The Lonely People (Are Getting Lonelier)

The title fuses neurochemistry with a very specific London geography — Craven Cottage, the oldest football ground in the English top flight, sitting on the bank of the Thames in Fulham — and the music somehow honors both halves of that pairing. There is a wistfulness here that the other pieces hold at arm's length, a quality almost approaching the pastoral. The string writing is less funeral and more autumnal, moving at a pace that suggests late afternoon rather than the middle of the night, and the harmonic language, while still grounded in that characteristic Stars of the Lid ambiguity, leans toward resolutions that feel bittersweet rather than tragic. The dopamine of the title is the good kind of sadness — nostalgia, the ache of places and seasons you cannot return to, the way a particular slant of grey English light can make you feel briefly alive and permanently lost at once. Where the Requiem pieces demand stillness, this one has a subtle, almost imperceptible forward momentum, as though the clouds themselves are moving. It would suit a Sunday afternoon when the weekend is ending and the light is going, a train journey through countryside that is beautiful precisely because you're passing through it, a moment when happiness and melancholy become genuinely indistinguishable from each other.