Scarlett Macfarlane has a new single out, and “Winter’s Whisper” is exactly the kind of track that refuses to sit still. The New York alt-pop artist blends rockabilly-tinged energy with pop immediacy and a surrealist edge drawn straight from Lewis Carroll, creating something playful, eerie, and genuinely hard to categorize. Produced by Grammy-winning Scott Jacoby, it sounds like nothing else in her lane right now.
The song started simply enough, a magical winter walk as the initial image, but Macfarlane let the concept pull her somewhere stranger. “Words like ‘magic’ and ‘wonderland’ took me down a not-so-proverbial rabbit hole,” she explains. What emerged is a commentary on reality itself, how bizarre and uncontrollable and occasionally wonderful life actually is. “This world, life itself, is filled with fantasy,” she says. “It can be all at once transformed by the cast of characters you encounter throughout your own zany story.”
Production details make “Winter’s Whisper” work on multiple levels. Eerie Halloween-adjacent synth textures give the track its off-kilter atmosphere, while layered call-and-response vocals, subtly panned left and right, create a genuine sense of internal dialogue. The bridge in particular rewards a good pair of headphones. Macfarlane put it simply: “I’ve tried to sit still through it. I can’t. I haven’t met anyone who can.”
The single belongs to a 15-song collection written and recorded in a single creative burst, each track standing independently while sharing a common emotional thread. After years of performing other people’s words, from glossy pop to fronting a rock band, Macfarlane writes entirely from her own perspective now. That shift is audible in every second of “Winter’s Whisper.”
This is an artist fully in command of her own voice, and “Winter’s Whisper” makes a compelling case for paying close attention to whatever comes next.