New York, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down

The closing song on Sound of Silver starts as a slow, almost hesitant piano ballad and builds to a chorus shouted rather than sung. It is a complaint addressed to New York itself, about money, policing and a city being sanded down, from someone who cannot bring himself to leave. It was never a single, though Simon Owens directed a video, and Murphy has not explained it in detail; critics have read it as a portrait of Bloomberg-era New York.

On stage it became the band's goodbye. It was the most common closer on the 2010 tour, sometimes meshed with Jay-Z's Empire State of Mind, and it was the last song at Madison Square Garden on 2 April 2011, stretched to nearly ten minutes with music from Twin Peaks. In December 2022 at Brooklyn Steel, days after Angelo Badalamenti died, the band slowed it into the Twin Peaks theme. Sharon Van Etten sang it at the BBC Proms in 2018 and The Last Dinner Party covered it in New York in April 2026.