Kill the Moonlight is the fourth album by American rock band Spoon released on August 20, 2002 through Merge Records. The album features a stripped-down, minimal sound that incorporates various different instruments such as tambourines and pianos along with an idiosyncratic production style. The album has gone on to receive critical acclaim with its lead single "The Way We Get By" being used in various television shows, and is regarded as Spoon's magnum opus. Composition The album has been noted for its minimal and rhythm-driven sound. Eric Carr of Pitchfork described it as "an adventure in starkness", going on to write: "Like some of the best minimalists in music, Spoon use the null and void to create tension which bolsters and sets apart every nuance of the music-- every handclap, every reverberating crash, every beep from the synthesizer." Heather Phares of AllMusic wrote that the group "follow(ed up) such a cathartic album as Girls Can Tell with a collection of tougher, leaner, and meaner songs like "All the Pretty Girls Go to the City," which sounds like the inverse of Girls' "Everything Hits at Once"". Daniel Pike of BBC found the album to be "terribly, terribly British" in sound, characterizing it as a "distinctly lo-fi post-punk offering" and noting "an air of tenderness and sincerity about" it. Tom Breihan of Stereogum noted elements of "toothy Wire minimalism, mid-period Motown strut, Kinks-y melodic twinkle" in the album's sound, even going on to suggest the influence of Timbaland "since (his music) brought the same sense that empty space was a virtue, that a perfectly-placed sound-effect could be the most memorable part of a song". The opener "Small Stakes" features "Steve Nieve-style keyboards and (a) shoutout to Har Mar Superstar" with lyrics "alluding to class concerns". "The Way We Get By", the lead single from the album, is "built on a rollicking piano line and handclaps" with lyrics that "had its roots in the (Daniel)’s more recent memories of scraping together enough cash to go to shows, alter his mind and find salvation in Iggy Pop". In an interview with Pitchfork, Daniel revealed that the song initially started out as "off-the-cuff" before turning into "a glorified, fucked-up-relationship song about a scrappy couple getting high in the backseat, making love with the song ‘Some Weird Sin,’ seeking out people that don’t speak very much [...]". The aforementioned BBC article noted "shades of Tim Burgess