Song You Need: Yves Tumor’s post-punk panic attack

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Yves Tumor‘s glam-punk superstar persona makes it easy to forget that they, too, can fall victim to the cross-chatter in their brain. The inimitable swagger and vulnerability are both captured on the cover of their 2020 breakout Heaven To A Tortured Mind: two translucent Tumors overlapped, one naked and staring up at the sky with all the confidence of a newborn calf, the other defiantly exhaling smoke. Their new single, “God Is a Circle,” rests firmly in the former camp and paints Tumor, somewhat incredibly, as a failing student on the quest for self-knowledge.

The song launches with a tortured scream, its guiding energy a sample of sharp, panicked breaths sharpened with a subtle yet intense distortion. As the rolling post-punk bassline ups the stakes, Tumor enters in a depressive fog: “Sometimes / It feels like / There’s places in my mind that I can’t go / There’s people in my life I still don’t know, yeah / Wander ‘round I just feel like a ghost in a well.” The only bright spot is a relationship that throbs with codependency (“Everything around us feels so unclean / My momma said that God sees everything,” they sing in underwhelmed monotone) and the kind of submission that’s more reductive than kinky. As compelling as it is to witness Yves Tumor in his Teflon rock-god mode, songs like “God Is a Circle” lend dimension to this essential figure in modern music.