Yulia, the World Is Ending Anyway

"Yulia" closes out Expo 86—Wolf Parade’s third album and, as it turned out, effectively their last before the hiatus swallowed them whole—with Spencer Krug’s voice stretched to its limit over a synth line that feels simultaneously triumphant and like a building on fire. The song is named for Yulia Tymoshenko, Ukraine’s braided prime minister, and it has that quality Krug does best: apocalyptic urgency dressed up as a love letter, or possibly the other way around. Expo 86 had been out since June and I’d been sitting with it all summer; by the time autumn arrived, "Yulia" was the track that kept surfacing—not the catchiest, not the most immediate, but the one with the most weather in it.