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The 25 Best Chemical Brothers Songs

These 25 Chemical Brothers songs are some of the most explosive, head-bobbing, ass-shaking anthems in electronic music history.

The Chemical Brothers
Photo: Hamish Brown

This week, the Chemical Brothers will release their ninth studio album, No Geography, a notable feat for a group that was first propelled into the mainstream via electronica’s so-called big bang in the late 1990s. Here’s how consistently rich the duo’s vast catalogue has been throughout their near-25-year career: Given the task of choosing our individual favorite tracks, we came up with over 50 contenders worthy of inclusion. As you read—and better yet, listen—to this list, you’ll discover some unexpected omissions (pour one out for one of their biggest crossover hits, “Block Rockin’ Beats,” which didn’t make the cut), but also some equally surprising additions that more casual fans may find unfamiliar. Regardless of your level of immersion, though, what you’ll find here are 25 of the most explosive, head-bobbing, ass-shaking anthems in electronic music history. Blue Sullivan

Editor’s Note: Listen to the entire playlist on Spotify.


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25. “Saturate”

The Chemical Brothers’s 2007 album We Are the Night is rightly maligned for containing a few of the duo’s rare missteps (here’s looking at you, “Salmon Dance”), but it also contains one of their most propulsive house bangers. Built on ping-ponging keys and a bassline so deep and dirty it almost qualifies as subliminal, “Saturate” builds to a surge of hammering snares that sound like crashing waves. A frequent late-set addition to the duo’s live show over the last decade, the track is just as deserving of its inclusion here as any of their early classics. Sullivan

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24. “Life Is Sweet”

But is it? Structured as a call and response, “Life Is Sweet” first finds the Chemical Brothers radiating in an unambiguously optimistic vibe, to the point you can almost feel UV rays emanating from the speakers. And then, suddenly, everything clouds over and you find yourself dancing in a haze of primal doubt that winds up in a denouement of existentialist angst. Eric Henderson


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23. “Loops of Fury”

Best video game soundtrack of all time? WipeOut XL, without a doubt. And the Chemical Brothers’s “Loops of Fury” was but one of the crown jewels of a compilation that also included Underworld’s “Tin There,” the Prodigy’s “Firestarter,” Photek’s “The Third Sequence,” and Fluke’s “Atom Bomb.” Even in that company, the relentless “Loops of Fury” comes about as close as any of them to feeling what it would be like to barrel down an anti-gravity race track at more than 200 kilometers per hour. Henderson


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22. “Three Little Birdies Down Beats”

There is perhaps no other song on the Chemical Brothers’s 1995 debut, Exit Planet Dust, that defined the duo’s developing sound more efficiently than the unrelenting “Three Little Birdies Down Beats.” The track is a torrent of increasingly complex layers: breakbeats, soul samples, and an onslaught of screeching guitars and distorted vocals that would become the group’s signature over the course of the next decade. Sal Cinquemani

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21. “My Elastic Eye”

Based around a sample of electronic composer Bernard Estardy’s 1973 piece “Tic Tac Nocturne,” “My Elastic Eye” sounds at once cinematic and classical, fusing prog-rock and jazz influences, and boldly employing the filtered basslines of French techno and electroclash, which was peaking in popularity around the time of the song’s release. The result is a mélange of styles that cohere into a spooky musical score that wouldn’t sound out of a place in an Argento giallo. Cinquemani


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20. “One Too Many Mornings”

If Dig Your Own Hole would go on to clearly articulate and refine the Chemical Brothers’s distinctive sound, the second half of Exit Planet Dust found the duo exploring electronica’s more ambient rhythms. With its pulsating, dub-infused trip-hop groove and swooning female vocal, “One Too Many Mornings” in particular placed Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons squarely downstairs alongside the likes of Underworld, Moby, and the Orb. Cinquemani


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19. “Playground for a Wedgeless Firm”

A real proper horror show, “Playground for a Wedgeless Firm” feels like taking a confident strut through a garden teeming with Satanic pinwheels. Or, to this listener, like home. Henderson

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18. “Escape Velocity”

Conventional wisdom holds that the Chemical Brothers’s apex came somewhere during their first four albums, but those who stuck with the duo into the aughts and beyond were rewarded with 2010’s Further. Cutting loose of the high-profile guest stars and occasional full-on pop experiments, the album represented a belly-filling sampler of their career-length greatness, best epitomized by this laser-sighted eight-plus-minute gatecrasher. Like “Star Guitar” before it, it’s dance music with feet firmly on the dance floor but eyes gazing past the Milky Way. Sullivan


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17. “Setting Sun”

The Chemical Brothers generally avoid out-and-out pastiche, choosing instead to pay their tributes by borrowing from the best. “Setting Sun” is the exception, a clear attempt to draw a clear through line from the Beatles’s legendary “Tomorrow Never Knows” to the tradition of electronic dance music in the ’90s. It’s a line that anyone who’s taken a fresh listen to Revolver closing track knows was there in plain sight the entire time, but the unbridled aggression of “Setting Sun” excuses the Chems preaching to the choir. Henderson


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16. “Don’t Think”

When filmmaker Darren Aronofsky needed music that communicated a kind of wild-eyed desire, a drug-dazed descent (or ascent, depending on your perspective) into hedonistic madness, he settled on dance music’s psyche-dance exemplars for this track on the Black Swan soundtrack, the best B-side in a catalogue brimming with fantastic B-sides. Bubbling bass and hi-hats skip along, almost subliminally, and then all at once, seemingly all the dopamine the world will allow falls on us via rumbling house and kaleidoscopic keys. Cinematic, indeed. Sullivan

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15. “Electrobank”

Upon first hearing 1997’s “Elektrobank,” I shared Keith Murray’s curiosity when—beneath a blitzkrieg of propulsive hi-hats and snares, warped Pac-Man sound effects, and distorted sirens—he asked, “Who is this doin’ this synthetic type of alpha beta psychedelic funkin’?” I was duly told that I was listening to the Chemical Brothers, and as “Elektrobank” sinuously flowed into the syncopated funk of “Piku” on Dig Your Own Hole, I knew I was being treated to something special. Huw Jones


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14. “Music: Response”

Tom and Ed go teutonic, in one of their last playful forays manipulating big-beat orthodoxy on Surrender. “Music: Response” finds the duo’s epic thump acknowledging its love of Kraftwerk, while simultaneously raising a glass to the similarly diabolical Gallic robots in Daft Punk. Sullivan


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13. “Leave Home”

As mission statements go, “Leave Home” leaves most everyone in the dust. Having been forced to abandon their initial moniker the Dust Brothers, the newly rechristened Chemical Brothers jumped right out of the gate with an entirely reconfigured vision for the future sounds of London. Popping basslines, pounding backbeats, caffeinated catchphrase hooks, all of them drawn from crate-diver samples. The refrain promised the brothers were gonna work it out, but anyone with ears could clearly hear they had already done so, with a vengeance. Henderson

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12. “Galvanize”

A deep wedge of Middle Eastern-infused hip-hop featuring a rabble-rousing Q-Tip, 2005’s “Galvanize” was the Chemical Brothers’s most successful crossover bid since 1999’s “Let Forever Be,” if not 1997’s “Block Rockin’ Beats.” Driven by Moroccan string samples and a shifty time signature, the track proved that even if the rest of 2005’s Push the Button failed to reach the heights of its predecessors, the duo at least wasn’t content to merely spin the same knobs. Cinquemani


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11. “Pioneer Skies”

The penultimate track from the Chemical Brothers’s visionary Come with Us is an unassuming instrumental that rides a quietly rollicking percussion sample from ’70s funk duo Resonance’s “Yellow Train.” Opening with a psychedelic guitar riff that gives way to Rowlands and Simons’s swirling synth washes and pensive keyboard figures, the song reveals new tonal images with each new trip and provides a soothing comedown after an album’s worth of heady aural hallucinations. Cinquemani


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10. “It Doesn’t Matter”

“It Doesn’t Matter” is a sinister trance monster from which the phoenix of Surrender outtake “Enjoyed” was born, operating like a transistor radio being pulled out of the primordial goo surrounding what I like to believe is Castle Greyskull. The Chemical Brothers are trying to make contact, except they don’t want to conduct a fax orgy a la Deee-Lite so much as host a raver’s paradise, and they won’t take no from the wary Sorceress. A fierce, deep house beat drops as they take us inside the castle. “It doesn’t matter,” they say to her (perhaps they threaten to reveal her identity to her daughter Teela), who’s neither amused nor easily placated. It’s smooth going for a minute or so before the sculpted minimalism of the thing spirals into an oblivion of big, fat beats and bird-like shrieks. The lady doth protest too much, but the brothers don’t stop the rock. Ed Gonzalez

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9. “The Private Psychedelic Reel”

A perfect gateway between the analogue loop curators of the first two albums and the digital megaclub conquerors of Surrender, this is the full kitchen-sink aesthetic of early Chemical Brothers: a sprawling acid test composed of a little Detroit techno, a little Public Enemy, a lot of The White Album, and even a little Cab Voltaire for extra perversion. This is the Chemical Brothers at their most drug-dazed, but with all their majestic beauty still intact. Sullivan


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8. “Got Glint?”

The Chemical Brothers’s very healthy obsession with 1970s French music continued on this standout cut from 1999’s Surrender, “Got Glint?,” which pairs a deep house groove, burbling effects, and robo-soul refrain with the trippy synths and brass stabs from experimental composer Bernard Fevre’s “Earth Message.” Cinquemani


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7. “Where Do I Begin”

The near-seven-minute “Where Do I Begin” consists of exactly one verse—“Sunday morning I’m waking up/Can’t even focus on a coffee cup/Don’t even know whose bed I’m in/Where do I start/Where do I begin?”—repeated over and over as a reverse guitar loop morphs into itself, Beth Orton’s vocal crisscrosses and overlaps, and the whole thing builds to a clattering racket of crashing drums and chainsaw synths as disorienting, numbing, and rousing as waking up to a bucket of ice-cold water to the face. Cinquemani

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6. “The Sunshine Underground”

When I think about 1999’s Surrender, with its Day-Glo cover depicting club kids going mental at an unnamed festival, this is the track that comes to mind, largely because it mirrors my experience seeing the Chemical Brothers live at Coachella that year. As the band began its set with the slow, bucolic build of “The Sunshine Underground,” festival goers were just beginning to wander over to the main stage. Then, about two minutes in, just as the sun was beginning to disappear behind the hills, the drums exploded in a frenzy, and a wander turned into a dead run toward the stage. Like the cover art, hands triumphantly raised in spontaneous celebration. Sullivan


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5. “Come with Us”

Several of the most beloved Chemical Brothers singles build choruses around a warped repetition of their titles. In “It Began in Afrika,” the wobbling syntax abuse was in service of looking forward to the dance floor, but the shuddering verbiage of the title track to 2002’s Come with Us heralded a bombastic, string-laden callback to the melodic big beat of the duo’s first two albums. Sullivan


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4. “Hey Boy Hey Girl”

The lead single from the Chemical Brothers’s much anticipated follow-up to Dig Your Own Hole, “Hey Boy Hey Girl” advanced the agenda of big beat by asking, why stop with just a singular beat? Why not make every last one of them big as hell? Eschewing funky breakdowns in favor of a propulsively quicksilver disco sheen, the superstar DJs turn what on paper amounts to two, maybe three, individual ideas into a dazzling matrix of sonic textures, simply by following the Orb’s playbook of layering sounds on top of each other. Simplicity never stomped as hard as it does here. Henderson

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3. “Out of Control”

Maybe it was the impending onset of Y2K, but it sure seemed like everyone and their brother and the Chemical Brothers were all quoting Giorgio Moroder’s immortal “I Feel Love” bassline in 1999. Few put their own stamp on the material as successfully as the Chems, though, turning Donna Summer’s radiantly blissed-out trance epic into a sharp-edged, brittle sprint. With swooning vocals by New Order’s Bernard Sumner, “Out of Control” comes on like an unexpectedly powerful hit of a mood-altering substance that landed on the wrong mood, but the track keeps its perpetual motion grounded with observations like, “Could be that I’m just losing my touch/Or maybe you think my mustache is too much.” Henderson


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2. “It Began in Afrika”

For this former, semi-reformed L.A. rave kid, the winter of 2001 is epitomized by two tracks that absolutely crushed the dance floors of disreputable Hollywood clubs and somewhat-less-than-legal warehouse parties. One was Basement Jaxx’s seminal “Where’s Your Head At” and the other was “It Began in Afrika,” a tribal house track immediately recognizable by its booming, God-like narration: “It began in Afrika-ka-ka-ka.” Hearing the epic refrain and thunderous drums, if you weren’t dancing, bad pharmaceuticals were probably to blame. Sullivan


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1. “Star Guitar”

“Star Guitar” is the Chemical Brothers’s most well balanced blend of their LSD-tipped psychodelic hallucinations and frenzied, bass-popping big beat anthems. Like the astonishing Michel Gondry video for the song (in which rhythms are registered through the objects passing outside the window of a passenger train), it’s all about the duo’s careful layering of sonic elements around a monolithic squelch-synth line, distorted into dazzling Technicolor with an epic amount of reverb. If the Chems’s zero-inertia “You should feel what I feel/You should take what I take” refrain comes off as a near-redundancy (there’s just enough space between each repeat for everyone under the tent to giggle “too late!”), the simple tension and release of “Star Guitar” gives listeners a vivid approximation of what they feel without even requiring you to take what they take. Every druggy, squelching aural accoutrement vibrates with its own dizzying life force. Henderson

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