Romattic Turn Romance Into a Candy Cigarette on Candy Smoking

Romattic started in 2025 as a solo room and found its present shape in 2026, when singer-songwriter Theodor Andreas Halmrast pulled producer Tommy Duong into the frame. They met in guitar class at a youth club, two listeners raised on different decades of rock. Halmrast came up around 1980s and 1990s records. Duong came in later, through the 2010s. The name is a cut-down of Romance in the Attic, which tells you the original temperature. Private heat. A little dust. A feeling stored where nobody has to watch it perform. Halmrast is from Krokstadelva, on the Drammen side of the river, and the early catalogue still carries that DIY restlessness. First came the 2025 EP My Happy Place, with its 80s and 90s surface and classic-rock undertow. Then stray 2026 cuts such as i forgot it wasn’t christmas and MySong2U, dropped with the project’s own shrug of a motto. Candy Smoking is the point where the attic door opens onto the street.

There used to be a sweet that taught children how to look ruined. Candy cigarettes. Chalk-white sticks in paper sleeves printed to resemble adult brands. You held one between two fingers. You blew a little powdered sugar into the air and called it smoke. The pleasure was never the taste. The pleasure was looking like you already belonged to a world that had not invited you in yet. You rehearsed the gesture of harm because the gesture looked like status. Grown-ups did this, so doing it meant you were no longer only a child. The packet was bright. The habit it trained was darker. Some countries later banned the product for that reason. The body remembered the pose even after the sugar was gone.

Candy Smoking works on that same small theatre. The title already knows the trick. She is sweet as candy and just as bad as smoking. Halmrast and Duong write a character who can hear the warning and still put the stick back in his mouth. Friends tell him he is hopeless. They tell him the cigarette will leave him scarred and broken. He answers with denial that sounds almost polite. I don’t want to believe that. The first verse still flatters the body in motion, pretty when she’s talking, shaking when she’s walking, love as vacation and destination. Then the pre-chorus pulls the room back to the warning circle. The chorus drops him to his knees. Pretty pretty please. Oxygen. A high when he feels low. Borderline addiction. Anybody but him can have her, and that fact does not break the pose. It tightens it.

The song is aimed at modernized romance as expectation. Being in a relationship becomes a kind of public proof. Losing it feels like falling out of the picture everyone else is standing in. That is why the character stays. Not because the love is clean. Because the empty hand would look like failure. Fear of missing out dressed as devotion. You call it an obsession, I call it dedication. The second verse even goes looking for the burn. Lungs start burning. Don’t threaten me with a good time. The line has a cheap grin on it, and that grin is the point. He is no longer only the victim of the wrapper. He is the one lighting it.

Sonically the single reaches for the same bright-and-bruised attitude Halmrast and Duong name in the press notes, from The Offspring’s Pretty Fly to the theatrical punch of Avenged Sevenfold’s Dancing Dead. The writing is built for a chorus that arrives like a shove. Short images. Tight rhyme. A vocal that begs without losing volume. The arrangement wants the hook to feel communal, the way pop-punk and emo-adjacent rock have always turned private humiliation into something a room can shout. That is useful here. Status panic is a social feeling. It needs a social noise. The track does not dress the subject in fog. It keeps the diction close to speech, then lets the refrain do the damage. You get me high when I feel low. You are the oxygen that I breathe. The metaphors are familiar on purpose. Addiction language is the available grammar when romance has been sold as both treat and necessity.

What gives Candy Smoking weight is how clearly it understands rehearsal. The character is not discovering the danger. He is practicing it in public. The friends have already spoken. The family has already spoken. The song still chooses the packet. That choice is ugly and very current. Couple photos, anniversary captions, the small performance of being chosen. A relationship can function as scenery long after it has stopped functioning as care. Romattic catch that without writing a lecture. They write a hook you can sing while the lyric admits the lungs are already burning. The project is still early. A first local headline show is only in the planning. The catalogue is still short enough that every new single has to carry identity. This one does. It takes the attic romance and walks it into the shop where children once bought a pretend vice, then shows what happens when the pretend becomes the only proof you have that you belong.

Follow Romattic

Candy Smoking is out now.

Listen: Spotify

Follow: Instagram · YouTube · TikTok · X