The Past Is a Grotesque Animal

Kevin Barnes wrote Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? during the collapse of his marriage in Oslo, Norway. He was alone, depressed, watching his sense of self dissolve under the weight of the wrong life in the wrong city. The album is his document of that dissolution, and “The Past Is a Grotesque Animal” — eleven minutes and fifty-three seconds of it — is where the document becomes something uncontrollable.

The song opens with a groove that sounds almost danceable, the synths bright and pulsing, the rhythm section locked in. This is intentional misdirection: of Montreal is going to use the language of dance music to talk about the death of a relationship, and the gap between form and content is where the devastation lives. Barnes begins describing a relationship from the inside — the specific way intimacy builds over years, the private language that develops, the particular horror of watching it reverse.

The instrumentation mutates across the song’s length. Arrangements collapse and reassemble. The groove that opened the song returns periodically like a refrain, but it sounds different each time — slightly more frantic, slightly less stable. By the nine-minute mark, the song is no longer interested in structure. Barnes is cycling through fury, despair, self-awareness, and something approaching bitter peace at a pace that feels genuinely unmoored.

“I fell in love with the first pretty girl that I met / Who could appreciate Georges Bataille / Standing in a rainy doorway.”

What distinguishes “The Past Is a Grotesque Animal” from a thousand other breakup songs is Barnes’s refusal to sentimentalize. The relationship being described was real and specific and flawed and therefore worth grieving exactly as it was, not as a prettier version of itself. The grotesque animal of the title is the past that we carry — not as it happened but as we’ve transformed it in memory, with all the distortions that grief and longing introduce.

Pitchfork ranked it among the best tracks of the decade. The people who found it agreed, and passed it on.