The song took six years to officially exist. It somehow arrived exactly on time anyway.
A demo that refused to stay buried
Doechii first recorded "Anxiety" in her bedroom in 2019 for a self-released mixtape, and for years it lived only on YouTube as part of her early Coven Music Sessions. The song resurfaced twice before it was ever officially released: once when New York rapper Sleepy Hallow sampled her original vocal for his own 2023 track of the same name, and again in early 2025, when both versions went viral together on TikTok. Doechii finally re-recorded and released her own version that March — six years after she first wrote it, and just in time to become, by more than one critic's account, the defining song of the year.
Built over a sample of Gotye and Kimbra's "Somebody That I Used to Know," the track repurposes that song's melancholy, looping instrumental for a very different subject. Where Gotye sang about losing a partner, Doechii raps about losing control of her own mind — the way anxious thoughts loop and repeat until they start to feel less like thoughts and more like weather.
Naming the physical, not just the emotional
What sets "Anxiety" apart from other songs about mental health is how specifically physical it gets — describing the tightness in the chest, the sense of something heavy sitting on top of you, the impulse to fight the feeling off rather than simply naming it and moving on. Public health researchers have since pointed to the song as an unusually accurate depiction of what anxiety actually feels like in the body, not just in the abstract.
That physicality is also what makes the song usable as more than a mood piece. Writers covering the track have noted it models something like a coping process in miniature: noticing the anxious thought, resisting the urge to judge yourself for having it, and trying to physically calm the body rather than just argue with the mind.
Why it became "2025 in a nutshell"
SPIN named "Anxiety" its Song of the Year for 2025, framing it less as a personal confession than a collective mirror — a sense of dread and uncertainty that the magazine argued had defined the year for a huge number of listeners, delivered in a form catchy enough to survive endless repeat plays. That's an unusual needle to thread: a song about a genuinely uncomfortable feeling that people wanted to hear again and again, rather than sit with once and move past.
Doechii, who swept three Grammys the previous year for her album Alligator Bites Never Heal, has built her career on this kind of directness — turning uncomfortable, specific truths into music that still moves a room. "Anxiety" might be the clearest version yet of that instinct: dread, made to dance to, without ever pretending the dread isn't real.