Top Lyrics of 2024: Phosphorescent
The year’s end always brings a flurry of lists rounding up and ranking 2024’s musical output. Amid the countless breakdowns—of songs and albums and artists—I found myself contemplating the standout lyrics I’d heard over the past twelve months. What would that inventory look like?
Near the top, assuredly, would be a line from Phosphorescent‘s song “Revelator,” the title track from his album by the same name. “Revelator” is a song about shellshock couched in the warmest atmosphere. Three chord changes—G to A to D—are done as leisurely strums before delicate drums and backing strings begin infusing the song with additional tenderness. When your world completely explodes, it’s best to step softly.
As Matthew Houck surveys the end of a relationship at a time of larger crisis (“But the city been shut down”), he paints this nadir as the engulfing crater it is. Surrounded once by the assurance of those things that often infuse life with spirit—people to love, meaningful work, edifying environments—Houck cannot make sense of the new world he faces. “And we’ve ridden beyond where we could safely touch down/ And we’re out in the void, past where we could’ve had turned around/ I tried my feet on the floor, tried to beat on the door/ But it didn’t even make a sound,” he sings, the meter of the song providing a structure the experience cannot.
The size of those losses extends like a fault line to his sense of self. “I don’t even like what I write/ I don’t even like what I like anymore,” he sings in one of the heartbreaking song’s most heartbreaking moments. Dude, same.
As lovely as all of those lines are—and they are, lovely—there’s one moment in the first verse that always catches me. “It’s only survival/ Only not dead upon arrival,” Houck sings with palpable weariness. It summarizes his exhaustion with a reality that involves more posturing than authenticity, and which may have been the inciting incident to the fallout he chronicles throughout the track. Listing various masks—of sadness, of madness, of being a badass—he cannot abide wearing any longer, he lands on the line that’s stuck with me since I first heard it earlier this year.
All of that living rings hollow. It’s only survival—only not dead upon arrival. There’s no comfort to these observations, but the mere fact of their being spoken—acknowledged—feels like enough.
Phosphorescent easily takes up two spots on this imaginary best-of lyrical list thanks to another Revelator song that shines like a mirror. Earlier this year, I wrote about an unshakeable sense that the world was ending based on how most people were choosing to ignore covid despite mounting evidence of the serious harms it continues posing. It felt dystopian—a sentiment found in certain tracks from Adrianne Lenker and Hurray for the Riff Raff, which made it easier to bear the burden.
Enter Phosphorescent with the on-the-nose title, “The World Is Ending,” which stares down a hard, unshakable truth. Houck describes how the world has been transforming into something unfamiliar. Though unsaid, you can hear at the margins of his meaning the rapid and unsettling changes to culture (I think here about AI, short-form clips and dwindling attention spans, the rise of personal brands) that have changed what it means to make, perform, and consume art—or simply be a person. “I’ve been reading the reviews/ It’s a new world, babe, I can’t behave/ As if I know what to do,” Houck sings against a lightly swaying beat. The song has a cheery quality despite its darker subject.
On the chorus, as sentimental synths practically pirouette around his voice, Houck sings one of the more beautiful lyrics I’ve heard all year: “‘Cause I belong to an older song/ It’s a feeling unrelenting/ And I might have apologized/ But I have never been wrong/ I know the world is ending.” His voice is heavy with resignation, as though he’s accepted this turning point with hard-won grace. Relinquishment may look like defeat but actually feels closer to the loveliest acceptance.
There’s a moment near the end when it seems like Houck might be referencing something beyond the societal and cultural shifts informing the majority of the song. He seems to nod to climate change, to the pressing and more frightening reality that our time on this planet is rapidly coming to a close. “Until they send some scientist/ To come and prove me wrong/ I know the world is ending,” he sings, repeating that last line three more times.
What a thing to witness. What a way to capture it.
