“Dark Entries” by Bauhaus

"Dark Entries" was how Bauhaus followed up "Bela Lugosi's Dead": a stand-alone single issued in January 1980 on Axis, the label that soon renamed itself 4AD once it turned out somebody else had a claim on the name. Beggars Banquet reissued it a month later, and it has come out six times in all. Paul Delvaux's 1944 painting Sleeping Venus served as its cover.

Anyone expecting another slow crawl through the crypt got a jolt. AllMusic's Dave Thompson heard it as far punkier than the band's reputation, run at breakneck pace, with a storm of feedback and drums raging for 45 seconds before Peter Murphy comes in, as breathless as he ever sounded. Daniel Ash on guitar, David J on bass and Kevin Haskins on drums wrote it with Murphy, and Mick Mercer later ranked it 4th among the best goth records of all time in The Quietus.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.