My parents moved to Queens, N.Y. from the Philippines in their late twenties knowing no one. After signing the lease on their first apartment, they shared an unusually adventurous moment—walking through a door carelessly left ajar and climbing to a rooftop. They breathed in the city air and looked out towards a skyline messy and unknown. I can only imagine what that felt like. The intoxicating grandeur. The raw nerves. In the opening seconds of Dev Hynes’ new song, “Augustine,” he sings, “My father was a young man/My mother off the boat/My eyes were fresh at 21/Bruised but still afloat.” It was startling to hear. “Augustine” addresses a shared experience of transience, faith, and the complications of urban life that I have never been able to put words to.

Moments later, Hynes quotes a famous section from Confessions by Saint Augustine, the theologian and philosopher who spread Christianity in Africa. “Late have I loved and chose to see,” Hynes sings, “Skin on his skin/A warmth that I can feel with him.” In that passage, Augustine describes a moment of revelation as a cry that breaks his deafness. With heartbreaking empathy, Hynes retools Augustine’s story to describe the shattering shifts that have occurred in American life with regards to the vulnerability of black bodies: “And no one even told me the way that you should feel/Tell me did you lose your son?/Tell me did you lose your love?/Cry and burst my deafness, while Trayvon falls asleep.”

Of course, “Augustine” is about more than just these stories. It is made from only three sounds (drum machine, guitar, and piano), but its scale is enormous. Its tapestry is both intimate and global, spanning observations on life in New York and the West African religious leader Nontetha Nkwenkwe. Hynes even sings the last seconds of the song in Krio (the national language of Sierra Leone, where his father is from). “Augustine” is a stunning epiphany of a song that wraps itself around you, whispering into your ear all of history's power and pain.