The Ten Best Tracks For the End of the Night

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The Ten Best Tracks For the End of the Night

Here's what you want to hear just before the lights come up.

To walk into a club is to know that something's going to come to an end sooner or later. Going out means coming back in. Unless you're one of those people who floats through life dropping out of society on a Thursday night only to rejoin at about 3pm on Wednesday afternoon. Still, clubbing is an exercise in understanding temporality. Time passes in funny way in clubs, but not even they have the power to stop it in its tracks. With that in mind we've picked out our favorite end of the night classics. These are the records we want to hear just before the lights come up, every time the lights come up.

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10. The MFA - The Difference it Makes (Superpitcher Remix)

It's always good to be reminded that nothing any of us do has any real bearing on anything that actually happens in the world, and the best place to be reminded of that is when you're billied beyond belief at 6am in a pitch black room surrounded by sweaty strangers.

9. DJ Kaos - Love the Nite Away (Tiedye Mix)

Fuck it, sometimes the best way to end the night is with a 7 minute balearic tinged AOR pop record that sounds like the bloke from the New Radicals jamming with Jose Padilla ringing in your ears. Also, who doesn't like guitar solos in the club? Cretins, that's who.

8. Jackson and His Computer Band - Vista (Hudson Mohawke remix)

THE WORLD IS OURS! WE JUST NEED TO GET SOME TINNIES FIRST!

7. Kerri Chandler - Rain

Proof if proof needs be.

6. Walter Jones - Living Without Your Love

Every so often you've got to end things seductively. This forgotten gem from the depths of the DFA back catalogue —back when it was the label to namedrop if you, like me, were a 17 year old lad in the sticks desperately trying to curate a personality to impress people on the internet—is the perfect late night slinkfest that'll have you stumbling to the bar for one last shot like you're Casanova in his prime rather than a pissed student from Castleford.

5. Fiedel - Doors to Manual (Fraxinus Edit)

Clubs are fun. The world outside isn't. Don't forget that.

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4. Jurgen Paape - So Weit Wie Noch Nie

Arguably the best record Kompakt have ever released —which is no mean feat. The label's co-founder's languorous ode to the joys of the elegiac is one of those songs that it's pretty much impossible to tire of hearing. It's an aural swoon, and sounds perfect at that exact moment when the night's festivities are about to transition into the morning's woes. Or something.

3. Lindstrom - Another Station

You've got to bring the energy levels down at the end of the night, right? You can't keep fucking away at jackhammer pace for five hours because that'll just leave us walking out of the venue battered, raw, and exhausted. We want to float out, to waltz out, to be nudged rather than catapulted. Lindstrom knows that. Lindstrom wants to make life easier for all of us. Obey Lindstrom and transport yourself to another station. Sorry.

2. Peter Gordon & Love of Life Orchestra - Don't Don't

The end of the night is always a sad affair. Nothing good can last. Flowers wilt. Relationships fail. People change. While you get ready to wait a 35 minutes for a nightbus, why not have a weep along to this a capella classic?

1. TC Crew - I Can't Do It Alone (LP Mix)

Tyree Cooper's sadlad deep house classic is a timeless, magisterial record, and proof of the ineffable power and potency of club music at it's very best. We can't think of a better way to end a night. It doesn't matter if you've spent the last six hours dancing to nosebleed techno or donk-y psytrance, as soon as those chords enter the mix the world melts and for five minutes everything is perfect.

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