Don't Take the Light Away

Beloved Swedish synth-pop duo Kite’s first single for Dais captures their chemistry at its most urgent, thrilling, and apocalyptic: “Don’t Take The Light Away.” Described as a song about “the war between energies,” singer Nicklas Stenemo’s wounded croon leads a rising tide of stabbing strings, pulsing percussion, and looming bass orchestrated by keyboardist Christian Hutchinson Berg, surging to a mass-chanted chorus both desperate and triumphant (“dance, let them dance into me / people versus people can’t see / hands should be holding hands”).

The song churns and burns until, suddenly, words are not enough – the song turns instrumental, smoke spills across the stage, and the melody becomes a battle cry. Like the best of Kite’s music, it fuses theater and catharsis into an anthem of universal yearning, born of “the struggle to keep a flickering candle lit in a very dark space.”