Shellshock

Commissioned for the John Hughes film Sixteen Candles, this track has an almost cinematic quality — synthesizers shimmering with a kind of wide-screen emotional reach that suits teenage longing better than most explicitly youth-oriented music manages. The production is crisp and slightly cold in that mid-80s way, but there's genuine warmth in the melody, which lifts in the chorus with the casual beauty of something that knows exactly what it is. Lyrically it occupies yearning — a specific, inarticulate teenage desire for something undefined, the feeling of wanting without knowing what you want. Sumner's vocal has an unguarded quality here. As a piece of pop-cultural history it's inseparable from the Hughes teenage-melodrama universe, but divorced from that context it stands as an almost perfect distillation of a specific emotional state. The synthesizer line at the end is quietly devastating.