By: Mandy Petrucci

There’s a moment, early in Shweta Harve’s new single “Which One Is Real?”, when the song seems to hover—weightless, suspended between breath and thought—as if uncertain whether to reveal itself or retreat. This is a familiar tension in Harve’s work. Even her sharpest songs, including the wry, chart-breaking “What the Troll?”, carry within them a certain inwardness, an impulse toward reflection. But here, working in collaboration with multi-instrumentalist and producer Dario Cei, Harve leans fully into that interior space. What emerges is a subtle, elegant excavation of selfhood—its fractures, its disguises, its shimmering, occasionally disorienting depths.

Harve structures the song as a dialogue between two presences: the ego, which scurries and postures, and the soul, which watches from somewhere deeper and steadier. This tension is not presented as a binary so much as a dance. The opening lines—“In a lone silhouette, you stand / A mirror of life untamed, unplanned”—carry a sense of intrigue. There’s something cinematic about the scene she sketches: a figure rendered in outline, the contours of a life visible but the essence still obscured.

Cei’s production mirrors that image, building from a few careful strokes. An acoustic guitar threads its way through the song like a quiet memory, its gentle notes evoking a sense of longing. Soft pulses of synth rise and fall, almost imperceptible, creating a texture that’s both elusive and haunting. A faint rhythm taps at the edges—never insistent, always drifting, like footsteps in another room. It’s a soundscape that feels intentionally permeable, as though air and light are meant to slip through its seams, revealing subtle details beneath the surface.

Harve’s voice—clear, unhurried, patient—is the gravitational anchor. She sings as someone who has learned to listen before speaking, and the effect is mesmerizing. In the chorus, she offers the song’s thesis: “Who you see is not you / I’m the one who sees you.” The phrasing is simple, almost childlike, and yet the implications unfold in increasingly complex spirals. What does it mean to be perceived by one’s own deeper self? To be witnessed, tenderly and without pretense?

The verses belong to the ego, restless and darting. “In the wake of doubt, you run,” she sings, tracing the jittery contours of self-avoidance. These lines feel familiar—like the frantic language of someone trying to outrun their own reflection. But the soul’s voice, which returns in each chorus, resists that urgency. It simply holds its ground.

The bridge offers the closest thing the song has to illumination:

• “Whether running blind or as a waning star
• I am your compass, no matter how far.”

The metaphor is cosmic, but the delivery is intimate, as though whispered in a darkened room. 

Petrusich often writes about music as a vessel for longing, and Harve touches that frequency here—the longing not necessarily for another person, but for the parts of oneself that can feel remote or unreachable.

What’s striking about “Which One Is Real?” is its refusal to force catharsis. The song doesn’t resolve in triumph or collapse. Instead, it lingers in the liminal—a place where understanding feels possible but not yet fully realized. And perhaps that is Harve’s most honest gesture here. Self-recognition is rarely instantaneous. More often, it is the quiet accumulation of moments like this: a voice murmuring truth, a melody holding steady, a listener turning inward.

Harve has crafted a song that invites contemplation without demanding it, a rare feat in a pop landscape that so often mistakes loudness for depth. “Which One Is Real?” drifts, glows, and ultimately settles somewhere beneath the ribs—a reminder that the most profound discoveries can sometimes be whispered rather than declared.