Billions

"Billions" is Polachek at her most oceanic and strange — an art-pop song shaped less like a pop structure than like a tide coming in. Co-produced with Danny L Harle, it opens on shimmering, watery synth pads and a soft, almost trip-hop drum pattern, and the low end is a rounded, liquid sub that makes the whole track feel submerged. Her vocal is processed into layers of hovering harmony, phrases dissolving into breath, with the delivery closer to incantation than to verse-chorus singing. The lyric is a catalogue of abundance and appetite — riches, honeyed images, hands and skin, a sensuality that keeps sliding into the cosmic — with the recurring "I never felt so close to you" acting as a refrain of overwhelmed intimacy. Then the ending: the Trinity Choir of boys' voices singing "I've been hungry all my life," a jolt of unexpected sacred choral music that recontextualizes the whole song as a hymn about wanting. That gesture, both funny and genuinely transcendent, is why the track became the emblem of Desire, I Want to Turn Into You. Listen with good headphones, ideally horizontal, ideally somewhere dark, and let the last minute take the top of your head off.