Blood

This is quieter than you expect from this band, and that restraint is the source of its power. The song moves slowly, deliberately, with a sparse arrangement that lets each guitar note breathe before the next one arrives. There's a low-end hum underneath everything, a kind of rumble that suggests something unresolved, something that might gather force at any moment. Tom Smith's voice is stripped of the grand swells he often reaches for elsewhere — here he sings almost tenderly, which makes the emotional stakes feel more intimate and therefore more acute. The subject is love and sacrifice and the willingness to absorb harm to protect someone else, the kind of devotion that is both beautiful and slightly frightening in its completeness. What the song captures is the particular exhaustion that comes from caring so deeply about something — the way love can feel like weight as much as lift. Sonically, it belongs to the quieter strand of the post-punk revival, the side that learned from the skeletal, haunted work of the Cure rather than the anthemic side. You reach for this song in the small hours, when the night has gone long and whatever you're feeling has moved past the point where loud music makes any sense — when you need something that acknowledges darkness without dramatizing it, that sits with you rather than performing emotion at you.