Can't Keep Checking My Phone

This is the sound of anxiety rendered as disco. Built on a spring-loaded bassline and a hi-hat pattern that never lets the pulse rest, "Can't Keep Checking My Phone" is the most explicitly danceable thing Unknown Mortal Orchestra had made, and Nielson makes sure it never feels clean — the whole track is smeared with tape hiss, the synth stabs slightly out of tune, a cheap organ tone wheezing under the chorus. His falsetto is high, thin, and pleading, doubled just enough to sound like two versions of the same person arguing. The subject is the specific 2015 humiliation of compulsive checking: waiting on a message from someone who has stopped writing, refreshing a screen that offers nothing, aware the whole time of how pathetic the loop is and unable to break it. He renders it without self-pity, almost cheerfully, which is what makes it land — the body keeps dancing while the mind keeps refreshing. It's an early, unusually precise pop artifact of smartphone-era longing, arriving before that subject calcified into cliché. Best heard alone in a room at night, or in headphones on a crowded train where everyone around you is doing the exact thing the song describes.