Running for over 8 minutes, "These Streets Will Never Look the Same" is one of the longest tracks on Chromatics' critically acclaimed fourth album, Kill for Love (2012). While it coheres with the album's aesthetic, "atmospheric, deeply stylish aural landscapes in pop song silhouettes, and darkly glistening electronic "pop" infused with post-punk's steely, nihilistic ennui" (K. Ross Hoffman, AllMusic.com), it's also one of the two songs on the album with a male lead vocal (instead of lead vocalist Ruth Radelet), rendered slightly robotic with a vocal harmonizer.
The track immerses you in a hazy, repetitive inertness as it fleshes out an isolated psyche with protracted guitar tension:
'Spent my life inside this roomAnd disappeared some more each daySpent my life inside this roomAnd disappeared some more each day
The screen stayed flashing in my mind (4x)
Lyrics: Genius
The lyrical persona 'confesses' all his anxieties about his present lack of emotional attachments ('I get so lonely all the time/ I try to find my way back home') and hang-ups about the past ('I couldn't run away from you/ You kept me hanging on the line ... These streets will never look the same/ My broken heart erased your name'), but the track isn't interested in resolutions or progress. As Salon's Jesse Cataldo notes, the album's aesthetic is governed by the "repetitive fruitlessness of nostalgia ... The looping structures that undergird these songs aren’t engines of self-sustaining dynamism like they are in the dance music that inspired much of the album; they’re indicators of exhaustion and discontent".
The track's fragmented, confessional lyricism and moody, cinematic instrumentals immerse you fully into this atmospheric emotional fatigue, but the inertness is somehow hypnotic and addictive, the way the past becomes wrapped in additional layers of rose-tinted nostalgia each time you examine it in your mind's eye.
