Wham City

The first thing that arrives is chaos — stacked synthesizers colliding at velocities that shouldn't cohere, voices layered so densely they stop being voices and become texture, a human choir processed into pure mass. But then the structure reveals itself: beneath the maximalist surface is an almost childlike folk simplicity, a round that keeps returning to the same melodic kernel even as the surrounding noise expands exponentially. Dan Deacon is an American composer who performs amid audiences rather than above them, and this track carries that spirit of collective participation — the feeling that it was made by a room full of people who had given themselves over entirely to the performance. The dynamics are violent and earnest in equal measure, reaching toward what can only be described as ecstasy without irony, which is remarkably difficult to pull off in the age of detachment. Listening alone feels almost wrong; it belongs to a gymnasium or a warehouse, somewhere bodies can be present and the sound can bounce off walls and come back changed. It is exhausting and invigorating in precisely the same moment, the way crying hard is both. You reach for this when you need permission to feel something without qualification, when the defended self needs to simply dissolve for eight minutes into pure collective noise.