The Sharpest Lives

There is something urgent and slightly frantic about the way this song launches — the guitars come in hot and stay hot, the rhythm aggressive and barely contained, like a night that has already gotten away from you. The production has a compressed, almost claustrophobic density that suits its subject matter: excess, obliteration, the seductive glamour of self-destruction dressed up in glitter and black eyeliner. Way's delivery here is at its most unhinged-but-controlled, riding the line between performance and collapse, theatrical enough to keep it at arm's length but raw enough to make you wonder. The song is soaked in the aesthetics of decadent rock — the imagery of coffins and champagne, of burning bright and burning out — filtered through a post-punk lens that keeps it from feeling purely nostalgic. It's the most danceable thing the band ever made without quite admitting to that, a mosh-pit song with a pop heart buried inside it. Melodically it is relentless, hooks arriving before you've finished processing the last one. Thematically it romanticizes destruction while the production seems to be enacting it in real time. This is music for a venue with sticky floors and too many bodies, for the part of the night when bad decisions start sounding like the only honest ones.