“Gold Rush” by Death Cab for Cutie

"Gold Rush" led the way into Thank You for Today, Death Cab for Cutie's ninth album, in 2018, and it almost didn't exist: the band had written off the demo until producer Rich Costey suggested they dig it back out and graft it onto another one. Ben Gibbard wrote it as a kind of funeral song for the Seattle skyline, specifically Capitol Hill, his neighborhood for 20 years, where the flood of workers for companies like Amazon had left whole blocks hard to recognize.

The hypnotic loop underneath comes from Yoko Ono's "Mind Train", off her 1971 album Fly, which is why Ono shares the writing credit with Gibbard and Dave Depper, and the title keeps circling back like a mantra, 46 times in all. In the video, Gibbard wanders a street as the passersby change into modern clothes, until a crowd buried in its phones stops him cold.

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