Oil

A deeply strange and strangely beautiful collision of two eras and two sensibilities, "Oil" pairs Gorillaz's characteristically woozy, sun-baked post-apocalyptic groove with Stevie Nicks's weathered, witchy alto in a pairing that should feel jarring and instead feels inevitable. Damon Albarn constructs a laconic blues-inflected bed — sparse percussion, organ haze, guitar that slides rather than strikes — and Nicks arrives like a prophecy delivered unhurriedly, her voice carrying forty years of rock mythology with it. The song concerns itself with environmental and civilizational decay, but never with the strident urgency of a protest anthem; instead it approaches catastrophe with a kind of weary mystical resignation, as though the reckoning being described has already occurred and what we're hearing is the elegy. There's a cinematic quality to its slowness, the feeling of watching something enormous and inevitable from a great distance. This sits comfortably within Gorillaz's tradition of unlikely intergenerational collaborations that illuminate something true about both artists — Nicks sounds more herself here than she has in years, her theatricality finding a frame that doesn't diminish it. Reach for this one at dusk, driving through somewhere flat and vast, when the scale of the world outside the window matches the scale of the melancholy inside.