Marcel Winatschek

Everything Bright and Blurred

The Naked and Famous released their debut album, Passive Me, Aggressive You, out of Auckland in 2010, and The Sun is one of its less-celebrated tracks—which is to say it’s better than most bands’ best moments. The whole record runs on overdriven synths and Alisa Xayalith’s vocals pitched somewhere between yearning and resignation, and The Sun pushes that combination as far as it goes: big, washed-out, slightly aching. I kept returning to it in the months after I first heard it, the way you return to something that names a feeling you hadn’t found words for yet.