"Some Say" arrived in September 2019 as the debut single of Swedish singer Nea, and it did not take long for the song to become one of the most inescapable pop records in Europe. By early 2020, it had reached number one in Belgium's Wallonia region, Slovakia and Poland, and cracked the top ten in Austria, Denmark, Hungary, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania and Switzerland. A remix by German DJ Felix Jaehn, released in January 2020, pushed it even further, and the track eventually charted in more than twenty countries. For a debut single, it was a remarkable run, and it announced Nea as a pop artist in her own right after years of writing songs for other people.

The song's DNA is immediately recognisable. It interpolates Eiffel 65's 1998 hit "Blue (Da Ba Dee)", and that familiar synth hook gives "Some Say" an instant nostalgia factor while the production, handled by Hitimpulse and Vincent Kottkamp, updates the sound for a modern pop landscape. But the real hook is the lyric. Nea sings about unrequited love, a subject she has said was inspired by events experienced by a friend of hers. "The song is about love that you can't attain but that you can't give up on," she explained. On Genius, she elaborated on the opening lines: "When you love someone so completely and the other person doesn't feel the same thing, you just wanna put the blame on something else? The time, the timing, anything but unreturned love."

That tension between hope and resignation runs through the entire track. The verses are full of careful, almost apologetic gestures ? "I'll find the time / We will find the timing" ? while the chorus turns into a patient, stubborn promise: "Some say you will love me one day / And I will wait, I will wait to get your loving one day." It is a song about waiting for something that may never come, and Nea's velvety vocals keep it from ever feeling desperate. There is a lightness to her delivery that makes the longing feel almost sweet, even when the subject matter is painful.

The song also marked a turning point in Nea's career. Before "Some Say", she had made her mark as a songwriter for artists like ALMA and Zara Larsson. When The Horn Blows described her debut EP as "a beautiful collection of deeply personal pop," and Nea herself said the songs on it were the ones she could not give away to anyone else. "These are the songs that transformed the songwriter Linnea to the artist Nea," she said.

As a reviewer, what I find most striking about "Some Say" is how effortlessly it balances commercial polish with genuine feeling. The Eiffel 65 interpolation could have been a gimmick, but Nea makes it her own, and the lyric about waiting for love that may never arrive has resonated with listeners across the world. It is a song that understands the particular ache of hoping against hope, and it does so without ever losing its pop shine.