Ultimate Comedown Jams: The Perfect Post-Party Playlist

The post-party comedown is a fragile stasis. You've got a lot swirling around in your system. The dying embers of whatever substances you took last night are gradually glowing out of action, the heightened sense of awesomeness trickling from your tingling fingertips, and the growing vacuous doom is beginning to flood your body. You start hearing voices: "Why did you spend £80 you didn't have?" "Why did you talk about food banks to that guy for an hour?" "You do this every single weekend." "You definitely didn't need to buy another gram."

Yet, in many respects, comedowns are like wild animals; let them roam unfettered and they will wreak havoc, destroying everything in their path, yet if you assert control early on they can be trained, disciplined, and converted into placid, and really quite bearable companions. Much of this is down to the music. Stick on Lana Del Rey and you're fucked. Similarly, try and revisit the glories of the night before by slamming on Camisra's "Let Me Show You" and you'll only amplify every regret that is already ballooning in your stomach. There is, however, a sweet spot.

You basically want to ease yourself out, with a selection of tracks that contain both the rose-tinted echoes of clubland without being "bangers", that have the pathos to acknowledge you don't feel your best without being depressing, and are mellow to keep you calm without letting you zone out in a misery k-hole. What we've sourced below, is a playlist of twenty tracks we feel do just this. Some slower ambience, some mellow groovers, some heartfelt hand-holders. All you need to do now is make sure you've got fresh sheets, loads of fruit, a twenty deck of cigs, and the mantra "there's nothing wrong with getting fucked now and again" rolling around in your head. We'd also 100% recommend getting an ad-blocker, otherwise YouTube has no chill. Stay strong. We're with you all the way.

We've all been there: you go out, you bump into someone, you start talking to them, and in that that moment of pure chemical bliss you see an entire life with them, with that stranger, run through the iMax of your addled mind. The sun rises. You get on separate busses home. You're sat there, an open tinnie and a half-smoked cigarette in front of you, someone's playing Burial off their phone, someone else is trying to talk politics, but you, you're lost in the dream. You'll never see that stranger again…you'll think about them. All the time.

To us, this edit sings of the sun coming up, and everything being alright again. All you need to do is get a good night's sleep, get your laundry done, start reading more, watch more French cinema, drink less cola, and stop giving yourself such a hard time. Then everything will be alright again.

Some breezy balearic, guaranteed to make your fusty bedroom start to feel like the deck of a yacht. A great track for turning the night before into a good memory again.

Sometimes, after a heavy one down the pool hall and the interminable bus ride home and the 45 minutes spent dawdling in front of the crisps in the corner shop and the forgetting your keys and finding them again and the skinning up and the kettle brewing and the sitting there utterly fucking brain dead and utterly inhuman, you'll want to draw for a record like Eno's still unsettling masterpiece. On Land is, outside of Human Animal by Wolf Eyes, probably the most disquieting thing ever pressed to wax. This is ambient music as a nightmare — it feels like it's a living, breathing, haunted, wrecked, ruined thing that's lurking somewhere behind the radiator — in the most comforting way possible.

Why not slap this obscure slice of lithe Swedish indie-disco-wierdness on the next time it's all getting a bit too much at 2pm. Action Biker never made it "big" in the way that Jens Lekman did, but hey, that's fine, sometimes it's nice to leave the world with one single perfect object before vanishing into the ether of memory. "Farah" is the ultimate lovelorn comedown jam. You'll wish it went on forever.

The ambient opposite to Eno, Chill Out is 45 minutes of pure unadulterated spinetingling magic. Allegedly recorded as live, arch-pranksters the KLF wove together samples from Elvis, Fleetwood Mac, Boy George's band and a tonne of other places into an aural comfort blanket. It basically sounds like that fuzz and rush of coming up — that magic moment when everything feels more real than reality. Slap it on at 10am and keep things going for another twelve hours. Then get a pizza. Then weep hysterically all night.

Listen to Barry and Babs. You've got nothing to be guilty of, baby. Take it easy.

Listen to the full playlist here.

Josh and Angus are on Twitter.