Spotify - Starting 11 (Sept 2012)

Yeasayer - Henrietta

There can’t be many songs these days written from the perspective of a tumour that’s outlived its human host. ‘Henrietta’, the most beautiful moment on Brooklyn trio Yeasayer’s third album, though, is a bubbling electro-rollock that tells the story of Henrietta Lacks, a Baltimore woman whose cancer cells were preserved for research purposes after she died in 1951. Halfway through the trapdoor opens, and things swirl in slow-mo as a incredible hypnotic chant of “oh Henrietta, we can live on forever” echoes out.