As the World Caves In

Matt Maltese delivers the end of the world as a dinner party anecdote, and somehow that's more unsettling than if he'd screamed about it. "As the World Caves In" moves on a stately, theatrical piano progression that wouldn't be out of place in a West End musical — broad, deliberate chords that give the song an almost ceremonial weight, the grandeur of watching something important collapse in slow motion. There's a cabaret quality to the production, a kind of sardonic English formality, complete with subtle orchestral swells that arrive not to comfort but to underline the absurdity. Maltese sings with a dry, deadpan baritone that belongs to a tradition of British wry wit — somewhere between Randy Newman and a very tired satirist on BBC Radio 4. The lyric constructs an absurd scenario involving political figures and the end of civilization while remaining oddly intimate, treating global catastrophe with the same weary resignation someone might apply to a delayed train. The emotional texture is simultaneously funny and genuinely bleak; the joke and the horror coexist without either canceling the other out. This is a song for people who cope with despair through irony, who laugh at the news not because they find it funny but because weeping feels indulgent. It arrived in 2017 when that particular psychic condition felt freshly relevant, and has only aged into greater resonance. Best experienced at full volume in a kitchen while something burns on the stove.