Haiti

Propelled by a rhythm that feels like it was always playing somewhere in the background of history, this song arrives with a density that is both musical and political. Régine Chassagne wrote it about Haiti — her parents' homeland, the country they fled — and that biographical weight permeates every layer of the recording. The production on Funeral was lo-fi and urgent in general, but here there's a particular rawness, a sense that the sound itself has been compressed under pressure. Drums hit hard and unapologetically, the guitar carries a kind of defiant energy, and Chassagne's voice shifts between something haunting and something almost incantatory, as if the song is equal parts lament and invocation. The lyrics don't explain Haiti from the outside — they speak from inside a family's specific memory, naming relatives, naming history, refusing to let diaspora become abstraction. There's a chant-like quality to the repetition, a way of insisting that these names and places not be forgotten. Musically it builds and releases in cycles that feel almost ceremonial. This is a song that understands that cultural identity is something that gets carried in the body — in rhythm, in call-and-response, in the act of saying a name aloud again and again. It sits apart from the rest of Funeral in its specific geography, asking the listener to hold a country's pain rather than their own.