Ava Valianti’s “Buttercups” is not the kind of song you expect from a 15-year-old, mainly because we’ve been conditioned to expect teen artists to churn out overproduced, sugary nonsense about feelings they don’t really understand yet. But “Buttercups” politely declines that offer and instead chooses to emotionally level you like it’s been reading your diary. Imagine Taylor Swift’s evermore had a smaller budget, fewer woods, and more existential dread via ukulele and you’re almost there. Or maybe think of a Chloe Moriondo cover recorded at golden hour in a bedroom that smells like cinnamon and old Polaroids. You know, in a good way.
From the opening notes, it doesn’t feel like a single. Rather, it feels like you’ve wandered into a memory someone accidentally left playing. Gentle instrumentation and careful guitar picking lay the groundwork like they’re tiptoeing around something delicate. It’s fragile, but never flimsy. And then Ava’s voice comes in; not exactly trying to impress you, not trying to belt her way through pain, just saying it, which somehow hits harder. “Aren’t you my buttercup, my buttercup baby,” she sings, which should be cloying, but instead sounds like a spell being cast to keep a heartbreak from fully taking root.
The production never tries to be more than it needs to be. It swells where it should and holds back where it matters. The whole thing feels carefully underwritten; like the track knows that over-explaining would ruin it. And honestly, it’s right. There’s something quietly devastating about how much this song trusts the listener to fill in the blanks with their own bruised feelings.
What makes “Buttercups” really land, though, is that Ava doesn’t try to be wise beyond her years. She doesn’t clean up the mess. She just shows it to you, says “look what happened,” and somehow makes that feel both deeply personal and weirdly universal. It’s not interested in being a TikTok hook. It’s not here to trend. It’s here to remind you what it felt like to realize, for the first time, that someone could love you wrong, and that you’d probably still write a song about it anyway.
By the end of its short runtime, “Buttercups” has made its point loud and clear; not with bombast, but with the kind of quiet confidence that hits harder than any overproduced hook ever could. It’s a reminder that sincerity still works, that writing from a place of emotional truth doesn’t have to be dressed up in irony or obscured by studio gloss to be powerful. Ava Valianti’s “Buttercups” doesn’t beg to be heard; it simply is, fully and unapologetically. And if this is where Ava’s starting at 15 no less, then the rest of us, whether artists or critics or just people trying to feel something through the noise, had better keep up.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for various publications around the world, the former lead writer of review blogspace Atop The Treehouse and content creator for Manila Bulletin.
