to pin down, a ghost-string reversal flickers against the piano, barely there but pulling at the edges of the sound like a tide you don’t notice until you’re dragging your heels through the flood.

Midway through, when the guitar leaks in – shimmered over with chorus and flanger, washed but close–you catch the crackle of something bigger under the surface. She never lets it swell out of control, though. She steers it with a slow hand, tightening the coil without snapping it. Stella moves between a storm-weathered alto and an outstretched soprano, shifting like a figure walking between heavy air and flared notes.

In the verses, her delivery stays close to the chest: soft sorrow and low-lit beauty. But when she hits the chorus, it blooms – subdued intensity giving way to an expansive build. She’s still holding back the flood of feelings inside but some of it finds a way to peel out through hairline fractures. It’s in that slow unravel that you catch what makes Estella different. She builds a room inside the hurt and leaves the door cracked open.

This take of “Wicked Game” locks into the original’s core without trying to reframe it. It recreates the fatalism woven through lines like “It’s strange what desire will make foolish people do / I never dreamed that I’d meet somebody like you,” dragging the sense of inevitability into the open instead of sanding it down. Every repeated “I don’t wanna fall in love” stacks over itself like a warning.

That’s the quiet trick Estella’s always had up her sleeve — the way she lets a feeling sit long enough to turn restless in its own skin. Originally from New Zealand and now based in San Diego, she’s a self-built artist in every sense – writing, producing, recording, and even editing her own visuals. There are a lot of moving parts to her creative output, but the center seems to be holding strong.

Over songs like “Big Enough,” “Locked In,” and “514 Denim,” Ms. Dawn has stitched together a body of work that hums with drive and potential. And “Wicked Game” doesn’t break from that pattern. In fact, it leans harder into it. Covering a song like this could’ve turned into a bit of a mess in other hands, but Estella Dawn makes it feel like light work. It’s just another room in the lovely house of music that she’s been building all along.

Listen to “Wicked Game” below, and stream it elsewhere here.

Follow Estelle Dawn on Instagram + TikTok

Words by Marvin Twiggs

The post WPGM Commentary: Estella Dawn Rebuilds From Ruins On ‘Wicked Game’ appeared first on WE PLUG GOOD MUSIC.