Resistance is psychosomatic. It’s the anticipation of action you find yourself unable to complete; knowing you can, knowing you won’t. “Resistance by definition is self-sabotage,” writes Steven Pressfield in his classic resistance-breaking guide The War of Art, a book I’ve resisted for years. Something is difficult. Nothing is easy.

“Feel Nothing,” Amen Dunes’ collaboration with the English post-punk duo Sleaford Mods, is about resistance. “I feel nothing at all,” goes the first line—the line printed on the cover, and the lyrics sheet, though it’s not heard in the song. “Do you feel nothing too?/I have nothing to say.” Damon McMahon sounds like he doesn’t want to sing, but here he is anyway. He falls into the hypnotic Amen Dunes narration as if by force of habit, a prophet reading original scripture, egging himself on in the same breath that he warns himself back: “They said stop and drop him until he talks/But he’ll never say it.” The poles resist one another; resistance negates scrutiny.

The simple, infuriating way to beat resistance, of course, is to stop resisting: to cease procrastinating with all the decisive force you lacked when you began and to cultivate discipline instead. Resistance’s opposite, as Pressfield explains it, is creativity, the making of new combinations. Amen Dunes and Sleaford Mods, perhaps. In the final quarter of “Feel Nothing,” the shaky beat breaks open, defibrillating dramatically into electro-disco, a dizzy upper/downer combination of producer Ariel Rechtshaid’s luminescent Los Angeles synth haze and the Mods’ gritty Midlands gray. It sounds sort of like Fatboy Slim and sort of like Public Image Ltd., and it goes out on a choppy, footwork-like vocal sample.

The coda is weird and unexpected, not unpleasant but definitely strange, and at first I want to turn it off. This, I recognize, is a kind of resistance. So I sit through it again, until McMahon’s slippery Möbius strips invert, and I hear him talk about beating resistance back. When it feels inevitable, it isn’t: “Can’t shake this ugly feeling, baby, but it’s not lasting.” When you say you won’t, that’s self-fulfilling: “Can’t change the situation/When everything’s the same.” When McMahon refuses to speak, it’s because he knows there’s no talking your way out of a rationalization. “Keep going up the mountain,” he sings. “From the mouth don’t come a kingdom.” The mountain and the kingdom are within. You climb up there and build it yourself.