Years & Years' Theodicy of Queer Desire

by guest contributor Grant Hartley

Years & Years makes music that I—deeply closeted in high school and the beginning of college—always imagined would play at the clubs I was too terrified to enter: overtly sensual, intentionally provocative, danceable. I listened to them almost from the beginning, thanks to my younger brother’s suggestion, a way to bridge the gap between my (at the time) deepening evangelical religiosity and his burgeoning agnosticism; the lyrics drew on religious themes in subversive and sometimes blasphemous ways, but it was a language that comforted me, and it appeared alongside a world I was slowly coming to celebrate.

The subversion of religious themes in pop music is nothing new, especially from queer artists and the divas we fawn over. And while it can certainly offend, it is understandable: a natural response to religion-as-weapon is to take up the sword. But I think there could be something more to the religious language in the music of Years & Years…something beyond simply an unthinking repetition of what has come before or a mere provocation. The spiritual edge of front man Olly Alexander’s lyricism hints at a kind of doomed longing—and forces one to question why: is it, as some might say, in the nature of gay desire, divorced from reproductive generativity, or does no erotic desire (gay, straight, whatever) ever find its end?

Communion is an ironically named album; there is not much real communion in it at all, only various failed attempts or flawed forms of it. The first track, “Foundation,” sets the stage well: “everything I want / I really shouldn’t get”—and in the tracks that follow are desires the listener is prompted to mistrust: “I’ll do what you like if you stay the night” in “Real”; “I want to be the one you steal/shield/that your love can heal” in “Shine”; “do what you want tonight / it’s alright if you want to get used” in “Take Shelter”. That last line sums up how the album feels to me: getting used. Power, subjugation, loss of control—“King” (“I was a king under your control”) and “Desire” (“I want desire / ‘cause your love only gets me abused”) epitomize this, but evidence a fear of intimate vulnerability as well: reduction to the merely physical and sexual is preferable to a more painful emotional wounding. 

The religious language in “Worship” (which Alexander has called a “fucked-up love song”) is one variation: “blind devotion,” a kind of spiritual madness. There is something about the longing here that seems to exceed human capacity to fulfill, and in that sense it is not unlike the longing for the “dark man” of gay dreams described by Quentin Crisp (you can read more about that here), or the “impossible desire” of The Little Mermaid. Faced with an insurmountable obstacle to union with the beloved, the only solution is a turn to the magical—or the miraculous. “I worship, high praises / my longing drives me crazy for you / my kingdom for your graces.” 

We can definitely be reading too much into the language here—it is certainly possible that “Worship” represents little more than a playful word game—but it seems to have struck a chord, as it is deployed even more abundantly in Palo Santo (and to a certain extent, in Night Call). If Communion is really an exploration of failed communion, of impossible desire, then Palo Santo repeatedly turns to the themes of failed confession: a lack of integrity, duplicity, deception, and even a disjunction between the body and one’s inner truth (“I don’t want to be something objectified,” he sings in “Rendezvous”). The album is populated by a cast of disappointing men (the repressed closet case in "Sanctify" and "Preacher," the douchey manipulator in "All For You," the sexy-but-bad-for-you old flame in the title track), and Alexander admits that the title itself is a tongue-in-cheek way of poking fun at the kind of man who thinks his dick is divine. 

The first four tracks in particular are saturated with religion. “Sanctify” adopts the language of confession. The last line of the chorus, “sanctify my sins when I pray,” although it doesn’t quite work (I get the sense Alexander doesn’t exactly get the gist of the sacrament), evokes a kind of “sexual baptism,” to use his words—the act of kneeling being the occasion for both prayer and, ahem, sexual pleasure. “Hallelujah” is a straightforward association between sex and worship, orgasm and transcendence. “All For You” is a lament about betrayal, and features kneeling again, at “the temple” of the beloved (okay, we get it). For all its eye-rolling at toxic men, Alexander seems to hold out hope that there really is a god-like perfect man out there; he’s holding out for a hero.

Interestingly, it is “Karma,” I think, that holds somewhat of an interpretive key: “Tell me I’m broken by design / so I can’t see the beauty in my flaws / and find some piece of mind,” describing the approach of subverting religious antagonism. He is fed up with the lies, whether pushed by a partner or preached from the pulpit (or both, as in “Preacher,” in which his lover is also “a preacher / but he’s preaching a lie”). Alexander seems to have landed on a vocabulary that is able to describe the contours of his outsized desire: it is the language of the Church, distorted through a fun house mirror.

Night Call, the first album after Years & Years became a solo act, Alexander re-hashes the same themes from previous albums, but sans the religious element: "Consequences" reimagines "Karma" from Palo Santo, "Starstruck" reimagines "Shine" from Communion, etc. The lone track featuring religious language, "Immaculate," revisits a supernatural image from “All For You”: “you’ve got powers / you instructed all the demons instead” becomes “fallen angel / almost heavenly” before describing the ecstasy of romantic love as a radical purity. Again, it seems he doesn’t really know what he’s saying (as one of my cradle Catholic friends commented, “‘immaculate’ doesn’t just mean ‘hot’”). With the religious language mostly replaced by an ambiguous “Strange and Unusual” vibe, the impossible desire of the previous two albums seems muted (even the cover image is a dark reversal of The Little Mermaid’s Ariel: a magical, sexy siren).

It is difficult to discern the degree of intentionality (or lack thereof) in the religious imagery in Communion and Palo Santo; one suspects that it only pretends at profundity, that it is evocative but ultimately empty, ready for the listener to import whatever meaning they wish (I think of the four of swords featured prominently in the music video for “Foundation,” tarot cards being a supreme example of imposed meaning). 

But if we take Alexander seriously, there are two potential lessons to learn from this example of impossible gay longing that reaches for the language of religion to express itself: either it is about a particularly pathological nature of gay desire (i.e. divorced from biology and procreation, it longs for more but is fatally flawed, doomed—which I don’t particularly buy), or about the fundamentally religious character of all erotic desire (i.e. all such longing is actually limitless, exceeding the human capacity to fulfill). Perhaps this gay longing, too, hints at epektasis—a journey into the Infinite that entails a never-ending, unsatisfiable desire for God.

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photo courtesy of The Guardian.