Almost all forms of music seek to speak, from time to time, of love, and from time to time of sex. But pop music stands alone in its obsession with their convergence point, where they become interchangeable or indistinguishable or simply confused with one another. "Is it desire, or is it love that I’m feeling for you?" Years & Years singer Olly Alexander asks, in characteristically dramatic fashion on "Desire", and the law of pop melodrama demands that the question go unanswered. So it goes with the music: is it the easy populism of Years & Years’ honed, slick dance-pop that intoxicates, or a transmission of deeper truths? But why separate the two?
The majority of the songs on the British trio’s debut album Communion marry thematic precision with the broad kinetics of great pop songwriting, mingling self-loathing and doubt with a redemptive, near-bloody-minded push to prettiness and uplift. Only the excellent single "Shine" is as upbeat as it is up-tempo, and even then the happiness feels so hard-won it can’t help but imply its opposite. The songs carefully map the contours of gay sensuality, filtering lust through a variety of counterparts: not just shame, but vulnerability, self-awareness and annihilating self-abandon. Where Bronski Beat once crafted colossal club-pop out of tales of marginalization and abuse, Years & Years occupy a more subtle, liminal contemporary world, one of feeling isolated amidst a crowd of bodies. "I’ll do what you like if you stay the night," Olly bargains on "Real", and then later offers on the seductive slow-grind of "Take Shelter", "do what you want tonight/ It’s alright." On "Worship", he promises "I’m not gonna tell nobody ‘bout you," and finally, on the wracked, gorgeous closer "Memo", he begs, "Let me take your heart/ Love you in the dark/ No one has to see." In each case the character of the song is made small and powerless by the asymmetry of desire, which renders the stadium-chant backing vocals and sun-from-behind-clouds synth bursts more perverse and exhilarating than they have any right to be on their own.
Remove or ignore that contradiction, and Years & Years’ musical familiarity might breed contempt. You could dismiss their overblown choruses and sculpted electro-house arrangements as just the most commercial manifestation yet of a decade’s worth of also-ran bands reimagining '80s and '90s club-pop; MGMT’s "Electric Feel" strained through Disclosure’s snappy post-garage percussion and Sam Smith’s middlebrow wallowing. But Years & Years don't dilute this formula, they distill it: Communion’s biggest hit thus far, the high-gloss anthem "King", attains a kind of formal loveliness not witnessed in this genre since Madonna’s "Get Together" almost a decade ago.
Here, and on the album’s other highlights, the air of mercantile anonymity feels generous rather than cynical, the music as anxious to accommodate its imagined audience as Olly is his lovers, to be the song that made you dance all night even though you can’t remember a word of it now (i.e. to be the best song ever, as One Direction rightly observed). How else could you end up with a song like "Worship": a bright xylophone bounce for the verses, and a chorus that references gospel via diva-house via the Wanted’s "I Found You"? Appropriately, the band sounds too delirious to feel any shame.
Years & Years are weakest when seeking to project dignity, a noble bearing up in the face of life’s torments and disappointments ("Eyes Shut", "Gold", "Without"). Then, the arrangements veer towards placating grand gestures, and Olly’s "soaring" vocals threaten to become cloying. Conversely, the ballad "Memo" is perhaps the album’s pinnacle, at least in part because of its defiant specificity. Over slow piano chords and halting percussion, Olly describes in fragile falsetto his infatuation for a straight male friend ("You see yourself in another way/ I try my best but I don’t ever change"), doomed to be unrequited although perhaps not unconsummated (the repeated refrain, "I want more", works either way). Although its lip trembles with the tremulousness of its longing, at another level "Memo" is ice cold: what kind of love, it asks, would place lovers in such an impossible bind? Again, there's no answer on Communion, but you can always return to the dancefloor and try to find it again.
