"Grounds for Resentment", the second single from British musician Kele Okereke's upcoming third album Fatherland (October 6), has been compared to Halsey's "Strangers" by virtue of being a queer romantic duet (with Years and Years' Olly Alexander in the former, with Fifth Harmony's Lauren Jauregui in the latter). In a web chat on The Guardian last month, Okereke noted that his decision to collaborate with Alexander was indeed motivated by the lack of 'openly queer' songs from openly queer musicians:
"I remember reading something that [Alexander] wrote about the use of pronouns in pop music for gay artists that I thought that was very perceptive and intelligent – just that the use of pronouns was the last frontier for gay artists. There are lots of gay acts that avoid using the term he when singing about same sex desire. It will just be a neutral term, whereas Olly understands from what I read that there is a long way to go for gay musicians in being able to describe love and desire authentically. So I was very happy to sing a romantic duet with him on my album, because I couldn't think of a precedent of any out gay musicians singing a love song to one another without having to hide behind codes. It was nice to put that all out there".
The song nevertheless wears its precedent-setting status lightly, playing down the melodrama that Halsey and Jauregui crafted on their breakup duet. Having drawn inspiration from Elliott Smith, Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell, and Al Green, Okereke is more invested in mapping out the slow dissolution of a modern romance than he is in evoking an emotional roller-coaster. Against a backdrop of smooth, breezy and folk-inflected electro-pop, his amiable falsetto describes the bittersweetness of it all: 'At the table we're polite/ I make a joke but it falls flat/ Silence falls where laughter daily used to blow/ Your job is fine, your friends are cool/ You will make me work for you/ Bitter medicine's exactly what I need'.
When Alexander sings the second verse, the picture is complete. Both sides are coping with the sting of separation in their own way, confessing to the listener what they cannot bring themselves to reveal to their ex-lover: 'I think I'm angry and I'm sad/ I kept your T-shirt and your cap/ All this evidence is surely looking bad/ Well do you think about me still?/ Are you happy and fulfilled?/ Will I always have a cut that doesn't heal'.
There are no accusations of blame or any attempts to dissect the doomed romance at hand. There are memories of passion and bliss, acknowledgments of the awkwardness at hand, and a shred of hope that the plot can be reversed: '(When I caught your eye) I could tell the flame was far from gone/ Am I wrong?'. The tranquil electro beats slow down after the question, allowing the listener to bask in a jazzy, open-ended limbo.
