The recently departed Jean Baudrillard once wrote, “television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.” Night falls, and televisions go on, the blue light burning away our fears; night falls, and the volume rises. Nowhere, Baudrillard suggests, is this endless daylight more visible than in our cities: air-conditioned, eternally lit banks of buildings contain crowds and crowds of children, alone and afraid of the dark.

Xiu Xiu has seen this city and lived to tell about it: as one might expect from a band founded in Southern California, their songs tend towards the cinematic, both in the lavishly violent sense of a Hollywood blockbuster, and in the way a chilly, empty movie theater can feel apocalyptically lonely. “Suha,” from 2002’s Knife Play, bridges these brutal extremes. Singer-songwriter Jamie Stewart tends towards melodrama—by the end of the song, he’s moaning, “My name is Suha / I’m twenty-five years old / I’m going to hump a cop”—and these indulgences sound tinny and false, weightless intelligences gathered from a “Law & Order” rerun. But when Stewart soars, he soars: after a moment of static fuzz, the song sweeps towards the chorus. “I hate the desert,” Stewart states, and you know what he hates is being deserted.

On their 2005 debut album, The Physics of Meaning took on that other big city, and “Manhattan Is an Island” is one of the loveliest, most forlorn portraits of urban discontent to date. The song is a flatline, its monotonous hum recalling the drone of an elevator, or the long, pale hallways of an apartment building. When Daniel Hart sings, “I was reborn a river / Drifting out to sea,” you see the gray East River, that much-maligned tidal strait whose islets were once home to the city’s insane asylums. The river’s deadly whirlpools earned it the name Hell Gate, and this macabre history permeates its way into “Manhattan Is an Island.” The song is almost deadly in its lonesomeness, yet Hart’s lyrics give way to hope. When he sings, “city’s holding out for a hero / I don’t want to fall out of love,” he reminds us that things weren’t always so dismal. The name Hell Gate, after all, derives from the Dutch word Helegat, which means “bright passage.” The city’s bright all night, it’s true, but sometimes that light is real, or at least we dream it is.

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