Heart

One of the most purely pleasurable productions in the Pet Shop Boys catalog, "Heart" deploys every available synthetic texture in service of a lyric that is, at its core, about romantic obsession rendered as religious devotion. The track runs on an insistent synth line that functions like a pulse — you feel it before you process it — while layers of keyboard sound accumulate around Tennant's vocal, which for once allows itself something approaching vulnerability. The song borrows the emotional vocabulary of devotion, of surrender, of faith, and applies it to human desire with genuine sincerity rather than irony. Tennant sounds as though he means every word, and that sincerity is disarming coming from a pop act associated with cool detachment. The production is genuinely euphoric in the chorus, the kind of controlled ecstasy that made the late 1980s dance floor feel like a site of transformation rather than mere entertainment. It holds up as a perfectly realized piece of synthetic pop architecture.