You’ll Be Humming It for a Week

It’s a do-do-do melody. That’s the whole mechanism. San Cisco built Awkward around a wordless hook so simple it shouldn’t work and so catchy it absolutely does, and two years after its 2011 release I spent an entire day walking around muttering it under my breath without noticing I’d started.

The song is about two people too socially paralyzed to text each other back, which the video makes literal with a visual gag that explains precisely why communication between them is impossible. The premise is slight. The execution is somehow perfect. The Australian band from Fremantle constructed exactly the kind of track that sounds effortless and probably wasn’t—deceptively simple arrangement, chorus that arrives exactly when it should, melody that lodges in the brain and refuses eviction.

You will hate me for clicking play. You’ll also be humming it all week, and you won’t even be annoyed about it.