The diminishing returns of doomed relationships; those moments when your lover is all torn-up about something but won’t say anything about it, leaving you to endlessly wonder, “What the hell went wrong this time?” This and more discussed in BoySkout’s new jam, “You Act Strange,” the perfect summer bummer.

Instead of getting slow and gloomy, the ladies of BoySkout wrap a crack’d bones love affair in a dance floor getup, all late-nite drunken rhythms driven home by funky-ass Rhodes licks, a bumping bass line, and kitschy electronics. The lyrics don’t fuck around with complexity, either, they just dish it like it is: “You don’t tell me things / Then you act strange, you act weird” or my favorite “What happened to the days when you and me would chat for hours? / To understand what’s in your head I need super powers.” Yeah, on the surface, it seems a little bit like a middle-school revelation, but seriously, I’ve had grad school-educated girlfriends posit the same question-ish when I go all silent and passive-aggressive.

But what elevates this song beyond a quick fifteen seconds of butt-shaking fame is BoySkout’s display of improved musicality: slipping in handclaps and a house music kick drum behind the real kit, unleashing dual guitar blasts in between the verses, and constructing breakdowns in the middle and end of the song that transform the rest of the track’s bouncy groove into something with a real hint of darkness. Just like my romantic life. Sigh.

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