Getting pulled in by the song’s story line might deny you the pleasure of its call to the dance floor, and being too caught up in the demand to dance might render the narrative pointless. The trick of the sonic and lyrical imbalances here is that if you get too swept up in one, you might be able to shove the other to the back of your mind, if even for a moment. The instrumental intro is danceable and upbeat, but then the first line pulls a curtain back on another reality: Our narrator has a wife and kids he has left, hitting the road and not looking back. Like Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart,” a song I found myself returning to early and often in my pandemic playlists. Sad bangers aren’t a new phenomenon - but the old ones have a new potency. We are all suffering from a prolonged hunger, and the realities of our circumstances won’t let us be satiated. Some of these songs were decades old, some of them brand-new, but all of them speak to the frequent misalignment between what the body wants and the mind understands. My pandemic soundtracks came to revolve around what I call “sad bangers.” More plainly put, songs whose lyrics of grief, anxiety, yearning or some other mild or great darkness are washed over with an upbeat tune, or a chorus so infectious that it can weave its way into your brain without your brain taking stock of whatever emotional damage it carries with it. The minute-by-minute emotional contradictions of this era have been fascinating to watch unfold, and I’ve been searching for music capacious enough to hold them all.

I enjoyed the idea of these events - but the thought of attending them filled me with a cocktail of longing and dread, despite the immense pleasure I felt in seeing the faces of people I loved. This was a result of prolonged pandemic living and all the little rituals we’ve devised to get through it: the Zoom birthday parties, wedding receptions, dance get-togethers, trivia nights. I have spent a lot of time these last two years managing small collisions of feeling: sadness laid over pleasure, heartbreak laid over some unnamed desire.

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