It's difficult to see Broken Social Scene's music as anything other than an antidote right now. We're all that much more paranoid and depressed than we were a few months ago—maybe even a day ago—and here's a band returning from the wilderness with a album called Hug of Thunder, the follow up to an album called Forgiveness Rock Record. They're still making songs that sound vast and cacophonous, tracks that are built to flood the brain with serotonin. Playing at Manchester's Albert Hall the night after 22 people—mostly girls and young women—were murdered outside of an Ariana Grande concert at the nearby MEN arena, the band opened their set with their beautiful "Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl": "Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me." Occasionally, it feels like they've dropped in from a parallel universe. Which is good. Because our one isn't working so well."Skyline," released late last night, is the third single from Hug of Thunder. Sonically, it's closer to the record's sprawling first single, "Halfway Home," than it is to the more delicate, Feist-fronted title track. It opens with hazy acoustic guitar and low horns, filling out with indistinct synths and howls while Kevin Drew repeats a rapturous lyric: "Skyline waits for the world / Skyline waits for the fall / But you shouldn't have come all / Because I know / You're never gonna be that way."Listen to the track in full at the top of the page.Follow Alex Robert Ross on Twitter.
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