This is it. The best song of 2019. ‘Movies’ by Weyes Blood is an ethereal and glimmering song about the inevitability of fate, and the fixation and curiosity about what other lives we may have possibly led. In many ways, ‘Movies’ is the sonic sister of Infinite Jest, a 1996 novel by David Foster Wallace. Infinite Jest features a movie so entertaining and grossing that the viewer loses all desire to do anything but watch until they die.

Though Weyes Blood depicts film in ‘Movies’ as a source of wonder, hope and beauty; there’s an inevitable sadness that thematically aligns with the work of the late Wallace. The fixation in ‘Movies’ draws from the concept behind its album Titanic Rising. As an album about finding love in the inevitability of death by global warming, Weyes Blood paints humanity as generous and beautiful, choosing to focus on love rather than destruction.

There have been an infinite number of comparisons between the baroque pop of Weyes Blood’s ‘Movies’ and 70’s influences à la Joni Mitchell, The Carpenters and The Beach Boys, among others. What separates Weyes Blood’s timeless sound from her predecessors, is the desire to escape to a simpler, happier time. As an exploration about the universality of love and the effects of global warming, there’s no way that this exact record could have existed without the conditions that inspired to Weyes Blood to look away from the world - to look towards the ‘Movies’.

- Sean Tayler