Haunted & Holy: Harlow Reign Reimagines 'Wicked Game' with Ethereal Power

June 08, 2025

Haunted & Holy: Harlow Reign Reimagines 'Wicked Game' with Ethereal Power

Emerging indie-pop up-and-comer, Harlow Reign, sinks her claws into “Wicked Game” by Chris Isaak. This cover is using all the foggy eeriness of a haunted melody with all the breathy and soft notes of defiance and fragility. Whereas the original takes place in the fiery desert, her version places the listener in sorrowful but magnificent moonlit rooms where women's power ascends like smoke from the walls which softly sing the melody of heartbreak.

This isn't merely a cover and somehow, Harlow's version sounds genuinely spellbinding. Her stamp lines the production as a minimalistic approach accentuates every note and moody guitars shine like candlelight underneath her breathtaking vocals, glimmering in ache. Each breath feels intentional as chosen words within a confessional, sung in sonic chiaroscuro. The artistic vision not only turns "Wicked Game" into a lament, but a reckoning, rather, reinterpreting the 90s hallmark into something raw, intimate, and modern, all at once.

Harlow concedes, "This song has always haunted me," yet still observes she is not alone – and in that haunting, this becomes true. She weaves ethereal and vulnerable strands into the tapestry of this remarkable tale, rendering it so dreamlike they seem impenetrable and yet impossible to awaken from. It doesn't just sound reverent, but radical too. In quiet audacity, she takes a man's lament and reshapes it as a woman's revelation: soft, strange, and breathtakingly her own.

The release is only the latest glittering step in Harlow Reign's ascent—a path paved with confessional songwriting and cinematic instrumentation. With her debut single already turning heads and an EP on the horizon, she's fast becoming a voice for the lovesick, the fearless, and the in-between. Harlow doesn't just sing songs—she conjures worlds. And in "Wicked Game," she invites us into one that's haunting, holy, and unmistakably hers.