Up All Night

"Up All Night" lives in the small hours — that specific stretch of time between midnight and four in the morning when the ordinary rules of behavior feel suspended and the city belongs to a different, stranger population. Beck builds the track on a sinuous, low-slung funk groove that owes a clear debt to Prince's late-night architecture, all slippery bass and guitar that seems to be winking at you from across a dim room. His falsetto is doing real work here, light and agile, slipping between registers with the ease of someone who has spent a long time in recording studios learning exactly what his voice can do. The production has a warmth to it — analog-feeling even where it isn't, textured and slightly hazy around the edges. The song doesn't apologize for its own pleasure-seeking; it is entirely comfortable in its restlessness, in the idea that some people are simply constituted for the late shift of existence. There's something romantically nocturnal about it without being melancholy — this is not insomnia but the deliberate, almost defiant choice to remain awake while the world sleeps. It belongs on a road trip after dark, windows down, or spinning in a kitchen while you cook for no particular reason at two in the morning.