High Hopes

"High Hopes" is engineered euphoria, and it works because Brendon Urie commits to it completely. The song is essentially a brass fanfare — a marching, syncopated horn line, a thudding floor-tom pulse, gospel-tinged backing stacks — with a chorus pitched high enough that Urie has to reach, and reaching is the whole emotional content. There's almost no rock band left on the record; by *Pray for the Wicked*, Panic! was a one-man theatrical pop project, and the arrangement is closer to a halftime show than to the emo-vaudeville of the band's origins. The lyric is a mother's advice remembered as ammunition: shoot for the stars, they told you you'd never make it, look at me now. It's self-mythology delivered without irony, which is unusual for a writer whose earlier work was drenched in it. That sincerity is exactly why it escaped the alt-rock audience entirely and became a graduation song, a sports-arena stomp, a montage cue — the sound of somebody insisting on their own ascent loud enough to make it true. Play it walking fast toward something you're nervous about, headphones on, chin up.