Ashnikko, Cobrah, Poppy, Charli xcx, Grimes, Slayyyter, Addison Rae. Strascha names them as her touchstones, and it is a bold list for an artist most of you will be meeting for the first time. hack makes the case for her in its opening bars. The grit is the hook itself rather than the dressing around one, and that is where she sits closest to Ashnikko and Cobrah: a distorted synth bass figure goes round and round while sub-bass thuds underneath and percussion ticks pan from one side to the other. It sounds bolted together with real intent, by an artist who knows how much a pop song can carry and then adds a little more.

That instinct is what ties her to the names on her list. The strain of alt pop they share is loud and sardonic, happy to let a hook sound like a machine part, and it treats abrasion as a pleasure. Strascha works squarely inside that tradition. She spent many years in the United States and the UK for her education before coming back home, and now she is doing it from Sofia, a long way from the cities that usually get credit for this sound, and she gives no impression of feeling she has to catch up.

The single was written at a songwriting camp at Sound Ninja Collective in Sofia. It is committed to volume, and the Bulgarian mix engineer Dimitar Ganchev pushed it further with one late suggestion: more noise in the low end.

The moment that sealed it for me is the bridge. Her voice steps aside and the synths carry it, and what draws her back in is a brief second pre-chorus over a rising sub bass pulse. Here she shows she can hold a room with the arrangement alone. Grimes has always understood that a breakdown can be the emotional centre of a pop song rather than a pause in it, and Strascha does too.

Then there is the line that belongs on that list more than any other: “Hey! The boy’s a hack, bitch, watch it learn!” It has the right sneer and the right economy, and it is funny without winking. It shares Slayyyter’s and Cobrah’s habit of turning a put-down into a chant, and the song sets it up with the same blunt wit elsewhere: “You’re not a god, you wish you were.”

The single is out now.

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