“The New Year” by Death Cab for Cutie

Death Cab for Cutie opened a window onto a gloomy party with "The New Year", from their 2003 album Transatlanticism, and sent it out as the record's second single in February 2004. Benjamin Gibbard says the song's narrator isn't really him: she's stitched together from several women he'd met, one of whom had asked to be written about. It began as something closer to a folk song before the band blew it up into something wider and louder, a slow burn that sounds like the hangover arriving before midnight.

Chris Walla produced, recorded and mixed it, and the music is credited to all four of them. In Britain it came out as a seven-inch on Fierce Panda and spent a single week in the singles chart, touching number 86.

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