The Ballad That Sounds Like a Falling City

Youth Novels is one of those albums I can no longer hear clearly because I listened to it too many times in a specific season. It’s inseparable from the year it belongs to—which is awkward once you know that Lykke Li hates it. The artist has moved past the thing you’ve been carrying around for years. There’s something about that, some complicated mix of abandoned and oddly proprietary, that only makes her more interesting to me.

I Never Learn arrived earlier this year, and "Gunshot" is where the album reaches maximum velocity. Orchestral, heavy, the kind of track that expands to fill whatever room you play it in. The most bombastic ballad of the year—no comparable candidate exists.

What I keep returning to with Lykke Li is the combination: a voice that sounds breakable and arrangements that refuse to break. "Gunshot" is a song about the end of love that sounds like a capital city falling. That’s a specific and rare skill. Most people write either small heartbreak songs or large melodramatic ones. She writes songs where the scale of the music is exactly equal to how destruction feels from the inside. The wound isn’t small. The song shouldn’t be either.

Turn it up. Something will loosen.