Goldfrapp / Silver Eye / 2017
Anymore
urgent, incantatory, feverish
A hypnotic, minimal-lyric track built almost entirely on desire and impatience, where sexual and mystical/transcendent longing blur together. Goldfrapp use repetition and pulse rather than narrative to enact the very craving the words describe.
desire and impatience transformation through another the sacred and the carnal merged surrender of self altered states/transcendence
Who's speaking
A first-person speaker addresses a lover or desired figure directly, using imperative and declarative statements of need; the voice is almost possessed, more chant than confession, and its reliability is beside the point since the song is about sensation rather than reflection.
What happens
There isn't a plot so much as an escalation: the song opens with plain statements of want, moves into sensory description of the beloved (scent, sound), then repeatedly demands to be taken across some threshold, before dissolving into pure vocal insistence by the end. The trajectory is from desire articulated to desire enacted as sound.
How it's built
The song relies on very short verses that quickly give way to an obsessively repeated refrain, which itself expands each time it returns (three lines, then four, then a stretched run-on version). A recurring bridge-like plea for connection interrupts the refrain twice, functioning almost as a ritual invocation. The final section drops new lyrical content almost entirely, looping fragments over the fading refrain, so the form itself performs exhaustion of language into pure repetition.
Section by section
Opening verse
The song begins with blunt, almost childlike declarations of want and need, stripped of metaphor, establishing desire as the song's entire subject before any scene-setting occurs.'
First refrain
The chant-like repetition introduces the song's central engine: impatience expressed not through complexity but through sheer reiteration, which will define the rest of the track.
Second verse
Sensory imagery elevates the beloved to something elemental and uncontrollable, comparing their scent to a storm, which reframes the earlier plain desire as something closer to awe.},
Bridge invocation
“Connect me, over to the other side”
This is the song's clearest gesture toward transcendence, framing the erotic encounter as a crossing into another state of being, almost a possession or ritual rather than a simple hookup.
Third verse
Music and dreaming become the operative metaphors here, suggesting the beloved doesn't just arouse but reshapes the speaker's consciousness, tying desire explicitly to transformation.
Extended refrain and outro
As the song nears its end, the lyric content thins out almost entirely, with the refrain stretching into breathless strings of repeated phrases and wordless sounds, formally dramatizing the collapse of patience and language into pure urgency.
Craft
- anaphora
- The insistent restart of the refrain phrase each time mimics compulsive thought, making the impatience structural rather than just stated.
- synesthesia
- Scent is described in terms of weather and sound is described in terms of dreaming, collapsing the senses into one another to suggest an overwhelming, disorienting attraction.
- escalating repetition
- The refrain lengthens and fragments as the song progresses, formally enacting the loss of control and patience the lyric describes.
- religious/mystical diction
- Words like divine and the imagery of crossing to another side borrow the vocabulary of spiritual transcendence to describe erotic longing, blurring the two.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as using erotic longing as a doorway to something more dissolving and transcendent — the repeated plea to be connected to another side suggests the encounter is imagined as a threshold experience, not just physical desire but a kind of ego loss or altered state. An alternative, simpler reading takes the song at face value as a straightforward song of sexual impatience, with the mystical language functioning as intensifying imagery rather than genuine spiritual metaphor. Both readings can coexist since the song deliberately keeps its vocabulary ambiguous between the carnal and the numinous.
Context
Silver Eye (2017) marked something of a return to a colder, more electronic and minimal-wave-inflected sound for Goldfrapp after the more folk-tinged Tales of Us. This track fits that shift, favoring pulse, repetition, and restraint in lyrical content over the ornate storytelling of some earlier records. I don't have confirmed biographical or production details about this specific song's writing process, so I'm working mainly from the text and the album's general stylistic reputation.
Listen for
- how the refrain physically lengthens and fragments as the song progresses
- the shift from storm and scent imagery to music and dream imagery between verses
- the way the bridge's plea for connection interrupts the refrain's momentum
- the sparseness of new lyrical content in the final third, replaced by wordless vocal sounds
- the tension between plain, blunt phrasing and more elevated, mystical word choices