179. Song No. 2,633: “Does This Mean You’re Moving On?,” The Airborne Toxic Effect
The Airborne Toxic Effect, 2008

Okaaaaay, sometimes my husband’s music collection contains a few secrets that just delight the hell outta me. Airborne Toxic Effect, kudos on being one of them.

In what is quite possibly the bounciest post-breakup song tracing the contours of that particular hell, this track runs the gamut of how people torture themselves when the wound of a failed romance is too raw to resist poking at: the imagined conversations, the fraught back-and-forth of calling and not calling your ex, the dramatic confessions, the physical ruin, the emotional anguish. The familiar trope of wailing and railing against the ashes of a spectacularly imploded relationship isn’t told from the depths of despair and narrated by a broken heart here: It’s soaked in brown liquor and city rain and lustily screaming the pain away from the gutters on Bowery, and it’s all the better for it. Pain is a lot more interesting and multidimensional when it has the courage to be angry, and this song does that phenomenally well.