“Gamma Ray” by Beck

Beck put out "Gamma Ray" on August 11, 2008, following "Chemtrails" as a single from Modern Guilt, his eighth studio record, on XL Recordings. It's a sly bait-and-switch: the beat bounces like a '60s surf-rock party on the boardwalk, but ghostly moans drift through the mix and the words are nothing but bad news.

Under that sunny tempo, Beck catalogs the end times: polar ice melting away, houses on fire, crowns of thorns, natural catastrophes and the plain grind of boredom. Even the title, lifted from the dangerous radiation thrown off by radioactive decay, reads like a warning label. It's doom you can dance to, and it caught on, climbing to 19 on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks chart, and Rolling Stone put it at number 6 on its roundup of the year's 100 best songs.

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