That Eric Alper

There’s an art to ending an album and most artists never fully master it. The closer has to do something incredibly difficult. It has to feel like a conclusion without feeling like a full stop, like a door closing but not locking, like the last image of a film that you carry home with you and find yourself thinking about days later. The albums that get this right tend to get it spectacularly right, and the songs that pull it off become inseparable from the records they close. Here are thirteen that stuck the landing in ways that still resonate.

“A Day in the Life” by The Beatles brought ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ to rest in 1967 with a piano chord that took forty-one seconds to fade and somehow managed to feel like the end of everything and the beginning of something else at the same time. It remains the gold standard of album closers because it doesn’t just end the record, it expands it outward into a kind of open silence that the listener has to fill themselves.

“Champagne Supernova” by Oasis sent ‘What’s the Story Morning Glory?’ off into the world in 1995 with eight minutes of Britpop grandeur that felt simultaneously triumphant and elegiac. Liam Gallagher singing about someday you will find me caught beneath a landslide while the guitars swelled and the strings came in was Oasis at their most genuinely moving, which is not a sentence you get to write very often.

“Purple Rain” by Prince drew the curtain on ‘Purple Rain’ in 1984 with a guitar solo that has never been surpassed for sheer emotional devastation. Everything about that performance, the restraint that builds into release, the way Prince’s voice breaks at exactly the right moment, the crowd noise that makes you feel like you’re witnessing something religious, adds up to one of the most perfectly constructed endings in the history of recorded music.

“Jungleland” by Bruce Springsteen sealed ‘Born to Run’ in 1975 with nearly ten minutes of operatic street mythology that felt like the entire American dream being sung and then mourned in the same breath. The saxophone passage alone is worth the price of admission but it’s the final verses, the magic rat driving the long dusty highway home while the poets down here don’t write nothing at all, that turn the song into something that lives in you permanently.

“All Apologies” by Nirvana laid ‘In Utero’ to rest in 1993 with Kurt Cobain singing everything is my fault and then dissolving into a repeated chant of married, buried that felt like both a confession and a goodbye. Knowing what came next makes this song almost unbearable but even without that context it works as a closer because it strips everything away and leaves you with just a voice and a feeling.

“Motion Picture Soundtrack” by Radiohead walked ‘Kid A’ quietly out the door in 2000 with Thom Yorke singing over a harmonium and a choir of voices that sounded like they were coming from somewhere just beyond the edge of the physical world. The song ends with a hidden track of orchestral music that fades in after a long silence, which means ‘Kid A’ doesn’t so much end as dissolve, which is exactly right for an album about dissolution.

“Eclipse” by Pink Floyd pulled the final curtain on ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ in 1973 with the declaration that everything under the sun is in tune but the sun is eclipsed by the moon, followed by an old man’s voice saying there’s no dark side of the moon really, matter of fact it’s all dark. The heartbeat that closes the record is the same heartbeat that opened it and the circularity of that choice is one of the most elegant structural decisions in rock history.

“Moonlight Mile” by The Rolling Stones eased ‘Sticky Fingers’ into the dark in 1971 with Mick Jagger singing about exhaustion and longing and the road that never ends, over strings arranged by Paul Buckmaster that turned a rock and roll band into something that sounded genuinely ancient. It’s the most underrated closer on this list and possibly the most beautiful thing the Rolling Stones ever recorded.

“I Know the End” by Phoebe Bridgers detonated ‘Punisher’ in 2020 with a song that builds from a quiet almost conversational beginning into a screaming horn-driven apocalypse that ends with Bridgers howling wordlessly into the void. It’s one of the most startling and cathartic album endings of the last twenty years and it announced her as an artist operating at a completely different level than anyone expected.

“Rock N Roll Suicide” by David Bowie lowered the final curtain on ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’ in 1972 with a theatrical declaration of connection that felt like Bowie reaching through the speakers and grabbing you by the collar. You’re not alone, he sang, and you believed him completely, which is the most any piece of music can ask of itself.

“Only in Dreams” by Weezer guided ‘Weezer’ off the stage in 1994 with eight minutes of slow-building guitar rock that felt completely out of place on a record full of three-minute pop songs, and was therefore the most interesting thing on it. The way the instrumental section builds and builds and then crashes over you like a wave is one of the great examples of dynamic tension in indie rock.

“Untitled” by The Cure left ‘Disintegration’ suspended in silence in 1989 with Robert Smith singing about the end of everything he loved over a wash of guitars and synthesizers that sounded like grief made audible. It’s the quietest song on the loudest emotional record in the Cure’s catalog and it works as a closer because it leaves you suspended, unresolved, exactly the way real loss feels.

“Gold Dust Woman” by Fleetwood Mac sent ‘Rumours’ out on its own terms in 1977 with Stevie Nicks singing about a woman who takes her love for granted and builds it into something that sounds like a ceremony, a ritual, a verdict being handed down. The way her voice moves through the song, from controlled to ragged to somewhere beyond either, is one of the great vocal performances of the decade and a reminder that ‘Rumours’ saved its most haunting moment for last.

Every one of these songs understood something crucial. The end of an album is not a conclusion. It’s a question you leave the listener asking as they sit in the silence that follows. The best album closers don’t answer anything. They open something.