Lucia offers a hushed, heavy act of care with “Wash you clean,” a quietly devastating song that finds release not in fixing what’s broken, but in staying present with grief, intimacy, and the cost of loving someone through their unraveling.

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Stream: “Wash you clean” – Lucia

I think within the contexts of love and within the contexts of war and genocide, it is so natural to feel angry and upset. Acknowledging human emotion is so deeply human.

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Some songs feel less like statements and more like places to rest – not escapes, not solutions, but quiet rooms you step into when carrying something heavy.

Nothing is demanded of you except to come, exhale, lay your bones down, and stay awhile. Lucia’s “Wash you clean” arrives with that kind of subtle gravity – hushed, heavy, and luminous. There’s a shadow to it, a bruise beneath the surface, but also a sense of release in letting the ache run its course. Soft and dreamy without ever drifting away, it unfolds with an earned stillness, offering catharsis not through resolution, but through care. Lucia doesn’t rush pain toward meaning; she lets it breathe.

Wash you clean
Holding onto New York summer
Your knees have both turned green
Rolling ‘round in grass and broken bottles
As you scream
Blood is dripping down and making
It’s own little stream
Scared of what you’ve seen

A softly spellbinding indie folk seduction, “Wash you clean” is a hushed, heavy act of care — and a disarmingly beautiful introduction to rising NYC-based singer/songwriter Lucia Zambetti, whose work lives at the intersection of storytelling, spirituality, and emotional restraint. The song appears on her recently released debut EP In Love & war, an ambitious first collection shaped by philosophy, faith, memory, and the fragile architectures of love and friendship. While Lucia has been releasing music for several years, “Wash you clean” marks a defining moment – a clear distillation of her creative vision, her worldview, and her willingness to sit inside discomfort rather than aestheticize or escape it.

Lucia’s voice is a breathtaking emotional anchor – aching, intimate, and impossibly close.

She sings as if she’s standing right beside you, tracing memory and grief in careful, deliberate strokes: “Holding onto New York summer / Your knees have both turned green / Rolling ’round in grass and broken bottles.” There’s innocence in every word, but it’s fragile. By the time she reaches “Scared of what you’ve seen,” the scene has already begun to darken, shifting from carefree motion into the weight of awareness. What starts as softness slowly gives way to sorrow, tension blooming beneath the surface.

That friction sits at the heart of “Wash you clean.” The song isn’t about a single moment, but about watching someone change – and realizing you can’t stop it. As Lucia explains, the track grew out of “a couple of dissolved friendships,” shaped by the experience of observing someone “internalize the world around them… and ultimately become scared of the world.” Her lyrics trace that transformation with delicate precision, moving from openness toward self-protection, from wonder toward restraint. It’s grief filtered through love – not explosive, but devastating in its restraint.

Broken all your seams
I’ve got a friend with pins and needles
Does it fast and clean
You won’t feel a single thing
Your eyes, they really gleam
Only for fluorescent lights
You’re starting to get mean
‘Cause they broke the machine

Lucia elaborates on that arc with striking clarity, framing “Wash you clean” as a song about watching someone you love retreat inward in the name of survival.

“I wrote ‘Wash You Clean’ about watching someone you care about so deeply build such restraints around themselves in regret for who they were in the past,” she tells Atwood Magazine. “It’s about how this obsession with healing oneself is so obsessive that it can lead to a life where everything out of their control feels dangerous. The song starts off describing a situation of excitement – ‘holding onto New York summers’ – the most exciting part of my youth was intertwined with reckless and careless adolescent decisions. I wrote this from a perspective of looking at a friend. This first verse captures that recklessness that leads up to the realization, the tragic event, the pinnacle that starts their journey looking within themselves. I love that ‘scared of what you’ve seen’ comes up twice in the song. It doesn’t describe what this friend has seen – it’s a vision of some sort.”

She continues, “This same friend goes on to realize they’ve hit rock bottom and they need to start helping themselves therapeutically. The fluorescent lights resemble this disinfected, white-walled place they’ve gotten to, in contrast with the previous visions of green and summer. That’s when the machine comes in, creating this new persona of someone whose creativity that intertwined with their recklessness is being taken from them on such a technical level. The title of ‘Wash You Clean’ comes from a cultural and intimate practice of bathing someone else – cleaning up someone else’s mess because they can’t do it themselves, out of a place of respect and/or commiseration.”

The act of washing becomes the song’s central metaphor, carrying layers of meaning that stretch across faith, care, and intimacy. Lucia draws from a deeply personal well here, shaped by religion, family ritual, and memory. “The act of washing is deeply embedded in my understanding of respect and love and sanctity,” she shares, recalling baptism, bathhouses, and the vulnerability of tending to another person. “It’s a very meditative and vulnerable process to wash yourself from every particle that stuck onto you during every good, bad, happy, sad interaction you had that day.” In the song, washing isn’t about erasing the past. It’s about helping someone shed what the world has pressed into them – “a sign of respect and care in a vulnerable time,” even when you can’t follow them all the way through.

“Wash you clean” appears on Lucia’s debut EP In Love & war, released in mid-November via R&R, and stands as the project’s emotional low point and center of gravity – the moment where tenderness gives way to exhaustion, and illusion finally breaks. Lucia calls it “definitely the saddest” song on the record, marked by what she and her collaborators refer to as the “blown-out, crash-out” bridge (a massive moment of catharsis).

Within the EP’s broader themes – love, conflict, devotion, memory, and the violence of the world beyond our doors – this track holds space for anger, grief, and despair without trying to tidy them up or resolve them. As she reflects, those feelings are not failures of strength, but proof of humanity: “These emotions are a reminder that I am a human being.”

Wash you clean
Holding onto New York Summer
Your knees have both turned green
Scared of what you’ve seen

What makes “Wash you clean” so affecting is its refusal to rush pain toward meaning; every choice – lyrical, sonic, emotional – is deliberate.

Lucia doesn’t offer answers; she offers presence. “Every decision I make for each song I create is deeply intentional,” she says, and that care is felt in this track’s restraint, its patience, its trust in silence. “Wash you clean” feels restorative not because it heals you outright, but because Lucia understands us where we are.

As a wintertime listen, “wash you clean” feels exactly right – dark but gentle, heavy but human, leaving you changed in small, impactful ways. It’s a stunning entry point into Lucia Zambetti’s world, and a powerful reminder that sometimes the most profound release comes not from letting go, but from staying with what hurts long enough to let it wash you clean.

Lucia recently sat down with Atwood Magazine to talk about the friendships, faith, and emotional restraint that shaped “Wash you clean,” and how In Love & war became a place to hold anger, grief, and care all at once. Read our interview below, and spend some time inside the quiet weight of this remarkable debut EP.

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:: stream/purchase In love & war here ::

:: connect with Lucia here ::

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Stream: “Wash you clean” – Lucia

A CONVERSATION WITH LUCIA

Lucia: Hi! If someone is just listening to my music for the first time, I’d want them to hopefully imagine the worlds I am attempting to create with lyrics and sonics. All of my songs read somewhat like creative stories, with backdrops and characters and specific descriptors. I’d want them to know that I am an A1 over-thinker and a philosophy and theology student, so I am truly well-endowed to question the world and spirituality in the context of an indie folk song 🙂

I believe that all different types of music with their bpms, lyrics, and sonic waves fulfil some sort of purpose, whether that’s dancing, crying, boosting confidence, theatricality — you name it. And I believe that mine carries the specific purpose of storytelling and promoting pensiveness.

I would want them to know that every decision I make for each song I create is deeply intentional.

Lucia: Unfortunately, this song isn’t about just one story but rather a couple of dissolved friendships that I have experienced throughout my life. The overarching story behind this song is about watching and experiencing someone’s personal transformation as an observer. It’s about watching a friend of yours internalize the world around them; watching them reflect on themselves and their behavior, and develop their beliefs but ultimately become scared of the world.

The first chorus paints a picture of someone carelessly rolling around in the grass as if they’re unaware of dangers and anxieties. Then they encounter some sort of intangible fright that changes their entire careless perspective [“Scared of what you’ve seen…”]. The process after that becomes these therapeutic resources to “fix” themselves. I mean, we’ve all been through it – looking for solutions, homeopathic methods, Eastern and Western medicine as not only a cure, but an explanation for why we see the world in some way, or why we feel some way. Everyone loves an excuse, valid or not.

Lucia: I grew up fairly religious. I’m still figuring all that out right now. I love spirituality. The act of washing is deeply embedded in my understanding of respect and love and sanctity.

I was baptized as a baby and water has always been a symbolic and material solution to life’s course. Whenever I feel sick, my dad tells me, take a hot shower. When I’m too sweaty and my face is all puffy and I’m stressed out during the hot summers, he tells me, take a cold shower. Whenever I have a headache: Drink a full glass of water, take a long shower. It’s a very meditative and vulnerable process to wash yourself from every particle that stuck onto you during every good, bad, happy, sad interaction you had that day. I remember that when I was younger, I used to say the Nicene Creed (that was the only one I memorized) if I thought I needed a little refresh on my behavior or emotions.

In that same light, I wrote about another aspect of this specifically in my understanding of womanhood and maturity and family. I wrote a Substack blog post about how I grew up going with my sister, my Russian mother, her Russian friend, and her kids to a bathhouse. I used to watch the younger women wash older women’ s backs with a scrub glove and some soap and have always just deeply associated that action with a deep-found respect and unity. When I was a little bit older and my mother and I went back, we washed each other’s backs and that was after we hadn’t seen each other for a while.

In this song it fits the same framework – it’s a sense of washing away someone’s “sins,” someone’s interactions that stick onto them, the metaphor of a bad taste in one’s mouth. It’s a sign of respect and care in a vulnerable time.

Lucia: Yes!!!! It is my first EP and I am so excited. I went through a bit of an existential crisis when releasing this, having realized that this is the hardest I’ve ever worked on anything consistently in my whole life. I am so proud of myself and so grateful for everyone who has been so supportive and has believed in me throughout my process in making music. I am still beaming with joy.

Firstly, In Love & war is the perfect descriptor for the surface-level content in the lyrics of this song. It’s about our triumphs and surrenders in loving one-another, and it’s about our attachment and humanity that we deal with in global combat. It’s about childlike wonder and nostalgia within tumultuous times. It’s the worlds we create on the outside of a closed door, listening into or drowning out the noise that comes from the other side of that closed door. It’s about how humans are so multifaceted in our abilities to experience the world and conflict in their structure but also have deep understandings of the world through interpersonal relationships and through memory. It’s not that our orientation towards the status of the world is separate from our life experiences in love and friendship and wonder but that they are intertwined so deeply and inform one another.

These songs are incredibly special to me as they are my deepest, most vulnerable confrontations of myself put into imagery. They are so similar to the songs I have written growing up but at the same time deal with experiences and contexts that are so mature. For instance, my first song ever, “That Night” was about being on the back of a sexy man’s motorcycle, “No barracks, No men” is about looking at the structures of religious institutions and the military through a skeptical philosophical lens, dumbing it down to act as metaphors for my devotion to a romantic interest. I am growing up along with my audience, which is the most special thing to me and these songs act as a barometer of how my scope of the world has developed over time.

Lucia: “Wash you clean” is definitely the saddest of my songs on this project. Its musical build-up definitely has the most emotion; we refer to the bridge as the “blown-out, crash-out” section. I think within the contexts of love and within the contexts of war and genocide, it is so natural to feel angry and upset. Acknowledging human emotion is so deeply human. I have had countless moments in these failing friendships or in my confrontations with the world where I have felt so hopeless, so deeply sad, so deeply angry, and a good friend of mine once told me that these emotions are a reminder that I am a human being.

Lucia: I don’t really know what exactly I want people to take away from this song or from my music generally. I think if people can take away anything from my music then I have done my job. At the end of the day I’m a woman in my early twenties who has been through many friendships and relationships, I’ve thought deeply about the world and do, and the only way I know how to deal with any of my emotions or observations is through music. I don’t think the human experience is subjective. I think we find it hard to communicate our experiences in the same words and same descriptions, which is why music and tone and the emotional weight of sonics is so metaphysical and spiritual.

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:: stream/purchase In love & war here ::

:: connect with Lucia here ::

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Stream: “Wash you clean” – Lucia

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