Last week we asked for your favourite album closers, and received so many responses that we decided to devote a hefty chunk of the newsletter to the topic. The closing track is a mysterious thing, often unlike the rest of the album that precedes it. It can be a place for experimentation, or at worse self-indulgence: it’s usually where artists place their longest, loosest tracks. But get that epic closer right and it suddenly turns your album Technicolor. Then there are the hushed album closers, a rare moment of pared-back intimacy between artist and listener. There are the wags who put the hit single at the end of the album (see The Kinks – Waterloo Sunset). And of course there is the (largely now defunct) hidden track at the end of the album – a gimmick, sure but also a reminder of the playfulness that that closing spot inspires.
In the age of streaming, when the concept of the album itself is under threat, the closing track might not have the same aura it once had, but artists still recognise that it can serve as a exclamation mark – look at Beyoncé’s triumphant Amen at the end of Cowboy Carter. To celebrate the closing track we asked Guardian music critics to share their favourites, before readers get their say …
***
Critics’ picks
“Often the album closer acts as a conclusion to everything that’s come before it – a safe landing, a bookend, a reflective tying-up of narrative threads. Rarer is the ending that lights a furious path to the future. Rarer still is for such a song to come after an album of scared, depressed, comfort-seeking songs. Smoke Detector, from the second of the National’s two 2023 albums, Laugh Track, blazes through all the anxieties so delicately held in the preceding 11 tracks: a rangy, eight-minute monologue through snapshots of alertness that frontman Matt Berninger (pictured above) held tight to during a now widely discussed mental health crisis. The raging lyrics are delightfully absurdist – “Why don’t you let me lay here and listen to the distant sirens? / Wonder why they have a dog in the driver’s seat / With a red helmet and his head out the window” – while the music is a looping storm, drawn from a live soundcheck during a period of peak gigging fitness. It might be my favourite National song, and hopefully an indicator of how wild their next record could be: an ending as a fresh start.” – Laura Snapes, Guardian deputy music editor
“Like many other teens who have come before and after me, I was utterly obsessed with Nirvana. Over one particularly hormone-addled summer I played Lithium and In Bloom on the piano every single day for about three hours, which I’m sure the neighbours absolutely loved. The first time I heard All Apologies, the In Utero closer which – after the likes of Heart-Shaped Box, Rape Me and Pennyroyal Tea – feels like the sun slowly breaking out from behind the clouds, I thought it must be a cover. Although there’s a clear sense of ennui in lines like “I wish I was like you / Easily amused” and “What else could I say / Everyone is gay”, they come cloaked in a sweet, lullaby melody, apparently inspired by the Beatles’ Norwegian Wood. Without that overt darkness and the sometimes primal screams that define Kurt Cobain’s delivery, All Apologies is free to be frank, spare, and to trundle along in a way that makes you imagine it continuing for ever and ever.” – Hannah J Davies, deputy editor, newsletters
“Just when you think Soul Mining by The The can’t get any better, in trickles the epic nine-minute-long Giant, a moody, progressive roller that has all the qualities an album closer should have: slowly building percussion, euphoric chanting, a shade of melancholy. To me, it’s not only the perfect way to wrap up a record, but it’s also the ideal soundtrack to the end of the night, when the sun is coming up and you’re feeling a bit wonky but you’re with your friends. Sometimes my patience for a track runs thin around the six-minute mark but this demands to be listened to in full.” – Safi Bugel, Guardian music writer
***
Readers’ picks
“I could pick any closing track from any Haim (pictured above) album, but let’s go with FUBT from 2020’s Women in Music Pt. III. The record, their third and most accomplished, came out during the pandemic and that acronym (“fucked up but it’s true”) embodied the truly weird era we were all living through.” – Dominique Harper
“The last track on Introducing the Hardline According to Terence Trent D’Arby instantly came to mind when I read this week’s subject. It’s an amazing version of the Miracles’ soul classic Who’s Loving You? that showcases the artist now known as Sananda Maitreya’s epic vocal styling. An unsung masterpiece.” – Rob Kielty
“505 by Arctic Monkeys on Favourite Worst Nightmare. Listening to their catalogue in full now it seems to signal the end of their first phase, pivoting away from the rebelliously teenage, kickabout indie of their first two albums and looking ahead to the more mature, lyric-and-groove-focused rock’n’roll of Humbug. Never mind that it’s still a mainstay of their live show and has one of the most cathartic choruses in all of 00s rock music.” – Andy McGregor
“Rock’n’roll Suicide from Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. It finished with a howl of desperation – “You’re not alone! Gimme your hands cos you’re wonderful.” Definitely made this teenage gay kid in 1970s feel just a bit less alone.” – Jeff Stevenson
“Les Boys, the final track on Dire Straits’ Making Movies album. I played this album in 1984, when I was sitting my O-grades in Scotland.I was a big Joy Division, the Cramps and New Order fan at the time, but none of those were calming enough to concentrate over. Making Movies was perfect for this, though, and it was on repeat on my record player, and all of those tunes just melted away into Maths, English and Physics revision. Whenever Les Boys came on, though, I’d take notice, not because it was the last track on the album, but instead because it took me away to far distant lands I’d never seen (Germany, in this case), and made me work harder to pass my exams and earn enough money to visit one day.” – Lisa Jelley
“The final track on one of my favourite albums – Nick Drake’s Five Leaves Left – is the perfect closer. The album epitomises languid, English melancholy, and Saturday Sun is the most beautiful coda to the whole thing, finishing with the lyrics: “But Saturday’s sun has turned to Sunday’s rain / So Sunday sat in the Saturday sun / And wept for a day gone by”. Sublime!”– Rob Mansfield
“Does the ten-minute long version of All Too Well from Taylor Swift’s Red release count? Supreme storytelling from an artist at her peak (and let’s be honest, most self-indugent).” – Miles Smith
“I had a habit 30-plus years ago of listening to World Party’s Bang CD as I went to sleep. The last track was called Give It All Away (Reprise) but, after it ended, little did I know that the CD continued to spin for another 21 minutes and 36 seconds before a satirical homage to the Beach Boys would jolt me awake. It was Surfing in Kuwait City, an ironic comment on the 1991 Gulf War aftermath.” – Pascal Desmond
“Hurt from Nine Inch Nails’ brutal 1994 classic album The Downward Spiral. A nihilistic finale that could have been almost a bit much if it wasn’t so both beautifully composed and clearly very personal. There’s a reason Johnny Cash covered it.” – Martin Pocock
If you want to read the complete version of this newsletter please subscribe to receive The Guide in your inbox every Friday
