Still casting a spell: Broadcast’s 20 best songs – ranked!
20. In Here the World Begins (2009)
Originally a limited-edition sold on tour, and the band’s last release before singer Trish Keenan’s death in 2011, mini-album Mother Is the Milky Way was more about fragmentary sound collages than songs. But In Here the World Begins, which floats Keenan’s vocals over a murky, slowed-down tape loop, has a strange and compelling power.
19. Where Youth and Laughter Go (2000)
Broadcast never let their quality control slip when it came to B-sides, as evidenced by The Future Crayon, a compilation of non-album tracks that’s as good as their actual albums. Originally tucked away on the Extended Play EP, Where Youth and Laughter Go slips from frosty melancholy into an extended, weirdly funky drum coda.
18. Message from Home (1996)
Unless you’d been playing close attention to a developing underground scene in Moseley, Birmingham, Broadcast appeared to come out of nowhere, bringing music that bore no relation whatsoever to mid-90s alt-rock trends. Here, jazzy drums, peculiar samples, buzzing analogue synths and what sounds like a harpsichord conspire to create an atmosphere of chilly mystery.
17. The Be Colony (2009)
A collaboration with Ghost Box label co-founder Julian House, Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age remains their most experimental album. It’s best listened to in one deeply disturbing sitting, but The Be Colony – which sounds like a folk song channelled from the afterlife – gives you a flavour of its unsettling power.
16. Unchanging Window/Chord Simple (2000)
Another fantastic non-album track that melds a toughened-up take on Unchanging Window, from The Noise Made By People, with instrumental B-side Chord Simple into seven minutes that sound as if they were recorded live. The music ebbs and flows but gradually increases in impact.
15. Michael A Grammar (2005)
The stripped-down, more straightforwardly electronic sound of the Tender Buttons album, in miniature: a ping-ponging 8-bit computer-game synth, drum machine, scratchy guitar and a disarmingly sweet melody that carries some pretty baffling lyrics: “Come on your father was a teddy boy … There’s nothing written on your fingernails.”
14. Lights Out (1997)
The adjective Broadcast seem to attract most often is “eerie”. It certainly fits Lights Out, which conjures a mood of vague ominousness so pervasive that even the most conversational lyrics – “My brother’s back from holiday, he’s been chasing girls in Spain” – seem fraught with grim portent.
13. Lunch Hour Pops (2003)
Lunch Hour Pops uses none of psychedelia’s obvious sonic signifiers but listening to it is a strangely disorientating experience. The nursery-rhyme simplicity of the melody and the feverish quality of the music perfectly mirror the turmoil in the lyrics: “I wait on the stairs for a break in my mind.”
12. Papercuts (2000)
Papercuts is like jazz-inflected 60s easy-listening pop through a distorting, psychedelic lens. Its tumbling drums and thickly layered vocal harmonies feel off-centre and creepy, the perfect setting for lyrics that deal with appearance and reality: “Your heart a place that no one sees / You can’t disguise your own unease.”
11. Come Back to Me (2024)
Posthumously released on the demo collection Distant Call, Come Back to Me was discovered by Cargill after Keenan’s death. With just a fingerpicked guitar and her voice sounding both doleful and direct, it’s genuinely entrancing.
10. We’ve Got Time (1996)
Broadcast’s debut single Accidentals was intriguing – it was based around a sample of an obscure Johnny Dankworth soundtrack and recorded on a home computer – but its B-side was even more striking. It’s a lovely ballad, lyrically impassioned but sung with a blank-eyed distance, beatless and backed with shivering electronics. Who were these people?
9. I Found the F (2005)
Reduced to a duo of Keenan and James Cargill, Broadcast pared back their sound on Tender Buttons. It’s still teeming with strange noises, but there’s more space around them – as on this wonderful melody that feels constantly on the verge of collapsing into silence.
8. Pendulum (2003)
A thrilling study in contrasts and contradictions, Pendulum is as musically aggressive as Broadcast got. The distorted synth riff sounds as if it’s spinning out of control and the guitar slashes and stabs, but the vocal is cool and aloof, the lyrics simultaneously sensual and sinister: “I’m in orbit, held by magnets, and the force feels so much closer than love.”
7. Follow the Light (2024)
Keenan’s tragic early death leaves a hint of “what if?” hanging over Broadcast’s story. It’s amplified by the tracks from Spell Blanket, a collection of demos for a new album they never made. With its muted synth tones and intimate, overlapping vocals, Follow the Light suggests it would have been amazing.
6. The Book Lovers (1996)
The title track from their second release, an EP on Stereolab’s Duophonic Super 45s label, was arguably the moment when Broadcast fully came into their own. The Book Lovers is enthralling, echo-drenched baroque pop, inspired by 60s electronic visionaries the United States of America.
5. Black Cat (2005)
Broadcast at their most hypnotic: a synthesiser that sounds as though it’s on the fritz plays a cyclical, octave-leaping riff; a vintage drum machine tick-tocks away; there are intermittent gusts of howling, echoing feedback. In the middle of it all, there’s Keenan’s voice, weirdly calm and detached: “Curiouser and curiouser” is about right.
4. Echo’s Answer (1999)
There’s not much to Echo’s Answer: a two-chord piano sample that’s increasingly drenched in effects, the occasional smear of strings and Keenan’s voice at its most intimate and vulnerable. But that’s all it needs to create an atmosphere that gets into your bones like cold weather.
3. Colour Me In (2003)
Cargill thought 2003’s Haha Sound album was the closest to the band’s initial vision. Certainly, its opening track is one of their most beautiful. The vocal melody feels wonderfully airy, cutting through the bursts of industrial clanking and discordant violin like a shaft of sunlight.
2. Tears in the Typing Pool (2005)
Judging by its streaming figures on Spotify, Tears in the Typing Pool is the rare Broadcast track that’s crossed over to a wider audience. It’s just Keenan’s voice, an acoustic guitar and some Mellotron-like electronics, but you can see why it’s so popular. It’s just a fantastic song – utterly gorgeous, desperately sad and hugely affecting.
1. Come On Let’s Go (2000)
Broadcast’s sound was a trawl through a dusty box of forgotten soundtrack albums, obscure electronics, psychedelic pop and acid folk that resulted in a style entirely their own. But you often hear more about their exquisite taste in influences than you do about what incredible songwriters they were. Come On Let’s Go is the perfect example. It’s awash with intriguing sounds, but the song they decorate is fabulous, the melancholy of the vocal melody at odds with the lyrics filled with empathy and support. It’s hauntingly strange, yet a total joy: so were Broadcast.
Distant Call – Collected Demos 2000-2006 is released 28 September on Warp Records
