Wake Up

"Wake Up" is a choir before it's a song. The opening — wordless massed voices over a distorted, downward guitar figure — sounds like a whole neighborhood shouting at once, and that collective texture is the entire argument of Funeral. Win Butler sings about the moment childhood feeling calcifies, the heart hardening so you can survive being an adult, and he sings it with a kind of strangled urgency, voice fraying at the edges rather than reaching for beauty. Régine Chassagne's counterpoint, the strings, the pipe organ warmth, the drums that hit like they're being played in a gymnasium: everything is oversized and slightly ragged, recorded to sound like people in a room rather than a studio. Then, at the four-minute mark, the song abandons its own solemnity and lurches into a loose, hand-clapping, almost doo-wop shuffle — grief turning, unexpectedly, into a party. That pivot is why the song survived its own overexposure in trailers and arena walk-ons. Made in Montreal by a band metabolizing multiple family deaths, it's music about mourning that refuses to be quiet about it. Play it walking through a city at dusk, or in a car with the windows down and too many people inside, all of them singing the wordless part.