Annotations for Big Freeze

Lyric: Healed (Healed), or are you still just reeling?
Annotation:
‘Reel’ has two  unique definitions, granting this line multiple interpretations. (1) ‘Reel’ may refer to the loss of balance and/or violent lunge toward someone. In this case, the persona asks the population whether they have absolved world problems (“healed”) or if they are still battling them to no avail.  (2) Alternatively, ‘reel’ is to wind something around an axis, meaning the line vividly represents how some world problems can become stubbornly repetitive over-time; moving on one’s axis at the expense of displacement/progress. In this sense, the persona addresses world leaders that inhibit meaningful growth.

Lyric: I’m collapsing in stellar clouds of gas
Annotation:
This line adds to the prevailing cosmic imagery; whereby supernovas (“stellar clouds of gas”) are explosions of energy often derived from star implosions (i.e. “collapse[sions]”). Tying with the album theme of entropy and thermodynamics, this line suggests a giving in to the natural forces of decay and disorder.

Lyric: We destroyed something beautiful
Annotation:
The author is criticising how humanity’s greed for money (addressed in  “Animals”) has been destroying the planet and its ecosystems. The ‘beauty’ of nature is not only aesthetical, but linked to its inner balance that man is violating by creating  an economy based on endless growth.

Lyric: Are you fine (Fine), have you found a way to escape?
Annotation:
A follow up to the previous song  “Explorers”: Free me from this world Bellamy is asking the audience if they have freed the planet that is now on the verge of being destroyed.

Lyric: Feel me—don’t let the sun in your heart decay
Annotation:
One more space reference: stars decay as they age and evolve, e.g. from a yellow sun to a white dwarf. This is the doing of entorpy, ever increasing as per the second law of thermodynamics. Metaphorically, this line is a call to keep our empathy and not getting corrupted by the greed that is destroying nature.

Lyric: Don’t give up (Up), don’t let the magic leave us (Leave us)
 Stop the loneliest force becoming king of the universe
Annotation:
The “loneliest force” may refer to the lowest values of entropy, to keep the song in keeping with the rest of the album. As a “big freeze” is a hypothesised ‘end-of-the-universe’ scenario in which entropy reaches its minimum value and nothing can move as all is at absolute zero, with the Universe being anything but an isolated system, a lack of entropy is by a long way the ‘loneliest force’ and would become ‘king of the universe’ if a Big Freeze were to occur.

Lyric: Can we hole up? A big freeze is heading our way
Annotation:
One of the many ways the universe is speculated to come to an end is the eventual “heat-death” of the universe. The idea is that the universe is slowly expanding, planets are drifting apart from their suns, and the distance between solar systems is ever increasing. Eventually, all the energy in the universe will be so distributed that everything freezes down. It is said that, like a stretched rubber band, everything will come crashing back to one point, to recreate the Big Bang. As such, no matter what humanity achieves, it will never outlive the universe no matter how hard it tries. It’s also possible this line refers to the coming “ice age”. The world is always in-or-between two ice ages, and humanity may not survive the next one with the world in shambles. Also, climate change is slowly heating up the Earth, possibly speeding the process that starts the new ice-age along, so they may have forced it to start somehow.

