An Unanswered Question in Four-Four Time

Why Don’t You Answer? is exactly what Friendly Fires do best—anxious emotion dressed up in disco clothes, Ed Macfarlane’s voice pitched somewhere between want and frustration. It’s from Pala, their 2011 album, which I came back to more times than I expected. There’s always been a tension in their music between how euphoric the production sounds and how quietly desperate the emotional content is underneath. That gap is what makes them interesting, and this track lives right in the middle of it.