Psycho Killer

The rhythm is the first unsettling thing — a locked, robotic groove that doesn't swing so much as it marches, a beat that sounds patient in a way that patience rarely sounds. Over this, angular guitar stabs arrive like interjections in a conversation conducted at a very controlled volume. David Byrne's vocal is the song's strangest instrument: he sings in a kind of strangled earnestness, a voice that sounds like it's trying to confess something while also trying to hold itself together. The lyric sketches a figure who is aware of his own compulsions, articulate about them, unable to stop — it's a psychological portrait rendered in first person, and the horror of it is how reasonable the narrator sounds. The Talking Heads drew on funk and punk and art-rock and produced something that belonged to none of those categories entirely, and "Psycho Killer" sits at the beginning of that process, leaner and stranger than almost anything on the radio in 1977. The French phrases inserted mid-lyric add a theatrical remove, as though the narrator is performing his inner life rather than confessing it. This song rewards headphones, late at night, when you want something that treats you as intelligent and slightly unsettles the room you're sitting in. It's not a comfortable song, and it knows that, and it doesn't apologize.