Tusk

Almost nothing about this song sounds like it should work, and that's exactly why it does. Buckingham replaced the rhythm section with the USC Trojan Marching Band, and what emerges is something genuinely strange — a rock song that has the spine of a parade and the nervous energy of a fever dream. The drums are live and thunderous and slightly absurd, the guitars are angular and jagged, and Buckingham's vocal is almost confrontational in its strangeness, all coiled tension and compressed intensity. There's no chorus in any conventional sense, just a title word repeated until it becomes incantatory. The song documents the fractures inside Fleetwood Mac — creative ego, artistic stubbornness, a refusal to make anything comfortable — and the result is a piece of music that sounds like an argument that somehow resolved into something magnificent. Nicks's counter-vocal in the background functions less as harmony than as a second opinion. The production is deliberately lo-fi in places, which only heightens the sense of controlled chaos. This is not background music. It is confrontational, rhythmically disorienting, and utterly specific to a moment when a band decided that being strange was more interesting than being loved. Play it loud, in a room where you can move, and let it be as weird as it needs to be.