When a track appears with the title Is It a Crime, it’s impossible not to think of Sade. But this isn’t a remake.
Mariah the Scientist and Kali Uchis aren’t offering a smoky, orchestrated slow burn.
What they deliver instead is something more sparse, more exposed; a duet wrapped in static, guided by two voices that don’t need anything but each other.
Following Burning Blue, her late July release and first preview of the upcoming album Hearts Sold Separately, Is It a Crime arrives as the second single, and Track 4 on the 10-song project.
This positioning bridges the earlier intensity of Burning Blue and the album’s later explorations of love’s ambiguities, a deliberate sequencing choice that mirrors the song’s unresolved tension. The full album arrives August 22 via Epic.
Where Burning Blue explored the friction between cold detachment and consuming heat, likening love to a “fire-breathing creature” and “cold sweat dripping,” this new track lets the tension hang in the air, unresolved. There’s no collapse or dramatic pull, just space.
Produced by Mat1k, Oliver Easton, and Nineteen85, the song floats on muted pulses and low, foggy synths that never quite land. The beat doesn’t push forward.
It recedes, leaving Mariah and Kali suspended in emotional limbo.
That absence of weight creates the feeling that the song could vanish mid-listen, like a conversation neither wants to finish.
Mariah opens with a line that functions like a rhetorical mirror: “Is it a crime to want your time?” She’s not begging.
The phrasing is gentle, but direct. There’s pain, but it’s not the loud kind. It’s the kind that asks once and waits, because asking again would mean admitting just how much she needs the answer.
Her verse avoids flourishes. Instead, she folds small observations into moments of emotional habit: “I still check your page like it’s routine.”
That detail says everything. The relationship may have ended, but the impulse hasn’t.
Then Kali enters, not to change the mood but to complicate it. “You can search the seven seas and never find, no, a heart like mine,” she sings.
Earlier this year, Kali released her album Sincerely, and she’s set to begin the Sincerely Tour this August.
Her return to a stripped-back R&B vocal space here feels intentional, a quiet detour before the stage lights come back on.
It doesn’t sound like someone trying to convince, but like someone warning the other person what they’ve lost.
There’s no trace of pleading here, only a calm assertion of value, one that carries its own quiet heartbreak.
She follows with, “So why would you let me go, and never show that side of you?” which reframes the song’s central question. It’s not just about being wanted; it’s about being truly known.
Together, their voices blur into something soft and weightless. One Reddit listener described it as “birdsong energy,” sultry, sweet, and impossible to ignore.
That description stays with you, especially in the outro where their harmonies circle the line: “Tell me, is it a crime to fall?”
The repetition doesn’t build. It floats, refusing to clarify what kind of fall they mean – into love, into disappointment, or back into someone who already walked away.
The reaction has been quietly passionate. Some Reddit users praised the harmonies and subtlety, calling the production “understated in the best way.”
Others, however, found the mix too subdued. One Redditor on r/Music described the synths as “murky” and the percussion as “stuttering,” suggesting the instrumental undercuts the strength of the vocals rather than supporting them.
Others wished for a sharper mix or more instrumental movement.
But few questioned the emotional weight carried by the lyrics themselves.
The track earned 57% of the vote in Billboard’s Favourite New Music poll during its debut weekend.
And while it hasn’t charted on the Hot 100 yet, its presence feels designed for a different kind of listening: private, solitary, and often late at night.
Both artists have long defined their emotional pace, and this track feels like a convergence of those instincts.
Is It a Crime doesn’t drive toward a climax. It lets the ache stretch out, uninterrupted. And maybe that’s what gives it power.
If Burning Blue’was a wildfire, this is its smoldering aftermath.
Because the real question isn’t whether it’s a crime to fall. It’s whether wanting too much, too gently, is still allowed.
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Is It A Crime Lyrics by Mariah the Scientist & Kali Uchis
Verse 1: Mariah the Scientist
Sometimes I look around for someone who might understand it
I seen it in they eyes that they’ll, they’ll never get it
I think I lost my patience and now I can’t contain it
They, they were wrong about us, I hate the way they paint it
I, I love the way that you walk and the air you breathe
I just let ’em talk, but it bothers me ’cause
It ain’t love, it ain’t love, it ain’t love they see
But it ain’t nothin’ to discuss ’cause it is to me
Chorus: Mariah the Scientist
And so what?
I fell, you fell in love a couple times
Tell me, what’s it to ya? Tell me, is it a crime
To fall, to fall in love, in love a couple times?
Tell me, what’s it to ya? Tell me, is it a crime to fall?
Verse 2: Kali Uchis
Is it a crime? How’s it a crime? No
‘Cause if loving me is jail, then you’re my prisoner
So let me throw away this key ’cause you won’t give me up
Let ’em know we don’t give a fuck
All they want is to see us breaking up (Ooh)
You can search the Seven Seas and never find, no
A heart like mine
Better yet, can’t forget my mind, no
Some may say a girl shouldn’t lay her cards on the table
Well, I’m a woman, l’m not a girl
Is that a crime in this cruel world?
Chorus: Mariah the Scientist
And so what?
I fell, you fell in love a couple times
Tell me, what’s it to ya? Tell me, is it a crime
To fall, to fall in love, in love a couple times?
Tell me, what’s it to ya? Tell me, is it a crime to fall?
Outro: Mariah the Scientist
I fell, you fell in love a couple times
Tell me, what’s it to ya? Tell me, is it a crime
To fall, to fall in love a couple times?
What’s it to ya? Is it a crime to fall?
