20. X-Ray Eyes (2024)
The most recent LCD Soundsystem single sounded remarkably like a callback to their earliest releases: a minimal backing of rhythm track and synth – playing a riff that recalls their debut single, Losing My Edge – plus a spoken-word vocal that’s alternately creepily stalker-ish and drily funny.
19. Movement (2005)
The Fall were clearly a major influence on LCD, but never more so than on James Murphy’s scathing, Mark-E-Smith-esque assault on what an excitable 00s music press called the “New Rock Revolution”, complete with a lyrical quote from Telephone Thing (“I’m tapped!”). Suicide-style electronics and raging guitar complete the picture.
18. Get Innocuous! (2007)
As Murphy has often pointed out, he never intended to have a career as an artist, just as a producer. Get Innocuous! wrestles with the reality of unexpected success to a mesmerising accompaniment, with the vocalist Nancy Whang in the role of cheerleader: “You can normalise – don’t it make you feel alive?”
17. Call the Police (2017)
Seven minutes of relentless, hypnotic new-wave-inspired pounding, Robert-Fripp-ish guitar – and an inexplicably satisfying tick-tocking vintage drum machine sound – buoys a horrified response to the rise of Donald Trump. The lyrics featuring an all-too-familiar cast of frightened old guys, “trigger kids and fakers and some questionable views”.
16. You Wanted a Hit (2010)
Among the reasons LCD broke up was record company pressure to repeat their past successes, as addressed by You Wanted a Hit: “Leave us on our own … we won’t be your babies any more.” Fittingly, the sound would be commercial were it not disrupted by slashing guitar and jarringly electronic effects; the Soulwax remix, meanwhile, streamlines it perfectly for the dancefloor.
15. Never as Tired as When I’m Waking Up (2005)
A lot of LCD’s eponymous debut album is concerned with the night before, but this feels very much like the morning (or afternoon) after. It suddenly lurches into life, tender but fuzzy-headed, with a melody that carries a faint hint of the Beatles circa the White Album. The result is beautiful: an underrated gem.
14. How Do You Sleep? (2017)
No reference point in LCD’s music is ever accidental – Murphy is an unabashed music nerd – including pilfering the title of John Lennon’s notorious attack on Paul McCartney. Amid booming drums, swirling synths and explosions of raw analogue bleeping, Murphy sounds genuinely anguished at the collapse of the friendship at the heart of DFA Records.
13. Yeah (Crass Version) (2004)
By Murphy’s account, Yeah had a difficult, lengthy gestation. His frustration seeped into the lyrics (“I’m getting tired of listening, knowing that this shit’s gotta run”), but the end result was worth it: seething, chaotic punk-funk that gradually shifts its sound from disco to squealing acid house, as if providing a potted history of dance music.
12. Oh Baby (2017)
If you were going to announce you were back, six years after a grand farewell gig at Madison Square Garden, the opening track of American Dream was a hugely appealing way to do it: Suicide’s Dream Baby Dream recast as dubby, Balearic pop, the blissed-out mood at odds with Murphy’s pleading vocal.
11. All I Want (2010)
You could easily dismiss All I Want as record-collection rock: it’s equal parts David Bowie’s Heroes and Brian Eno’s Here Come the Warm Jets. But if bemoaning clear reference points is your thing, LCD probably aren’t the band for you. And besides: who cares when the results are exceptional?
10. Dance Yrself Clean (2010)
It’s all about the moment, three minutes in, when what initially appears to be a subdued, sparse electronic lament explodes. The whole thing gets louder, as if you have suddenly cranked the volume control, an idea so simple and thrilling you wonder why more people don’t do it.
9. Home (2010)
The final track on what was supposed to be LCD’s final album is a lovely thing, with warm electronic arpeggios and electric piano, clip-clopping percussion and a lyric that seems to plot their progress from unlikely solo project to the camaraderie of a band: “You’re surrounded, it won’t get any better, and so – goodnight.”
8. New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down (2007)
The anti Empire State of Mind. A song that sounds, unexpectedly, like a lost 40s standard, it laments the passing of the city’s scuzzier and more exciting days – “you’re safer and you’re wasting my time” – yet sounds begrudgingly enthralled despite the gentrification: “You’re still the one pool where I’d happily drown.”
7. Tonite (2017)
Murphy’s lyrics can occasionally approach music journalism, as on this funny, incisive examination of 21st-century pop’s penchant for carpe diem messaging. Is it actually expressing a fear of ageing, death or the future? Its cleverness wouldn’t matter without a killer tune, which Tonite has, along with a filthy, squelchy synth riff.
6. Someone Great (2007)
This is LCD’s take on the cocktail of euphoria and melancholy at the heart of a lot of great disco and house music. The rhythm is propulsive, the glockenspiel-assisted melody is bright, but the mood is suffused with sighing sadness and the lyrics contemplate grief. A punch is duly packed.
5. North American Scum (2007)
A marvellously conflicted examination of the US (less fun than Berlin, apparently) and foreign perceptions of its inhabitants (“I know you wouldn’t touch us with a 10ft pole”), with a hint of Talking Heads in its lyrical and musical DNA. Its brand of funk is agitated, its bassline is a monster.
4. I Can Change (2010)
A homage to early 80s synth pop – you would be forgiven for thinking you were listening to Yazoo when the intro kicks in – but rather than focus on that sound’s neon hues, I Can Change digs deep into its yearning, lovelorn quality. For all the promise in the title, you suspect the troubled relationship isn’t going to work out.
3. Losing My Edge (2002)
Allegedly inspired by a meeting with a young Pharrell Williams and made on a toy synthesiser attached to an ancient beatbox, LCD’s fantastic debut single was satire of and a love letter to hip record-collector snobbery, packed with snarky wit and riven with an affecting insecurity. It’s also funky as hell.
2. Daft Punk Is Playing at My House (2005)
A fantasy of the French house duo performing at a house party like a local punk band, you could read this track as an analogy for Murphy’s MDMA-fuelled transformation from uptight punk to dance fanatic. Either way, it’s punchy, writhing and as improbably exciting as the scenario it describes.
1. All My Friends (2007)
When LCD Soundsystem appeared with Losing My Edge – smart, sarky, thoroughly meta – the last thing you would have expected them to make was a moving paean to lasting friendship and time passing. But that’s what All My Friends is. It might have been inspired by the loneliness of touring, but anyone can see themselves reflected in its desire to reconnect and peel back the years. The message is: don’t worry about tomorrow; come and party tonight. As the music shifts slowly from melancholy to euphoria – underpinned by a piano line that owes something to the Velvet Underground’s I’m Waiting for the Man – it’s a very tough invitation to refuse.
