Cooper Phillip went quiet for a while. Not the kind of quiet that means nothing is happening, the kind where everything is. Her new single, “Love Me Not,” is the sound of that quiet finally breaking.
It’s her first release in over a year, following 2025’s “Last One,” and it arrives less like a comeback than a confession. The Los Angeles singer, songwriter, and vocal coach, born Karina Kuper, wrote the track with Davy Nathan and Yan Perchuk, who also produced it. The pairing gives “Love Me Not” its texture: soft synths, a rhythmic pulse borrowed from R&B, and just enough restraint to keep the whole thing feeling like a secret you’re being let in on.
The premise is almost embarrassingly familiar. You meet someone, or you don’t really meet them at all, and your mind starts filling in a story before life gets the chance to write one. Cooper Phillip built an entire song around that gap.
“I wanted to explore a very specific emotional space, the feeling of connecting to someone in your mind before anything has actually happened in real life,” she says. “It’s that in-between state where attraction, imagination, and possibility start to build a story that doesn’t fully exist yet. There’s a softness and uncertainty in that, when your thoughts begin to create meaning out of something undefined, and emotions feel real even without a real relationship taking shape.”
A Song Built On Almost
That last word, almost, might be the closest thing “Love Me Not” has to a thesis. The verses stay hushed, patient, letting Cooper Phillip’s voice do the work instead of the arrangement. She’s always operated this way, favoring mood over spectacle, and “Love Me Not” doesn’t break that pattern so much as sharpen it. The chorus doesn’t explode. It just lingers, the way a thought does when you can’t put it down.
She’s called this single the start of something bigger. “My new chapter as an artist begins here,” she said around the track’s release. “Over the past months, or even years, I’ve gone through many transformations, and it felt like I put myself on pause until the moment I truly felt ready to step forward.” That framing matters. “Love Me Not” isn’t a standalone moment, it’s a door she’s choosing to walk back through.
Why It’s Landing Now
Cooper Phillip isn’t arriving out of nowhere. Her catalog has quietly passed 15 million streams, and outlets like Wonderland, American Songwriter, and Hollywood Life have already put her name on their radar. What’s made her music stick isn’t volume, it’s specificity. She writes about feelings most people don’t bother naming, and “Love Me Not” is maybe the clearest example yet: a whole song about liking someone who doesn’t know it, built with enough craft that it never feels small.
There’s no twist ending here, no resolution. The song sits in the not-knowing and asks you to sit there too. For anyone who’s ever built a whole relationship out of one conversation and a lot of imagination, “Love Me Not” will feel less like a song and more like being seen.
Cooper Phillip is on Instagram and YouTube, and this, by her own account, is only the beginning.
