As they break for lunch at Lord’s, Pakistan are currently 53/3 in their chase of an improbable 388 to win. With test cricket taking a back seat at the same time as the rain did this summer in England, another autumn draws in, and the rain in north London shouldn’t make too much of a difference to the result. In 2005, the Guardian’s fledgling ball-by-ball commentary asked if it was cowardly to pray for rain as the anxious wait for the Ashes to return to England for the first time in over fifteen years looked like it was approaching the wire. Cricket doesn’t always defer the contest to the weather - sometimes it merely delays the inevitable.

30 May 1999 - a bank holiday weekend at the start of a summer in the same way this one is the end. England are playing a Group Stage game at the Cricket World Cup they are hosting for the first time since 1983, and they have made an absolute dog’s dinner of it, contriving a position where a rain delay into Sunday meant a defeat sees them out of the tournament so early they are out of contention the day before the competition’s official single1 is even released. They collapse on the Sunday morning before lunchtime, and their elimination is confirmed to me via Radio Five Live (909 and 693) while sitting in my uncle’s car in the car park for my first2 visit to what we now call Old Wembley Stadium.3

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Watching England lose to Argentina in the World Cup last month is something that moves from traumatic to frustrating as you get older. Because there's always the original sin of the first time you taste crushing defeat in a summer tournament - which for me was in Euro '96, a tournament where, had England benefited from fractionally more luck against Germany, they may well have won, and Baddiel, Skinner and The Lightning Seeds wouldn't be getting royalties half as regularly as Noddy Holder does from 'Merry Christmas Everybody' (though, in fairness, England rode their luck versus Spain in the quarter-final and at times versus Scotland).

While it was unlikely the England team of 1999 would have gone on to win the tournament had they prevailed in Birmingham that morning, it was another home tournament that my teenage self was looking forward to in another sport that meant a lot to me, and what could be better than being at Wembley to watch my team, Gillingham, take on fallen (small) giants Man City as we attempted to reach the second tier of English football for the first time. With Gillingham going 2-0 up with three minutes plus injury time to go, we were home and hosed, and many supporters in sky blue decided that was enough football for them and headed home. Cue a 90th-minute consolation (we hoped) and the second most famous injury time goal in Man City’s history.

Back at Edgbaston, it is raining and had the rain’s timing been as good as Paul Dickov’s, England would have smuggled themselves into the Super Sixes. Instead, out on net run-rate and Alec Stewart, England’s wicket keeper captain, would resign the captaincy within weeks and hand over the reins to Nasser Hussain, safe in the knowledge it could only improve from what cricket Bible Wisden called “the blackest day of all for English cricket.” Hold that beer, Wisden, the summer isn’t over yet for either England or myself.

One almost total eclipse later, or 97% of one obscured by clouds, and England went into the last test needing a win. This time they had benefited from the rain - rescued at Old Trafford in early August, knowing a positive result at The Oval would mean a drawn series - while a loss would mean they would drop to the bottom of the test rankings (at the time the unofficial Wisden World Championship), now below New Zealand as well as Zimbabwe. Cue the crowd singing, We’re shit, and we know we are, “We’ve got the worst team in the world”, and booing Hussain on the balcony.

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The summer of 1999 was a great time for me to be 15, with my GCSEs the following summer. I was taking mock exams and had the benefit of finishing the school year early after attending my school’s compulsory Founder’s Day on the first Saturday of July (It was here that I listened to Alex Tudor make 99 not out on my Walkman as England beat New Zealand by seven wickets back at Edgbaston). With an extended summer to stretch out into and no football or Olympics to hog my attention, I could make the most of Virgin Cinema’s unlimited pass, and the timing of one of the best years of cinema didn’t pass me by at the time.

As I mentioned in that Flaming Lips piece, by the end of the year I was in full-on discovery mode when it came to music. While I would not have known who Pavement were back in May when ‘Carrot Rope’ was released as a single in the UK, a day before the World Cup started in mid-May, or the album in early June - by the end of the year the artwork was very familiar to me from end of year round-ups including NME who had the album artwork’s man and his dog nestled close to Smog’s cat and the Super Furry Animals’ alien octopus in the year’s best ten records.

By the time I’m looking at that top ten in December 1999, the band no longer exist. They took an indefinite hiatus after playing at Brixton Academy in November 1999. Singer Stephen Malkmus dangles handcuffs from the microphone stand and says:

These symbolize what it’s like being in a band all these years.

Though guitarist Scott Kannberg claimed that the quote was that’s what it’s like being in England. Domino would confirm the hiatus and tell the NME the members would: 1. Start families 2. Sail around the world 3. Get into the computer industry 4. Dance 5. Get some attention.

The band don’t play ‘Carrot Rope’ at that gig; they don’t play it when I’m at the same venue in May 2010 watching them return to touring. In fact, neither Malkmus nor the band have played it since a German gig earlier in November 1999. There’s an air about the song of something included as an afterthought, and the sleeve makes it explicit: on the back of Terror Twilight's artwork the title is rendered ‘...And Carrot Rope’. I normally avoid being so sure of declarations of a song slotting in like that, but there’s reasoning to it.

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Looming over England’s dreadful 1999 summer of cricket, he sings of being beaten by the weather and, even more strangely for a band formed in California, "the wicket keeper is down". Kannberg reckoned it was one of two classic pop songs Malkmus hated for being classic pop songs. It’s the jauntiest thing on probably the gloomiest record of their quintet: three-part harmonies, barre chords, a video with the five of them in yellow oilskins doing boyband choreography.

Nigel Godrich, fresh off the decks of Radiohead’s OK Computer, produced the album. He didn’t want it to end that way, and 23 years later, the band ceded some ground.

Malkmus told Rolling Stone in 2018:

Some people might say that “Carrot Rope” is a rather odd way for Pavement to leave the Earth. Terror Twilight had a lot of interesting arguments about sequencing. In the end, one of the members of the band won out, and “Spit on a Stranger” went first and it was front-loaded. And one of the guys that wasn’t in the band that worked on it a lot wasn’t into that order, and he was right probably, but he wasn’t in the band, so….Anyway, I have no idea what’s going on with that song. Just completely absurd. Almost like a show tune.

When they reissued the record as Terror Twilight: Farewell Horizontal in 2022, the LP finally gave us Godrich's preferred sequence, while the CD kept the band's original.

Godrich's track-listing buries 'Carrot Rope' in the middle of side B and closes the whole album with 'Spit on a Stranger', the song the band had chosen to open it. Godrich explains this in the fresh liner notes, wanting to put the heavier material up front. A Brooklyn Vegan review of the reissue agrees with that same reading: the ellipsis makes it plain the song is "tack[ed] on at the end... with a shrug", and on the updated version, those dots are gone: an artefact of positioning, not the song's name.

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When we interviewed Field Music, Peter Brewis mentioned that the dot dot dot introducing the closer inspired them to do the same with their own 'Scratch The Surface' on The Week That Was.

Across their five records, they have no particular pattern with their closer; ‘Our Singer’ on the debut is the closest to confirming the typical closer pattern: longer, quieter, sadder, and they even finish Brighten The Corners with ‘Fin’, a tongue-in-cheek closing gesture. Four of their five records end with closers among the least popular songs on the record; 'Carrot Rope' is the sole mid-table exception, the 28th most streamed song in their catalogue. And the end to their final album isn't invited to the afterparty.

Not only has 'Carrot Rope' not been played since November 1999, but it was also left off Quarantine the Past, the 2010 best-of, despite being their highest-charting UK single4. Never performed, never compiled, demoted on the reissue. Meanwhile, one song from that era found an afterlife. ‘Harness Your Hopes’, cut from Brighten the Corners, name-checked in the lyrics to ‘Carrot Rope’ and on the UK single as a B-side (plus the EP hosting ‘Spit On A Stranger’), has become the band’s most streamed song. ‘Cut Your Hair’ has 54m in second, and ‘Harness Your Hopes’ is approaching 271m.

Malkmus's own theory was a shrug: "I heard it was on a playlist or something... one of those 'Monday Moods' or whatever the fuck they do." The likelier culprit is January 2017, when Spotify switched Autoplay on by default, and its algorithm started quietly appending the song to the end of other people's playlists. By 2024, it would be a gold record, their first, thirty years in. All those years later, rather than breaking into the computer industry, it was working for them.

Don’t forget, we need your thoughts on what should be on our 2000s closing track longlist

Hello, there’s no Sunday essay from me this week as I’m in Scotland with my family. Instead, a couple of announcements and one request for you, dear reader.

In October 2025 I hosted a Reader’s Poll to crown the best album closer of the 1990s. A hundred and seventy-five of you diligently filled in the ballot. After much toing and froing, Portishead’s ‘Glory Box’ landed on the top spot, narrowly beating out Radiohead’s ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’. Nirvana’s ‘All Apologies’, the subject of the first essay I ever sent out, came third. Around three-quarters of you said you’d be up for doing it again.

So we are. It’ll be the 2000s, with the voting opening in October.

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Mitchell, why can’t I just send you my ballot?

Yes, that is the obvious way to vote in a poll; it is a daft way to run one, though.

Trying to police people into writing Song|ARTIST|Album in a way that makes data cleaning simple is a ticket to frustration, and a free-for-all is even worse.

So, I see no reason not to run it the way I did last year. I will present a Google Form with around 200 options, and you can select your ranked favourites from it. This makes sure I don’t miss your vote for Hail To The Thief’s ‘A Wolf at the Door’ because you named it in full as ‘A Wolf at the Door. (It Girl. Rag Doll.)’ There will still be a write-in option even after what I’m proposing in the ask section below.

So yes, the list will be long and epic, like Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven. If it were short, you’d be more annoyed.

So as the saying goes, you have to be in it to win it. Not being on the longlist will be quite detrimental to any closer with ambition to win the crown. This is where you all come in.

The ask

Before 12 September 2026, can you please let me know which closers from this decade you’d expect to find on that ranking list? No need for you to order suggestions, just the ones you’d be looking for come voting time and you’d be annoyed not to find.

Reply to this email or leave a comment1. Two or three is plenty. Twenty is fine if you’re that way inclined.

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One note, to save us all some time. If I’ve already written about it in a previous edition, assume it’s on the longlist. I’ve covered a fair number of 2000s closers (47) over the past five years, and I’d rather not get nineteen separate emails reminding me about ‘Motion Picture Soundtrack’ and ‘Videotape’. Those will be there waiting for your vote.

It’s the rest I’m after. The closing tracks that are on long-forgotten albums by bands who packed it in after a couple of years. Something that was enormous for about eleven months in 2005 and then everyone else moved on. I can’t promise they’ll all be on the ballot, but there were enough in the 1990s that came through several times in the mailbag to make me wish I’d offered them out, especially as we ended up with ten songs out of 200 that no one voted for.

A quick visit to Pedant’s Corner.2 We will be looking at original studio albums (no compilations, live albums, or scores/soundtracks) from 2000 to 2009. The closing track as it appeared in the artist’s home country when the record came out - not some streaming service or Japanese bonus track rearrangement.

The other announcement

Over the past six months, regular readers will have spotted that we have been quantifying more and more of our claims on the site about closing tracks. This is because this spring I was able to pull together track data from over 2,000 records into a usable database to explore themes and back up (or challenge) some of my theories built up from five years of looking at closing tracks and the patterns they hold.

I’m very pleased to say that this dataset has allowed me to produce an article on the subject of album closing tracks, and I'm delighted to share with you that it is the cover feature for September’s Significance, the Royal Statistical Society’s magazine.

It’s behind a paywall until 7 September, but some of you may have institutional access. I’ll be saying more about it once it is free to read in a few weeks.

Reminder: Nominations by 12 September, please. I will release the longlist in late September, with voting and the countdown in October. I'll credit a list of nominating contributors.

Last week parts of Europe got a total eclipse, or a decent partial one. Some people ignored the advice about looking directly at it and spent the rest of the day with sore eyes and the sun still burning behind their eyelids. In Summer 2024, the afterimage when you shut your eyes was a garish lime green colour. It was word of the year, it was a talking point the day Joe Biden pulled out of the 2024 US Presidential Election.

There was the brat generator, the album1 landing in the top three in the US, a remix album hitting #1 in the UK and three Grammys. The irony that the cover was a hedge to save money as Charli XCX was expecting a flop (she told Zane Lowe that ‘This album is not going to appeal to a lot of people’) yet the Lidl version of the album cover ate the world.

In a world with more content than eyeballs and eardrums, we are not often accustomed to anything that looks like mono-culture. Gone are the days when 25% of the country would watch a regular episode of One Foot In The Grave or ‘Allo ‘Allo because there were only four channels. Just recently people have been incredulous that a song has been number one for months and the same people who remember asking taxi drivers to switch Wet Wet Wet and Bryan Adams off because they just heard it ten minutes ago can’t quote a lyric from ‘Rein Me In’ the longest-running number one in British chart history.

The things 'everyone' talks about are usually some buzzy prestige drama that earns wall-to-wall coverage for a fortnight (White Lotus and Baby Reindeer would be prime examples) while pulling a fraction of the audience of the soaps and shows like Call the Midwife and Death In Paradise that nobody writes about. So, in that sense it was a surprise that of all things an album was the cultural hit of the summer. When did that last happen? Beyoncé’s Lemonade in 2016? I can't think of another album in the decade since that escaped being talked about as music. Brat was big. It opens with the mirror-check of ‘360’ and ends with the year-round escalation of ‘365’. A circle and a calendar as bookends carved from the same melody.

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Oddly the shape of a reprise for what will surely be forever carbon dated as the most 2024 album of 2024 is a classic rock staple. Many bookending albums reprise as diminuendo - from The Dark Side of the Moon’s heartbeat fading out to the ghostly reprise of Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs.

Sometimes though we get the opposite, Sgt Pepper’s reprise is the penultimate before handing off to ‘A Day In The Life’ but Neil Young flips from acoustic 'My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)' to the electric 'Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)’ on Rust Never Sleeps and that’s the curious bedfellow for Brat’s mutating song titles. Almost the same song twice, but harder the second time around. Spinal Tap were keen on the idea that eleven is one louder than ten, and '365' obliges, +3dB up on '360', much less acoustic, and seventy seconds longer. This fits the pattern, her closers run longer and typically slightly2 hotter. ‘365’ is the first time she’s ended on the up, literally bumpin’ that.

'365' started life as an edit producer A. G. Cook made for a small club night he and Charli were playing, built out of '360'. Cook says that as soon as they started recording her on '365', he was fixated on it being the first and last track. He liked the idea of coming full circle without being continuous, so the end would not just blend back into the beginning. He wanted the end of '365' to be "exhausting and slightly too long", so that you would go back to '360' and "the simpler times when the beat only dropped once" - the album is engineered to send you round again. Charli's account of the same decision runs alongside his. She wanted3 the record to feel cyclical, like a DJ mix.

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Between those two club track bookends the album goes off asking questions about a dead friend ('So I'), a confused non-rivalry ('Girl, so confusing'), a potential pregnancy ('I think about it all the time') and after all that capital D Drama Charli ends up back where we started, inside a club track with the same melody but wearing boots4.

“When does it all end?” was a question being asked of brat summer before the leaves were brown, before the central heating went on and the spiced pumpkin lattes were at Starbucks. Pitchfork called a pivot in July, The Ringer was tapping a watch, scythe in hand in mid-August, some were over it before the nights really drew in, Charli herself called time in early September, others well after a standing eight count. But it would not go back in the box.

It was ‘365’ that would end up being used as part of Kamala Harris’ ill-fated Presidential campaign on TikTok. Then came the remix album, brat but it’s completely different but also still brat and gathering up Lorde’s guest verse in October. In 2025 the Other Stage headline at Glastonbury, PLEASE DON'T LET IT BE OVER behind her at other shows that year, an album cover that mutated four times on Spotify in 2025 and before the moment was done we had this year’s A24 mockumentary The Moment. We went round and round and round. 360 to 365 to 360 to 365 again and again like a self-perpetuating Groundhog Day, album mirroring what became the PR campaign.

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Much of what we discuss at The Run Out Grooves is about landing an ending, sometimes the plane has to do a go-around.

So, we next cut to Charli at her own LIDO festival in 2025, a year after the album came out, at Victoria Park. She opens her headline set with the Shygirl ‘365’ remix segueing into ‘360’, flipping the two bookends around and letting the middle spill out. When she got to the end she finished, of course, with the Icona Pop song that landed her over a decade earlier.

Before that came 'Track 10', which Alexis Petridis called her best song in the Guardian last year. It is a demo torn apart and rebuilt, eventually becoming 2019’s Lizzo-featuring Blame It on Your Love. This is entirely consistent with her own thesis. When the remix album came out she announced on her own Instagram;

i've always had a bit of an issue with songs coming out and being cemented as one thing for eternity... i think songs are endless and have the possibility to be continuously broken down, reworked, changed, morphed, mutilated into something completely unrecognizable.

This plays well to her attitude to the rest of the LIDO setlist. ‘365’ pops up again halfway through and ‘Rewind’ gets rewound and repeated (the first time as an accident, too on the nose for anyone to invent).

Having done everything to define what having a brat summer is and what being a bit messy looks like, it is hard to argue that Charli XCX didn’t deserve her victory lap. She spent almost nothing on a cover for an album she thought would die on its arse, then ran a near-perfect campaign for a record that did what many thought wasn’t possible in the 2020s; it became something bigger than just another record.

Anyone who can do that has earned a day off. 2024 was a leap year, after all.

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If you were sitting watching British TV in spring 2012, you might have caught an advert for the Volkswagen Polo in the breaks during A Place in the Sun or Come Dine with Me that felt familiar. We see a father raising his daughter, condensed into ninety sentimental, car-oriented seconds, scored by lilting dream-pop with a drifting siren-call of a vocal. You may have even felt like you recognised the song. You didn't, officially. Beach House had said no, repeatedly, so the agency, DDB, commissioned a soundalike from an outfit called Sniffy Dog and ran that instead.

The pursuit had been persistent. The band put out a statement mid-controversy:

The ad agency actively tried to license “take care” from us for weeks, to which we politely declined. People’s comments/anger should not be directed towards VW or us. It was the ad agency that made these moves.

Alex Scally gave the New York Times a fuller account: at least five offers, and at one point DDB sent the band a cut of the advert with ‘Take Care’ already playing underneath it, a blueprint for any counterfeiter shown to the originators in advance. The refusal was immediate and firm. The ad’s feel-good father-daughter story isn’t close to what the song is about, and Scally voiced that complaint.

A feeling and a sentiment and an energy has been copied and is being used to sell something that we didn’t want to sell.

So, when DDB finally wrote the brief for Sniffy Dog, assuming it didn’t only say ‘Take Care’ by Beach House, what do we think it said? What were they trying to ape?

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They’d spent the second half of the 2000s, right up to lead single ‘Norway’ arriving in November 2009, building word-of-mouth through what we embarrassingly called the blogosphere1. From the self-recorded, self-titled and hazy debut released on Carpark to the follow-up Devotion selling in the thousands and landing on many end-of-2008 best-of lists from the likes of Tiny Mix Tapes, No Ripcord, The AV Club and, of course, Pitchfork. I paid the princely sum of £12.45 to see them that year at a sold-out night at ULU in June supporting Fleet Foxes. At that point Fleet Foxes were the most blogged-about new band in Britain and the jewel of Sub Pop's roster.

Fifteen months later, Beach House were on the same label. That deal opened doors Carpark couldn't. Producer Chris Coady had Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio and Grizzly Bear already on his CV and they decamped to a converted 19th-century church in upstate New York called Dreamland Recording Studios rather than the band’s own houses. Teen Dream, their third album, arrived in January 2010 and is the record that made them in the eyes of many.

At the end of the record we have the song that the hired hands of Sniffy Dog would use for inspiration2 for ‘Whispers and Stories’. Victoria Legrand’s vocals are always better absorbed as half-understood clouds of waltzing smoke from a smouldering campfire than pored over in text, much like Björk and Liz Fraser’s. Regardless, we can read that the verse hedges the offer of taking care before the refrain’s repetition moves the vow from I would to I will. This is why it doesn’t work for the advert - a father’s care for his daughter isn’t conditional, and VW want us to think their safety record is a given as well. The agency wanted the vow but didn’t hear the if, so they had to settle with second-hand smoke.

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If we look at the numbers, the song isn’t a gentle comedown, tailor-made for selling cars. It’s the longest track on the album, and compared to where the energy levels on the record sit, it is actually a jump-up. Granted, it is only moving from comatose to languid on Spotify’s energy metric3. This energy measure is tracking the reverb waves as those repeated vows stack up, and the song washes out to sea in the outro.

Though it is still not a loud song, loudness stays flat against the rest of the album, but as few as one in seventy records in our database make a relative leap in energy of that size. This is where the ear is needed alongside the data. The numbers overread the accumulation and miss the dissolution, which is the same mistake the agency made, hearing the vow and missing the if.

Legrand has said it is an intense song, telling Artist Direct4 in 2010 that the song is

definitely in its right place at the end... The way that it keeps going until it leaves you or you leave it, means a lot about the future. ...I'm sure there's still heartbreak. I think there's a little future in it. That's something that I don't think we played with before. I always compare it to the energy of '10 Mile Stereo'... it was giving us an energy that propelled us forward

We can listen to what she's describing. We can’t tell if those waves are further and further out to sea or if we have walked away. Who is giving up on whom? We also land on energy again - the word everyone talking about the song reaches for. Legrand means what propelled the band. Spotify metrics mean what continually stacks in the mix. The agency meant a feeling it could use to sell a car to a new father.

This closer is a bit of a one-off for Beach House; it is the second most-streamed song on Teen Dream, but as Heraclitus says, you can’t stand in the same river twice. In the year of the car advert, 2012, the record earned a route to the ears of more and more listeners when Kendrick Lamar sampled ‘Silver Soul’ on ‘Money Trees’, showing the band were happy to lend in the right circumstances. It was also the year of 'Irene', the closer on Bloom, which runs long like all their closers do and drops the energy considerably, the mirror image of this closer. They never dialled a closer up again.

Björk’s second proper1 solo album is a fidgety record. It refuses to sit still, constantly glitching nervously or adding an industrial throb. Take the opener, 'Army of Me'; all menace and threat. 'It's Oh So Quiet', the single and MTV hit, detonates every time it reaches a chorus. Even the quieter moments, 'Possibly Maybe', 'Cover Me', carry an off-kilter otherness as they build. It is a maximalist and extroverted record that takes the work of Debut and builds on it, in the way other confident second albums of 1995, The Bends and A Northern Soul among them, built on their debuts. But where Radiohead and The Verve dug deeper into a sound the bands settled on early, Post adds more sounds instead. The beats are harder, the arrangements busier, that confidence total.

Closing track ‘Headphones’, as you might expect with a name like that, is more intimate, and at 5m40s it is a breathy whisper that is almost the longest song on the record (just behind ‘Isobel’ at 5m47s).

As a climax to the record, it is our narrator falling asleep on us, tucked up in bed, with sounds locked up inside her own head rather than broadcast to the world. In our dataset of 2,284 albums, it is in the first percentile for quietness; I could name 2,250 albums with a louder closing track.2 It is one of the steepest withdrawals in the dataset, nearly fifteen decibels below the rest of the album - which is no surprise when the loudest record of her career meets the quietest ending, one that lets us know she's fast asleep.

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We also have a lineage here with our withdrawal archetype of closers; they quite easily become lullabies that don’t just say goodbye, they say good night. From Ringo Starr literally singing ‘Good Night’ to The National holding us close with a lullaby and The Smashing Pumpkins, who managed goodbye and good night at once.

The song opens with a line about the craft of making a spot-on mixtape, and it is directed to 808 State’s Graham Massey. Björk told Stereogum in 2008;

It was written to Graham Massey as a thank you. He was the best tape maker there was. He would make compilation cassettes and I would play them non stop.

So we have a clear sense that she’s falling asleep, in headphones, listening to mixtapes. That exchange of music on tapes takes us back to the title of the album, Post, which back in 1995 more obviously connected to the idea of messages sent over distances to be read - but which did not arrive instantaneously after they were sent. It makes the song a thank-you note rather than a continuation of the mixtape exchange. This is an Icelander abroad sending out letters to important people in her life at the time.

One of those people would be Tricky, four months after the release of Maxinquaye, an album totally steeped in Bristolian and West Country trip-hop, rather than occasionally investigating it amongst other areas of electronic music. It remains very much headphone music. This song was one of a handful3 of songs co-written and produced by the pair during their brief romantic involvement.

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A whispered track is a trip-hop staple, not just a closing track trope, but this one is really whisper-quiet, and some of the more subtle elements are probably best picked up on headphones. Play it into the room at a dinner party, and the conversation dominates it. You need to luxuriate in the womb of the headphones to hear everything that it has to offer. What makes this land is all the noise that came before and the gap between the two. Whispered final tracks can be the obvious endpoint of a quiet record (such as Joni Mitchell’s Blue), or it can be a juxtaposition (like The White Stripes' White Blood Cells).

Come 1997, Radiohead and The Verve reached the logical conclusion of their 1990s work. The Verve imploded, and Radiohead waited until 2000 to turn left. Björk had already made her turn by album three. Post is a kitchen sink record, and Homogenic is a return to Iceland, a return to a formula. On the South Bank Show, she said of the new record

Because it’s all one flavour. It’s just me now, you know here, and it’s gonna be, instead of like all these different instruments, it’s just gonna be beats, strings, and voice.

That makes ‘Headphones’ the last quiet point after all the noise before a new plan emerged.

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I’m quite lucky that I’m not sick very often, and I’ve never taken days off school or work,1 that sort of thing. What I do know is that when I am sick, I am not much use to myself or others. When I was in my first year at university, I had a bad bout of something flu-adjacent, and because I was reading Ian MacDonald's Revolution In The Head, I was having feverish hallucinations not about The Beatles, which would have been something, but instead about the format of the book and how MacDonald used a cataloguing system for each song.2 The reason I bring this up is that I was not particularly productive when I wasn’t well. Some people can produce a little more value—one of those being Neil Young.

One afternoon around the turn of 1969, Young was bedridden with flu and a 103-degree fever. According to the liner notes of 1977’s collection Decade, Young wrote not only ‘Cowgirl in the Sand’ but also ‘Cinnamon Girl’ and ‘Down by the River’ - just over half the runtime of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere.3

In Waging Heavy Peace, he wrote;

Sometimes [when] I get sick, get a fever, it’s easy to write. Everything opens up. You don’t have any resistance.

I think the closer is the most important of the three, not purely because that’s the currency we trade in here at The Run Out Grooves, but because it’s a signature sound that he’d return to time and again with his backing band, Crazy Horse.

By 1969, closing tracks stretching out to be amongst the longest on the record weren’t that strange, but getting to the ten-minute mark was a little less frequent. In our dataset of 2,284 albums, 39 are from 1969 and 290 from the 1960s. Both have a median length of around four-and-a-half minutes, and only 7% reach ten minutes. This is a club that draws heavily from jazz with Coltrane, Mingus, Davis and Ornette. Bob Dylan has two, and the likes of ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’, ‘Sister Ray’ and ‘The End’ feature.

So while it isn’t unprecedented for a guitar band to push out beyond ten minutes, in most cases it’s done as an extended freak out, or an abrasive assault on the listener’s senses and patience. ‘Cowgirl’ is the only one that just sounds like a band playing a song, and it just so happens to clock in at barely over ten minutes.

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‘Cowgirl’ is a slight anomaly in the world of Neil Young. He would record other long, drawn-out closers in this period, from Harvest's ‘Words’ to On The Beach's ‘Ambulance Blues’; in fact, all three are roughly double the length of the average song on the rest of their parent albums. Other Young albums from the middle of the 1970s onward would pull away from putting so many minutes into the last track. 'Tonight's the Night - Part II’, ‘Hey Hey, My My’ and 'Rockin' in the Free World’ are many things, but long songs they are not. Where ‘Cowgirl’ goes against the grain of the other long closers is that it is louder and less acoustic than the rest of the album.

What you see later in his career is that if there is a song like ‘Cowgirl in the Sand’ on the record (‘Like A Hurricane’, ‘Cortez The Killer’, ‘Change Your Mind’ and ‘Ramada Inn’ all spring to mind), it is tucked in a little more. Zuma makes the demotion clear with the running order: ‘Cortez’ sits second from last, and the album closes on the three quiet minutes of ‘Through My Sails’. Like the HBO trick of having the series arc conclude much of the action in the 12th episode, with the finale being the aftermath and new order.

If you dig out Live at Massey Hall 1971, you can hear a much shorter version of ‘Cowgirl’, solo and acoustic, a glimpse of how it might have closed one of the quieter records he made later. The ‘Down by the River' he played that night in Toronto is similarly half the length of the album version. Travel-sized versions of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere's load-bearing pillars.

So Young alternates between finishing hot and finishing cold, much as his records themselves did. But after 1969 he only ever reached for one lever or the other, length or heat. Never pulling both at once again. Perhaps the levers were never levers at all, but personnel. Danny Whitten provided that second squalling guitar. Young and Whitten exchange messages across the recording studio, pushing and answering rather than duetting. That conversation is the sound the record is known for.

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These songs live and die on how they sound, not what they mean, but for completeness - there are some lyrics here, maybe for 20% of the song. Three greetings for three different (or are they?) women. Cowgirl in the sand, Ruby in the dust and woman of his dreams. They get a hello and a question each. The questions read a bit rum in 2026. They lean towards hectoring these imaginary women and charging them with promiscuity, not something I charged The Beatles with during my own delirious bout of fever in late 2002.

One last dip into the numbers. Of the three songs written that afternoon, ‘Down by the River’ is the album's most-streamed track, ‘Cinnamon Girl’ sits just behind it, and ‘Cowgirl’ trails them both with half as many streams on Spotify and is narrowly beaten out by the title track. This is reflected in Neil Young (and Crazy Horse) setlists with the other two fever songs getting 4-8 times as many plays.

After Danny Whitten’s death in November 1972 (see Tonight’s the Night), the ‘Cowgirl’ style of closer disappears, and I’d wager that’s more than a coincidence. The rebuilt Crazy Horse could still summon the form on career highlights like ‘Cortez’ and ‘Hurricane’, but those grind against each other like cogs that don’t quite interlock, and the jarring is part of the noise. ‘Cowgirl’ is noisy without setting teeth on edge because there is a response, not only an echo.

A month before the release of LCD Soundsystem’s third record This Is Happening, James Murphy told Chuck Klosterman for The Guardian that;

It just feels like this should be the last one. For one thing, I always told myself I wouldn't do LCD past the age of 40.

As the release date comes and goes, he wobbles on that feeling through the press cycle. In June he tells NPR it may be the final album; come August, in The Quietus, he says they will do some 12”s and they might do another album. He made similar threats around 2007’s Sound of Silver, as a TIME article points out. The interviews and pieces from the time all carry a weight of frustration that recording and performing as a band is taking up all his time, and he isn’t devoting time to writing, producing, or running DFA Records, never mind living a life1.

All of this uncertainty makes ‘Home’ a Schrödinger’s closing track. Is it to be their final goodbye under the LCD Soundsystem moniker, or is the door still ajar? It is a long song, almost eight minutes - but it is an album of long songs: the mean is seven minutes and three songs are longer than eight. The album opens with ‘Dance Yrself Clean’, a song with two hands on the blasting machine detonator, waiting for the Road Runner to zip past and after three minutes we get that release. ‘Home’ doesn’t do that, there’s no explosion. Perhaps it ends with Wile E. Coyote jumping up and down on the plunger and nothing happens. It's an answer (though not the answer) to 'All My Friends': at 40, home isn't the consolation prize. Home is the thing you were missing out on, it was the late nights that were the distraction. The dread of the verses answered with a curiously reassuring refrain - it won’t get any better and that’s fine.

When we compare ‘Home’ as a closer against the other three LCD closers we can see that the other three (‘Great Release’, ‘New York, I Love You’ and ‘Black Screen’) drop in valence, Spotify’s measure of positivity, by around half a point2. We are talking about ending up on the floor at 4am feeling more than a little sorry for ourselves on those three records by a wide margin. ‘Home’ is different: It is more positive than the rest of the album and it has more energy. A closing track that stretches out and uplifts like that is a rare beast, with fewer than 10% of closers finishing that way. So on the record that might have been their last, LCD Soundsystem closed with a deviation from their own template.

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The following year the maybe became concrete, the band announced that they were winding down from recording, touring and performing live by marking the calendar with their own funeral3. 2 April 2011. The show, later released as The Long Goodbye: LCD Soundsystem Live at Madison Square Garden, was the culmination of the band’s story and they opened the set with the first song of their 'final' studio album and closed the first encore with its last. But there was a second encore, and as the performance entered a fourth hour they reverted to the Broadway curtain call of ‘New York, I Love You, but You’re Bringing Me Down’.

‘Home’ wasn’t the real final word.

‘Does it make you uncomfortable?’ I said ‘Yeah’, and he said, ‘Good, it should. You should be uncomfortable’ … he was always making himself uncomfortable.

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Speaking to Lauren Laverne4 on BBC6 Music in 2017, James Murphy was recalling the advice5 that resurrected LCD Soundsystem within five years of that goodbye show. The voice shouting for an encore was David Bowie's. Over the last years of Bowie’s life, Murphy had slowly been drawn into his orbit, he’d spun out The Next Day’s ‘Love Is Lost’ to ten minutes in a remix that ended up as a single. There was talk about the pair making a record together, then there was talk about co-producing what would become Blackstar with Tony Visconti. That ended up just being contributing percussion on two tracks.6 The advice was coming from someone who knew that you can take as many curtain calls as you want until the biggest one comes in - which of course meant, Bowie never saw the resurrection he did much to seed but it was announced less than a week before his death.

When the comeback landed, American Dream finished with ‘Black Screen’, a reversion to type at scale: twelve minutes and a barely veiled eulogy for Bowie, nearly twice the album's average track, energy, volume and valence all down. An elegy that the supposed farewell didn’t reach for. ‘Home’ is the sound of a man keeping his options open, just in case. Murphy spent 2010 hedging his ending and 2011 staging it. One arrived six years later, a real and unavoidable ending at the close of an album that only exists because a dying man told him to be uncomfortable.

In 1971, an advertising man named Bill Backer was grounded by fog at Shannon airport and watched a departure gate of miffed and stranded passengers slowly simmer down over bottles of Coca-Cola. The pitch he scribbled became the Hilltop advert: a multicultural choir of young people on a sunny hillside, miming universal love for a soft drink.

The jingle was so effective it escaped the advert entirely, was stripped of the product, and the hook became a hit several times over, firstly as The New Seekers’ ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (In Perfect Harmony)’. A hippie ideal commoditised and repackaged by one of the largest companies in the world.1

Nineteen years later, Shaun Ryder and co closed Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches with a song building off that line. ‘Harmony’2 is, by Ryder’s own account, about being on ecstasy, and the lifting of the line might be doing more subtle work than a writer like Ryder normally gets credit for. The advert was selling community in a bottle of fizzy whatever Coke is and Manchester’s famous Hacienda was selling it in pills. Our multicultural hillside and the loved-up dancefloor are the same fantasy, everyone connected, everything glowing, for about as long as the active ingredient lasts or the cameras roll.

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The song itself is a humid and swampy thing, a loose-limbed shuffle under whirling Hammond and slide-heavy guitar figures you could imagine John Squire playing. The Happy Mondays went there some four years before the Stone Roses’ Second Coming waded into that territory.

The closer nearly belonged to a family we visited last week. Ryder wanted the band’s drummer, Gary Whelan, to sing it, explicitly on the model of The Beatles handing Ringo a song. It never happened, and Ryder kept the vocal. So ‘Harmony’ is the closer that almost joined ‘Good Night’ and ‘After Hours’ in the drummer-gets-the-mic lineage, and bottled it.

Not content with one line from the Coke song, written by Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway, the squarest daddio hit machine in British pop. They were writers for The Fortunes, Cilla Black, and half the light entertainment canon of the sixties, Ryder would go back for another. ‘Harmony’ also pulls directly from ‘Melting Pot’, Cook and Greenaway’s 1969 plea for racial harmony recorded by Blue Mink.3

One closing track with two lifts, both from the same two song writers, both songs about everybody getting along. The Salford poet of the Hacienda built his pill anthem out of the two nicest men in the business, twice. Four years later, the same songbook cost Oasis a reported half a million dollars when ‘Shakermaker’ leaned on the same song and the writers’ lawyers noticed.4 Noel Gallagher, who was a Manchester roadie for The Inspiral Carpets the month Pills ‘n’ Thrills and Bellyaches came out, demonstrably rated the songwriter’s catalogue: in 1997 he picked Cook and Greenaway’s ‘Melting Pot’ for an All Back To Mine interview.

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For Mancunians and Madchester fans of a certain age, the line’s home was never the advert and never in ‘Shakermaker’. It was the end of a Happy Mondays record. Eighteen months that ran from the Mondays and Roses sharing Top of the Pops in November 1989, through Spike Island and a Glastonbury headline, to the whole city briefly running British pop. From that second summer of love into the new decade the charts were joyous and sun-flecked.

Within two years it was the band “enjoying” Barbados, crack, Yes Please!, and Factory bankrupt. So ‘Harmony’ is the last track of this imperial phase. A blissed-out comedown at the end of a party record that turned out to be the end of the party. A melting pot of a song, half of Manchester swirling in it, harmony taken from the price of a bottle to the price of a pill. The last few shimmering moments of a moment that had gone on too long.

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PJ Harvey spent her first two decades flitting between deep personas like a method actor, arriving with each record as somebody new. From an avenging jilted lover of Rid of Me, the swamp preacher of To Bring You My Love, the loved-up New Yorker of Stories from the City… to the Victorian ghost whispering through White Chalk. Let England Shake, her eighth album, is the first where you have the sense that the record isn’t PJ Harvey as some character. This is also reflected in the cover, the first record of hers that doesn’t feature some part of her face.1 That’s not to say she doesn’t have a story to tell; she does, but she is the narrator here, not the star.

She is said to have spent two years on the words before she’d move across to the music and unveiled the title track on the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show during the run-up to the UK’s 2010 election. Prime Minister Gordon Brown sat on the sofa observing her singing “England’s dancing days are done”, less than two weeks before he called Gillian Duffy a bigoted woman and less than a month before he left office.

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The full album that followed almost a year later observes England with both love and disgust intertwined as if they were one feeling. It also spends most of the songs surveying foreign fields. The botched campaign for Constantinople, Gallipoli and other mistakes (to put it lightly) abroad.

The timing of the record did a chunk of the work, eventually helping it to win her a second Mercury Prize.2 Released on 14 February 2011 as the first dominoes of the Arab Spring were falling - it was three days after Hosni Mubarak fell and five weeks before British jets were flying over Libya. British soldiers were still dying in Helmand almost a decade into that conflict and the Iraq inquiry was still sitting. A record about ill-conceived expeditions around the world almost a hundred years earlier said a lot about the world we were in - history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes and all that.

By the autumn of 2011, the Prime Minister on Marr's show was David Cameron, and Harvey was back too, bookending the album's promotion, post-Mercury3, with 'The Last Living Rose'.

An ending then picking at an English scab that never quite heals. After eleven songs carried by Harvey’s high, lilting register, ‘The Colour of the Earth’ opens, and the voice is not hers. Mick Harvey4 (Australian, ex-Bad Seed) takes the lead, singing with the persona of an old soldier remembering his friend: “Louis was my dearest friend”, who ran out from an Anzac trench and never came back. Polly is in there, but behind him, harmonising. A backing singer on the last song of her own album, as she couldn’t be the old soldier herself.

On 7 August 1915, at the Nek, a ridge barely the size of three tennis courts, waves of the 3rd Light Horse Brigade were sent over the top into Ottoman machine guns, line after line, gaining no ground whatsoever. The covering barrage stopped seven minutes early; four waves went over anyway. It is the charge Peter Weir freeze-frames at the end of his 1981 film Gallipoli. Mick Harvey’s soldier tells us that nobody brought Louis home; he is still on that hill twenty years later - reduced to bones.

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Handing the closer to another voice has history here. John Lennon gave Ringo Starr ‘Good Night’ to sing us to sleep at the end of The Beatles; the Velvet Underground let Moe Tucker carry ‘After Hours’; Régine Chassagne takes the final word on both Funeral and The Suburbs.

But those are bands passing a microphone around the family. Harvey is our only author, and Let England Shake is an album of ventriloquism, borrowed voices all the way through: soldiers, mothers, the land itself. To end it, she declines the opportunity to give us the only voice left, her own. The last word goes to the kind of man these songs are all about, voiced by an Australian at that.

Asked the colour of the earth that day, the old man answers plainly: "dull and browny red", he says, "the colour of blood". After a whole album of place names, dates, and campaigns, the final statement of the most ambitious record of Harvey’s career is a single memory a former soldier could not forget, unlike the campaigns themselves, which England managed to.

For a band who would become the eternal misanthropes of UK indie, the debut by The Smiths spends most of its length sounding happy to have a place in the world. It is all jangle and swoon and wit and romantic longing, Johnny Marr's guitar rolling over the Pennines like sunlight off the muddy Manchester canals, gilding the dank and the grim beneath. The definitive versions of several of these songs ended up on Hatful of Hollow, the sessions compilation released later that year. The debut is fighting to be that record, but its production and engineering keep it from clambering out of the waterways.

Half of the debut never made the leap to Hatful. The five it left behind are the album's longer, darker, much less radio-friendly songs. Only 'Miserable Lie' had a session take that could have qualified, and it was passed over1. The other four had no second version, and three of those, 'Pretty Girls Make Graves', 'The Hand That Rocks the Cradle' and 'Suffer Little Children', were exactly the type of song someone at the BBC with a clipboard would have shaken their head at. The last of them, as the most extreme thing the Smiths ever recorded, would have ended the meeting there and then.

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‘Suffer Little Children’ closes the 1984 debut, and it is about the Moors Murders, the killings carried out by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in and around Manchester between 1963 and 1965. Morrissey, born in 1959, was a few years younger than the victims and grew up in the same area, with the shadow of the crimes looming large. He wrote the lyric after reading an account of the case by Emlyn Williams, and the song was among the first he and Marr ever made, on their earliest demo.

You can frame that as the two duelling forces of the band's character, making a very early appearance. Marr's melodies and Morrissey's darkness combine in a way that doesn’t soften the horror but sharpens it. It is a balance the band did not always nail, the prettiness sometimes sitting awkwardly against the words rather than charging them.

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On this closer, that gap doesn’t arise; the song is gorgeous, and that makes the song more unbearable. The title is the first turn of the knife. “Suffer the little children to come unto me” is Christ in the Gospel of Matthew, welcoming the young, where “suffer” means permit, allow. Morrissey lets the more familiar, modern meaning seep through, so we are clear that “permit” and “allow” are not what these children were experiencing. “Oh, Manchester,” he sings, “so much to answer for.” The evil has the same locational root as the one that forged the band, and Morrissey used the end of their debut to hold someone, something to account, even if that’s geography.

What made the song a scandal was that, while it admonishes Manchester, the place, it names three of the five victims outright. John Kilbride, Lesley Ann Downey, Edward Evans. Three murdered children, named in a pop song, while their families were still living through the aftermath of Brady and Hindley's crimes2. Beyond the names, the song slips into Hindley's own voice, then gives voice to the victims and even agency to suggest they would haunt their killers. Naturally, the press had a nuanced and thoughtful take on this: The Sun compared Morrissey's moral compass to those of Hindley and Brady themselves. The band’s debut was pulled from the shelves of Boots and Woolworths3.

Salvation for Morrissey came from a person with much more right than anyone else to object. Ann West, Lesley Ann Downey's mother, contacted the band, met Morrissey, and came to accept what he was trying to do. His argument (the one she is said to have accepted) was that the real obscenity is silence: to leave the killers infamous while the victims go unnamed is backwards, and so to name them is the opposite of exploitation.

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The song and the album end on a laugh. As the song fades, a woman’s laughter rises and trails away into silence, a recording of a friend of the band rather than anything more sinister, but we all know what reaction from the listener was intended. There is a line in the song, sung in a child’s imagined voice, “find me, find me, nothing more”. Morrissey could not have known, writing it, how long that line would sound to anyone hearing the song decades later. One of the children murdered4 on those moors has never been found, despite years of pleading before both the killers died; they never said where.

By the time the listener has got to the end of All Things Must Pass, they have certainly travelled a long way. George Harrison’s first proper solo album1 is a triple, one of the first in rock, two discs of dammed-up songs finally bursting out after years of him being in the Europa League of songwriters in the Beatles. All of them wrapped in Phil Spector’s cathedral of reverb. ‘My Sweet Lord’, ‘Isn’t It a Pity’, ‘Beware of Darkness’, and especially the title track are all the sound of a man in his late twenties reaching beyond disposable pop music towards something more permanent, eternal. Transcendental. But the very end, the last thing before the needle’s job is done, is a loose five minutes of instrumental jamming called ‘Thanks for the Pepperoni’.

The album Harrison built does not really end there, though. The songs proper close on ‘Hear Me Lord’, the final track of the second disc, and it is that song that is the benediction the whole record has been moving towards, marble and granite reaching up to Spector’s slow-rolling organ and a choir of massed voices, Harrison asks the man upstairs, plainly and over and over, to be heard and forgiven. After two discs of soul searching, it is offered without irony. If All Things Must Pass has been a pilgrimage, ‘Hear Me Lord’ is the altar Harrison is kneeling at, come the end.

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Harrison wasn’t done with us yet, though; he kept going. The third disc, labelled Apple Jam and given its own design with a little jam-jar logo, gathers up the loose instrumental jams from the sessions. Why does something like that even exist in the days before Japanese CD bonus tracks? It exists partly for the same reason they arrived in the 1990s, to take the sting out of the price; a triple album was a serious outlay in 1970. Harrison was clear about what the last disc was, though.

He told Billboard magazine in 2001 that;

For the jams, I didn’t want to just throw in the cupboard, and yet at the same time it wasn’t part of the record; that’s why I put it on a separate label to go in the package as a kind of bonus.

So even back in 1970, there was some debate about which track was the final one.

I will ignore George and focus on where the sold package finishes, on a groove, and what a groove it is. The jam rides a Chuck Berry riff, Harrison trading licks with Eric Clapton and Dave Mason, cut on the very day Clapton’s new band, Derek and the Dominos, first played together.

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The title is a joke. Harrison lifted it from Lenny Bruce’s ‘Religions, Inc.’, a routine in which Bruce paints organised religion as a grubby business and, in a riffed telephone call with the Pope, thanks him for the pepperoni.

This is the dry and laconic humour from Harrison that would also see him stump up millions of pounds to fund Monty Python’s Life of Brian because he wanted to watch it.

We close out the most devotional album of Harrison’s life, ending on a jam with a title borrowed from a comedian, taking the mickey out of the church. There is no contradiction in it, which is the lovely part. ‘Hear Me Lord’ is where Harrison says everything he means. It was often said that the Anglican Church was the Conservative Party at prayer. ‘Apple Jam’ and ‘Thanks for the Pepperoni’ are by George Harrison, not at prayer, but playing his guitar with his mates.

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If you don’t remember the summer of 2001, you might be surprised that, for all the coverage of The Strokes and their debut record, Is This It, it was actually two people, not in skinny jeans but plain white and red t-shirts and trousers, who were actually responsible for the biggest hype train of the year. Despite already being two albums into their career at that point, The White Stripes were playing their first shows in the UK twenty-five years ago, and for a brief period, everyone was out of their tiny minds over it. The NME had them on the cover, DETROIT ROCKS! – The Sound Of Now!

The second of their three1 pushes of US exports, they got behind that year. That’s pretty standard, as was someone like Jarvis Cocker coming to see an early August gig at The Boston Arms in Tufnell Park and John Peel having them in for a couple of sessions while they were searching for a UK record deal. What was more surprising was their third record charting via import, Kate Moss attending the gig and attracting commentary from The Sun (The paparazzi spending more time photographing Moss than the band) and more bizarrely, The Daily Mirror declaring that the band were the best thing since the Sex Pistols or even Hendrix and offering a phone number for you to call so you can hear the so called ‘Blunk’ music (Blues plus Punk) for yourself – this was too early for normies to be on LimeWire.

Jack and Meg White were presented at the time as brother and sister, except the records suggested they had been married and divorced; the band declined to clear it up, which only fuelled the whispers about who they really were. That mystery, the red-and-white uniform and imagery, the deliberate primitivism, the refusal to have a bass player – it all felt a lot more interesting and rock n roll than Papa Roach, Limp Bizkit, or Creed could offer.

White Blood Cells, the record at the centre of this storm, is an album about being besieged. Named after the things in your body that swarm to fight off whatever shouldn’t be there. The cover has the two band members in the middle, red on white, with shadowy black-clad figures advancing at them. The press, the fame, the attention – it is all bearing down on them. The record sounds like a body bracing for impact: it is fast, sharp, over fifteen tracks that stick to that template of running hot and keeping the world at arm’s length.

They close with something not cut from that pattern. ‘This Protector’ is the quietest, most acoustic, lowest-energy thing on the album by a distance. After all that guitar, the closer is piano and voice and almost nothing else. It isn’t directly a title track, but we know that those little leukocytes are our protectors. Looking at the numbers, it fits our Withdrawal ending - it runs short against the rest of the album, it tracks what we expect on every other measure, energy, loudness and valence all falling, acousticness climbing. In that sense, the only other track that the band placed last on a record that better fits our framework is ‘I’m Lonely (But I Ain’t That Lonely Yet)’ on Get Behind Me Satan.

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By November 2001, even before ‘Fell in Love with a Girl’ was out as a single and Michel Gondry was arranging Lego for the video, they were already at Maida Vale, looking to capitalise on the momentum of the year. They cut tracks that would land on Elephant, their colossal pachyderm of a follow-up that gave the world ‘Seven Nation Army’. Perhaps they realised they could not hold back the tide, so they rode the wave instead. That fame they were bracing against arrived anyway, and much faster than anyone expected.

On the other side of the record cover, mounted like a frame of Kodak film, sprocket holes and all, the band are not just photographed but developed, fixed and displayed. The shadowy figures are unmasked, holding an array of cameras as old as the analogue gear the band would take to Toe Rag to capture their fourth record, and the two “siblings” are smiling, thumbs up to their would-be antagonists.

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On Thursday evening, I was in an enormous terracotta blancmange in West London to see a band from the past warn of the future, much as they have been doing for the last 50 years. The Royal Albert Hall is the least computational venue in London, built in 1871 as a monument to Queen Victoria’s late husband, Prince Albert, and a testament to the Victorian quest to harness the power of both the arts and the sciences. That evening, a near octogenarian and three others stood on the stage, in Lycra suits fitted with LED lights and, while barely moving, performed some of the most deliberately mechanical and robotic music ever produced. All the while, they had a giant screen full of images behind them, and much smaller screens in front of them, capturing the show on the sort of devices their work has spoken to since the mid-1970s.

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Kraftwerk are on their first UK tour in nearly a decade. Working out which album features the most is a game of suites against crisp, nameable tracks, but my feeling is that Computer World wins out; every track from the album turns up somewhere in a set list that has barely changed in twenty years. Ralf Hütter, now 79, is the last founding member standing. Florian Schneider left in 2008 and died in 2020. Now, in 2026, with the automation debate centred on white-collar work rather than the factory floor this time round, the music sounds more prescient than ever. This is a show where you cannot see the gap between the looping algorithm and the human in the loop.

Which is, or at least I hope it is, the whole joke, and the whole point of Computer World’s closing track ‘It’s More Fun to Compute’. It marks the place where, much like Winston Smith at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the album finally learns to love computers as the dissolve between the two becomes invisible. The rest of the record is still fairly person-centric. ‘Computer Love’ is a song about loneliness rooted in a screen, carrying genuine tenderness despite its cold intonation. ‘Pocket Calculator’ is playful, almost silly, with the zany sound effects. ‘It’s More Fun to Compute’ is none of that. No melodies that Coldplay could borrow, no warmth, just a pulse and green text on a CRT repeating the same thing over and over like Jack Torrance’s typewriter in The Shining.

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In 1981, the song’s title was an absurd deadpan joke. A parody of the way home computers were starting to be marketed as a leisure tool around a decade before you could play Minesweeper or Solitaire on them. More fun than what exactly? Than going outside and touching grass? Than talking to an actual person, in person. Forty-five years later, this is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time. You wake up and look at a 6.5-inch screen, then spend time on a 16-inch screen, before finally putting both away and looking at a 55-inch screen (while also looking at the smallest one again). Work, play, life - all the world’s a stage and it is tempered glass.

For decades, Kraftwerk’s encores belonged to the robots. The four men would slip offstage, and their mannequin doubles would be wheeled out to perform 'The Robots' in their place, a perfect punchline from a band who had spent fifty years dreaming of becoming machines. On Thursday, the dummies stayed on the screen, and the flesh-and-blood band walked back out to do it themselves. Could it be that as the machines finally came for the white-collar jobs, the men who taught us it was more fun to let the robot do the work decided that it was right for them to do it themselves?

Across the thirty-odd minute run time of Surfer Rosa, Pixies’ debut album proper, Black Francis, the lyricist and vocalist, is not one for understatement and subtlety. Carnal relationships are incestuous, faces and bodies are severed, mutilated and celebrated in Spanish, and the biblical imagery is decidedly Old Testament. If this wasn’t enough to offend puritan neighbours, reading the lyrics on paper, the songs are barked and howled by Francis at a volume that will have them reaching for a telephone number to complain, as they are accompanied by a mighty backing crunch from the rest of the band and Steve Albini’s production.

In 2024, the BBC dispatched him to read a CBeebies bedtime story, an odd commission for a man whose songbook runs on biblical violence, mutilation, incest and torture.

A children’s bedtime story doesn’t have to be a soft nursery rhyme. A closing track can be Ringo singing us gently to sleep after almost ninety minutes of The White Album's genre-swapping and pastiche. Or it can be a lightweight shrug at the end of a furious, filthy, era-defining record.

The numbers bear that shrug, up to a point. Compared with the rest of Surfer Rosa, ‘Brick Is Red’ is a little over two decibels quieter according to the Spotify audio data. It is also recorded as lower in energy, ticking two boxes of the gentle wind-down you might expect of a closer. But it is also nearly a quarter shorter than the album’s average track and, by Spotify’s reckoning, marginally sunnier in mood than the album’s average. These are going against the grain of your classic withdrawn closer. Our school report would note that it is quieter, but more noticeable that it is just short.

Short things bolted onto the end of an album tend to go unloved. Across a couple of thousand records in our database, three-quarters of closing tracks are less popular than their album’s average song, and a third are the least popular track on the whole thing. ‘Brick Is Red’ sits eleventh of Surfer Rosa’s thirteen, trailing ‘Where Is My Mind?’ 5m plays to 1.2bn, a gap of roughly 240 to one.

To complicate things further, I would guess a large proportion of listeners to 'Brick Is Red', over the almost forty years it has existed, do not view it as an ending at all. My CD copy of Surfer Rosa, bought in the late 1990s, is actually Surfer Rosa/Come On Pilgrim, with the track moving into that EP's opener, ‘Caribou’, and the album package closing out with ‘Levitate Me’. On top of that, for the Come On Pilgrim... It’s Surfer Rosa anniversary edition from 2018, the natural chronology is there, and ‘Caribou’ and the seven other songs sit first rather than as a bonus bolt-on to a record with a skinny runtime. To complicate matters more than needed, that anniversary edition also has a live disc, so ‘Brick Is Red’ can be at the end or in two different middle sections, depending on which version(s) you own.

This GitHub approach to version control didn’t start with Pixies; we only need to look at the biggest record of this era for another example. Michael Jackson's Bad either finished on 'Smooth Criminal' (vinyl) or 'Leave Me Alone' (CD).1

More recently, Taylor Swift and others have taken to more and more elaborate ways of finishing records with three or four different endings depending on where you think each project stops and which shade of marbled vinyl you bought from which store. In the CD era, due to the higher price of discs in Japan, Japanese pressings often became sought after in the US and Europe for their bonus tracks on the back. Sometimes these could be strong material that didn’t quite fit on the standard version, b-sides or simply songs that can’t take the hint as the host coughs and mentions their early start tomorrow.

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'Brick Is Red' can be filed as an early, minor casualty of a problem that would only get worse. A less consequential song placed last on purpose, which, for many of the people who owned the album, doesn’t end it in their minds. The band would go on to make far more memorable closers in the near future, including one that is one of the very best examples of the craft.

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The first sound on ‘Green Eyes’ is a surface hiss. A crackle like the muffled warmth of an old ‘78. The recording trying to trick you into thinking it has been waiting in a shoebox for seventy years. Erykah Badu and her producers, mostly Questlove and James Poyser, made a contemporary record with all the trappings of a contemporary studio, then opened the closing track with sonic forgery and trickery before she even sings. It wants to transport you to the voices of earlier times, belonging to the likes of Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, and Etta James, women who sang about love coming apart at the seams while their backing bands did not.

‘Green Eyes’ runs over ten minutes and moves through three distinct sections, each rooted in a different era of Black American music. It opens as that crackly 1930s torch song, all brushed drums and a recording that must be restrained to keep it from escaping the construct of the physical medium. "I'm insecure," Badu sings, then immediately retracts it: "But I can't help it." She tells us green is supposed to mean health, but it is also a colour of sickness. The denials and admissions wrestle each other across the first three minutes.

A middle section gets comfortable with mid-century soul as the bargaining begins, and Roy Hargrove's trumpet steps forward to anchor the brass section. The same horn had carried D'Angelo's Voodoo and Common's Like Water for Chocolate through the same year. You barely notice the transition wipe where the crackle and hiss pull out. It is a neat trick to pull off and should be considered a technical achievement, on par with the wow-and-flutter techniques used by Boards of Canada at the end of the 1990s. Finally, the last section settles and returns to the early-2000s neo-soul that Mama's Gun has been luxuriating in, so Badu can stop pretending. "Are you stayin', are you goin'?" she asks, then answers herself: "I think you better go."

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Three-act suites that move through distinct parts were not new; there is a lineage. ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun’ in 1968, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in 1975, ‘Paranoid Android’ in 1997. The Beatles, Queen and Radiohead built their suites in time and space, using musical contrast and different keys and time signatures to move between sections. Badu builds hers in elapsed time. The three parts are three eras of Black women singing about heartbreak, arranged chronologically, ending in the present day, where she has now run out of wigs to try on.

For most of Mama’s Gun’s runtime, Badu is foregrounded as a sage and a seer. ‘Penitentiary Philosophy’ diagnoses the prison-industrial complex. ‘A.D. 2000’ confronts 1999’s police killing of Amadou Diallo. ‘Cleva’ argues for self-acceptance. ‘Bag Lady’, the album’s biggest single, instructs the listener to put down the emotional baggage they have been dragging around. Then ‘Green Eyes’ arrives and reveals that the advisor is not capable of taking her own advice. The bags she told you to drop are there on her own shoulders.

The breakup the song works through was widely understood to be hers with André 3000, the father of her son Seven, the most famous half of Outkast and one of the few peers operating at her level in 2000. The song never names him in the same way as their ‘Ms. Jackson’, released a month earlier, also does not name her.

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The closing track can be a place where the public artist becomes private. It can be the mask of persona slipping to reveal something more intimate, and that has its own history. Marvin Gaye gave What’s Going On a more personal ending with ‘Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)’. Lauryn Hill officially closed The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill with the title track, then snuck 'Tell Him' out as an unlisted hidden track, a more personal love song delivered as a small secret to listeners who stayed put. Like Water for Chocolate, released six months before Mama’s Gun in the same Soulquarian milieu, closes with ‘Pop’s Rap III’, his father reciting poetry over a beat. Stevie Wonder ended Songs in the Key of Life with ‘As’ and ‘Another Star’, a social record giving way to personal love songs that go out big and brass rather than tender and quiet.

The mood drop from the album’s bright average to the closer’s near-floor is the steepest of any track on Mama’s Gun. That withdrawal is not in the production, which has been acoustically warm throughout the record. It is in the temperature of the song itself. The room stays warm; it is the lights that go off.

Each of those earlier closers does one part of the move. Gaye strips back the production. Stevie puts the personal at the end. Hill turns the sage into a lover but tucks it away. What Badu does, and what Common does in his quieter way the same year, is fold the gestures into a single track and put it where no listener can avoid it. That is the Soulquarian move at its most exposed. ‘Green Eyes’ is the longest song on the record. The album that has been speaking to systems, out to other women listening, arrives at one woman in the dark, holding herself together across three musical eras until she cannot.

Ten minutes can be an awful long time to spend admitting you were wrong about yourself, still carrying the bag you once told everyone else to put down.

Many of the closers we have looked at in this newsletter withdraw. It is the default reaction of a closing track. One of the findings from my book I’m working on is about the ebb and flow of this tendency over the decades and the technological reasons for it initially. Tracks like 'Flamenco Sketches' dissolve into a serene stillness. Recently, we looked at 'Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks', which asked 50,000 people to sing at the volume of a lullaby. The Who’s ‘Love Reign O’er Me’ submits before the weather.

The mid-nineties showed an affection for this ending as well 'Something in the Way' deflates Nevermind from bombastic to something close to mumblecore, and Radiohead’s 'Street Spirit' fades The Bends into tortured paralysis. But not everyone always took this route.

Weezer's debut ends on an explosion.

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For the first four minutes, you would not know that it’s on the way. The song opens on Matt Sharp's bass, a patient presence that repeats with the discipline of someone who has been directly told to wait. Rivers Cuomo's vocal sits on top, quiet and resigned, singing about a girl who exists only in his imagination1.

On an album full of songs about dorky romantic failure and nerdy social incompetence, from sweater-unravelling anxiety in 'Undone' to the possessive jealousy of 'No One Else', the closer is where Rivers retreats into a fantasy of something better. She does not know him. She never will. He is not even sad about it anymore, just tired of pretending that anything in the real world can compete with it.

The Blue Album, up to this point, has been one of the tightest, most controlled debut records of the decade. Ric Ocasek produced it with the same precision he brought to The Cars, everything buffed and compressed and exactly where it should be. The top button of that cardigan is done up, even if it pinches the neck slightly. The first nine songs run to 33 mins, and there’s very little fat. The power-pop hooks arrive and depart like Shinkansen.

The CD, as a technology, gave a bit more room to stretch out on albums, and, importantly, you could be as loud as you needed to on the last track rather than be concerned about losing fidelity towards the end of a vinyl side with high variance. So Weezer run with this.

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The build begins somewhere around the halfway mark of the closer.2 Sharp's bass starts to push. Patrick Wilson's drums thicken, as if he added some cornflower. The guitars, which have been hovering inches above the ground, begin to layer. It is tectonic, the kind of slow, frog-boiling accumulation you only notice when you realise the terrain has shifted while you are standing on it. The song climbs for what feels like longer than it actually takes, each repetition adding a fraction more weight, the production's own discipline creaking. When the guitars finally break through, it is closer to a dam failing than a crescendo. Everything Cuomo held back across ten songs of controlled awkwardness comes out in a single, extended roar. Then we are done, the song keeps going for a couple more minutes, one more instrumental build and fall, but Rivers is spent. Closing your debut with an eight-minute epic is a risk most bands would not dare take. The closer can reveal character or plans, not just summarise what came before.

There is a lineage to the in-track move. Pixies built their songs on loudQUIETloud, the dynamic Kurt Cobain and a generation of American rockers aped. A photographic negative approach that you could let the chorus be the breath before the verse blew the windows out. Weezer-scale that idea up to album-length. The whole record is the quiet part. The end of the closer is the loud one. Nearly forty minutes of restraint give the eruption its meaning. Without the control, the chaos would only register as noise. The album has built towards exactly this transaction without once signposting it.

What happened next sharpens it. In 1996, Pinkerton doubled down on the vulnerability, stripped the production back, and was met with bewilderment and poor sales. Cuomo retreated. The band that followed, across various-coloured, self-titled albums, leaned into irony, novelty, and a calculated detachment. 'Only in Dreams' is a signpost before that retreat. Weezer would never be this willing to be this emotionally exposed again.

Eight minutes is a long time to spend in a fantasy about someone who will never love you back. It is even longer when the last four minutes abandon the pretence of composure entirely. Most nineties closers asked you to sit with the sadness. This one asks you to feel the moment the saucepan lid rattles, and the top button pops open.

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At the end of the 1960s, Creedence Clearwater Revival were a hard-working hit factory posing as a good-time swamp band. Seven studio albums in four years, three in 1969 alone, a release schedule that makes modern release strategy look as urgent as a spa weekend. While their albums are well-regarded, they have a run of singles that are so bright, breezy and direct that retrospectives on the band's discography can too often fall back on that run as the band’s only source of output. But the most productive factories have people there when it is dark and if you want to hear what the pace cost them, skip the hits and hear the toll of the night shift at the end of the records.

CCR’s albums burn brighter than almost any in the annals of rock. Driving, swamp-boogie songs that have the DNA of something dredged-up from Louisiana despite being built in El Cerrito, California. Their songs often sound like they were born and made on a porch in the bayou. If we listen to the closers, they sound much more like a band in a rehearsal room in California at the end of the day. Five of their seven albums end with a track that drops noticeably darker than the album’s own centre of gravity. There’s a chance that wasn’t by design, but it certainly does not feel like a one-off experiment. A pattern that consistent starts to look like a habit, then a compulsion, then a tell.

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“Mood” here does not mean whether John Fogerty was having a nice day. It is shorthand for how the closer sits relative to the album’s average, especially Spotify’s valence measure, which roughly captures musical brightness.

We start gently. ‘Walk on the Water’ closes their 1968 debut with a slight dip in mood, nothing dramatic, and in isolation, it is still fairly breezy because, while Spotify does not put a number on breeziness, it is a gentle tick down from fairly high up. By January 1969, Bayou Country closes with ‘Keep On Chooglin’-nearly eight minutes of the band stretching into a jam, the brightness sinking as the swamp-boogie gives way to something slower and more uncertain. All that fun has a floor, and Fogerty wants to let you know where it is.

Green River in August 1969 is the exception. It closes with ‘The Night Time Is the Right Time’, a Ray Charles-associated cover, essentially an encore, the band taking a bow with someone else’s song. The mood stays level, with no sourness, though that also means nothing is revealed. It is the only time in the most acclaimed period of their career that a closer feels like a conventional continuation of what came before, rather than an accidental confession of working conditions as late becomes early.

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Then the pattern deepens. ‘Effigy’ closes Willy and the Poor Boys in November 1969. ‘Fortunate Son’ opens the second side of the vinyl, CCR’s most explicit Vietnam-era protest. The same side closes with ‘Effigy’, a dissociated witness watching the whole structure burn down. Over six and a half minutes, the guitars circle a single riff like smoke rising from a fire nobody is going to put out. Fogerty’s voice drops into a register closer to incantation than singing, mirroring the riff, and the song works its way through the shift, turning over but never resolving. A side of vinyl that begins by shouting into the face of power ends by standing back as it consumes everything.

Cosmo’s Factory, their best album1, gets the most dramatic withdrawal of all. ‘Long As I Can See the Light’ is a different beast from everything around it. The album is absurdly stacked, especially given what they’d already put out in 1969; you’d forgive the factory for taking some time off. However, they don’t and instead give us ‘Travelin’ Band’, ‘Who’ll Stop the Rain’, ‘Up Around the Bend’, and an eleven-minute version of ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’. Then the closer arrives with a saxophone and a soul vocal, and it is the point at which Fogerty sounds genuinely tired. Not in a performative way, actually tired. Three albums in eighteen months will do that to you. The energy drop against the rest of the album is the steepest in their catalogue.

‘Long As I Can See The Light’ is the sound of a man who has been running a factory (Cosmo’s Factory was the band’s rehearsal space and the source of the album’s title) and is finally about to punch out. The light in the title is the way home, but it is conditional. Not “I see the light” but “long as I can see” it. He knows he might lose sight of it. That doubt is baked into his worldview.

Pendulum, released five months later, pushes the pattern to its breaking point. Tom Fogerty’s last album with the band ends with ‘Rude Awakening #2’, a six-and-a-half-minute instrumental coda that begins with a distorted guitar pulse and slowly sinks into darker layers of feedback, organ and percussion that, for a band like Creedence, sounds so removed from their music palette it is more like the literal sound of a factory machine winding down. Nobody is singing; there may be nothing left to say. The mood drops further than on any other CCR closer, like a stone in a lake. The band recorded it under conditions that already sound frayed, and you can hear the magic emptying out of the room.

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And then, finally, Mardi Gras in 1972 was a disaster. Fogerty, stung and exhausted by accusations of autocracy at the top of the organisation, split creative responsibility with the rhythm section. Stu Cook and Doug Clifford each wrote and sang a third of the album. The closer, ‘Sweet Hitch-Hiker’, is still a Fogerty song, but it no longer behaves like a Fogerty ending. It is bright, bouncy, and sounds like a late-1960s single parked at the end of a compromised, designed-by-committee record rather than the escape hatch through which the album used to sneak. There is no energy drop like before, not because the unhappiness was resolved, but because the factory isn’t pulling in the same direction and isn’t working the way it used to.

CCR’s closers are revealing as they are not a stylistic tic. They are a place, sometimes the only place, on each record where the boogie stops and something more private starts to take over. The procession of hits blows steam out of the front of the factory to satisfied applause. These closers show what is building up behind the assembly line. When the pressure is mainly Fogerty’s to shape, the albums darken as the years pass, tracking the band’s internal collapse with an unnerving neatness. When ownership fractures, that trapdoor goes along with the emotional truth the closers have been carrying.

CCR’s closers are the scars left by the night shift.

Here is the first published cluster essay from late last year on Boards of Canada

For nearly five years now, I’ve been writing this Substack about album closing tracks. Over that time, it’s grown from a collection of hundreds of essays into a book. A book that uses Daniel Kahneman’s peak-end theory to explore how the final song of an album can disproportionately shape how we remember the whole record.

The book is in a solid draft shape. I think about a quarter is written to the point I’m happy to share with others, half is in an advanced or second draft, and another quarter is still to be written. Not everything has featured here in the last five years, but where it has, it has been reworked, updated and more importantly, tied to a book voice, not a weekly Substack one. I’ve been querying literary agents and submitting to publishers in parallel.

On Friday, I put out a paid preview on Gumroad for subscribers first, with a launch-week discount code. Today I’m sharing it more widely. Two tiers, both available now.

Standard Preview (£2.99) contains the book’s introduction which sets up peak-end theory and how it applies to albums, a note on how the book is structured, and a partial preview of the first cluster essay - a new format the book introduces that examines a scene rather than a single track, in this case the new-acoustic movement of 2000-2003 (Doves, Coldplay, Travis, Elbow, Badly Drawn Boy, Kings of Convenience, David Gray). The whole package is about 2,950 words.

Premium Preview (£6.99) includes everything in Standard, plus a 2,300-word exclusive essay on Kate Bush’s ‘The Ninth Wave’ suite from the second side of The Hounds of Love, an updated essay on Oasis’ ‘Champagne Supernova’, and the full cluster essay. This package is about 8,700 words, roughly 9% of the finished book.

Why a paid preview now?

Traditional publishing remains tied to platform size. The paid preview is designed as a commercial signal to the agents and publishers I’m in conversation with, demonstrating that the book's audience appetite is real at exactly the moment those conversations are happening.

I wanted to reward people who are early on the bandwagon and are helping it roll out of the station. Premium buyers in the launch week (until 23:59 BST on Thursday 30 April) also receive lifetime complimentary access to any paid Substack tier I introduce in future, tied to their Gumroad checkout email.

If the project sounds like your kind of thing, both tiers are linked below. If it sounds like something someone you know would love, please send it to them.

The Run Out Grooves @ Gumroad

Standard Preview is £2.99, Premium Preview - £6.99

Normal essay service resumes next Sunday. If you would like to sign up for that, please click below

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Thank you.

Mitchell

For most of its runtime, The Suburbs sounds like Bruce Springsteen grew up in Montreal and has never quite forgiven someone for it. Win Butler spends sixteen tracks mentally driving through his childhood in the Woodlands, Texas, chronicling cul-de-sacs and fading shopping precincts with the kind of wistful reverence that, if I’m being honest, starts to wear thin by the halfway point if not before. George Romero got to the dead mall first, of course. In Dawn of the Dead, his zombies shuffle through a shopping centre on muscle memory alone, drawn back to the place where they used to consume, long after there is nothing left to consume. We what we do in life echoes in eternity, as a Spaniard once said.

Butler does something similar, only with guitars and a notebook full of nostalgia, like an indie-rock Peter Kay1, remembering eating spangles on a space-hopper on a BBC2 reminsiece package.

Then Régine Chassagne walks in and changes the channel entirely.

‘Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)’ does not sound like the rest of The Suburbs. It does not really sound like Arcade Fire at all. If anything, it sounds like ABBA. It sounds like Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’ rebuilt on a retail park escalator at closing time, all glittering synths where the album had been giving you chiming guitars and earnest yet dreary and plodding piano. Chassagne delivers the album’s emotional climax not through another rock anthem about lost youth and Proper Binmen but through disco-pop so dazzling it almost disguises the fact that the lyrics are about suffocation. Being told to move, keep quiet, and know your place. Butler’s suburbs are a place you look back on with a degree of complicated fondness. Chassagne’s suburbs are a place you needed to get out of yesterday. The album has been telling you about why it isn’t worth sticking around for an hour. This is the only song that does.

It is also, and this is worth pausing on, the second time Arcade Fire have handed the album’s closing word to Régine rather than Win. On Funeral, she closes the record with ‘In The Backseat’, a song about being forced into the driver’s seat of her own life after her mother’s death.

Six years later, she closes The Suburbs with a song about refusing to stay in the place everyone expects her to remain. Moving from the backseat gave her some control. ‘Sprawl II’ is her utilising it. Whether or not the band intended that arc between the two albums, it is there, and it gives Chassagne’s role as a vocalist in the band some back story beyond “the other vocalist.”

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But ‘Sprawl II’ is not technically the last thing you hear. After it fades, ‘The Suburbs (Continued)’ arrives, a truncated, quieter reprise of the album’s opening track. The same song, shortened, its piano refrain now closer to the wistful, woozy shimmer of Sleepy Jackson’s ‘Good Dancers’ than the statement of intent we heard at the start.

The album begins and ends in that same place, the needle returning to where it started. For a record that luxuriates in the inescapability of escaping where you grew up, that is no accident. It is the whole argument. You can drive as far as Chassagne’s synths will carry you, beyond mountains and over vast bodies of water. The album pulls you back to the street you started on.

Which is the real closer? ‘Sprawl II’, the emotional peak, the song that sounds like breaking free? Or ‘The Suburbs (Continued)’, the quiet admission that you never really do? The shortness of the actual final track on the album gives you option to have both and allows you to sit with the contradiction. Liberation, then return -the open road but always that same front door when you close your eyes. Like Romero’s zombies finding their way back to the mall, can you ever truly find release?

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The Cure’s lead singer, Robert Smith, was raised Catholic, and by the end of the 1980s, he stopped believing. There are interviews1 that confirm this verbatim, but I don’t think you needed to have waited that long to notice. He was twenty-one when he wrote a song called ‘Faith’ and put it at the end of an album called Faith, which is either the most straightforward sequencing decision in this newsletter's history or the most quietly devastating. A young man names a record after the thing he is in the process of losing, then makes you wait right until the final track to see that process laid out.

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Faith is the middle chapter, the Two Towers if you will, of what Cure fans call the band’s dark trilogy. It is bracketed by Seventeen Seconds and Pornography2. Seventeen Seconds gave the world' A Forest’, arguably the first time the band’s sound clicked into something which we can now unmistakably identify as their own: Simon Gallup’s bass leads from the front, Smith’s guitar provides texture and reverb inside the cold space. However, it was a blueprint, an architectural drawing. Faith is when the outline is more fully realised, and The Cure moved in.

The album commits fully to what Seventeen Seconds had sketched. The tempo slows to a crawl. The reverb deepens like tangled thorny bushes surrounding Aurora’s castle in Sleeping Beauty. The last traces of the wiry post-punk and angularity (still selling records for other bands in 1981) from Three Imaginary Boys are gone. Gallup’s basslines on the title track are the connective tissue spreading the decade between ‘A Forest’ and ‘Fascination Street’, a song that would help break them in America. You can hear those almost ten years playing out in that low end. As you sit back with a full discography, you know where it leads. In 1981, nobody could realistically guess.

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What makes ‘Faith’ work as a closer is how little it feels like it is doing and how it deviates from the rest of the record while quietly laying down some guidelines for the future. The song does not build to a climax. It thins out, then repeats and circles back to the last few words. Smith’s voice is flat and affectless in the way that would become his signature style in the band’s darker moments, not quite disengaged but certainly emptied by something. The lyrics are sparse to the point of almost opacity. There is no spiritual crisis, no catharsis in looking elsewhere. Like the music, the words have no resolution. Just faith, turning over and over until it stops meaning anything to hear. This might have been the point. If you have ever said a word so many times that it has lost shape in your mouth, you have felt what losing your faith feels like better than any narrative could.

This lack of resolution is borne out by taking a zoomed-out view; the data supports it. The album is uniformly grey throughout; the closing track’s mood sits essentially on the same level as the rest of the record. The song does not drop dramatically because there is nowhere lower to go. The whole record is already on the floor, and the closer can only confirm that for you.

On a middle album in a trilogy, the closer has an unusual job. It cannot be resolved because the story is not finished. It has to feel like an ending that leaves room for a sequel. ‘Faith’ manages this by offering nothing concrete to hold onto. The album closes without satisfaction but also without devastation, just a suspended somethingness. This is exactly where Smith wanted you, because what came next was Pornography, an album he intended as The Cure’s last, a record so deliberately self-destructive that the band nearly didn’t survive it. Gallup left. Smith and Lol Tolhurst could barely speak to each other. The whole thing almost blew up in 1982 for good.

That makes ‘Faith’ the closer feel, in retrospect, like the last big gulp of a breath before a man holds his head underwater. The calmness is by no means peace. It is the moment before a decision. Smith didn’t know that yet, or maybe he did, and the song is the sound of someone not yet ready to commit either way. For us, the hinge in their career only looks like a hinge from the other side.

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