Wonderland

This crashes in like something that has been held too long and suddenly released — swirling, slightly disorienting production that borrows from both baroque pop and theatrical rock, all tumbling percussion and layered vocals and an arrangement that suggests controlled chaos rather than actual chaos. The emotional atmosphere is one of velocity, of being swept up inside a feeling so fast that rational thought can't keep pace — love rendered as a Lewis Carroll landscape where the logic keeps shifting underfoot. Vocally it's playful and slightly unhinged in the best sense, the voice flexible enough to move from sweetness to something with an edge in the same phrase, tracking the emotional instability the lyric describes. The lyrical conceit, following a relationship through imagery borrowed from fairy-tale and nightmare alike, captures something true about the early stages of intense romantic connection: the way it can feel simultaneously like discovery and like losing your footing. It belongs to a lineage of songs that understand love and anxiety as next-door neighbors, that the feeling of falling for someone and the feeling of falling are not entirely distinguishable. Culturally it represents a certain maximalist moment in pop production — everything turned up slightly past comfortable. You reach for this in the exhilarating, slightly terrifying first weeks of something new, when you can't decide if you're thrilled or terrified, and the answer keeps changing every three minutes.