“Let Me Go” by Heaven 17

"Let Me Go" was the Virgin single that ushered in Heaven 17's second album, The Luxury Gap, and it's synth-pop with a cathedral's worth of ambition. Glenn Gregory, Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware wrote it, and B.E.F. produced it with Greg Walsh at AIR Studios in London, using every inch of the place: the very first chord is 118 overdubbed voices stacked in fourteen-part harmony.

From there Gregory's brooding, dramatic lead rides a bubbling bed of synths and backing vocals, and the song swells and then ebbs away, finishing on the chord it started with. Ware has called it the band's finest song, a complete piece rather than just a single. Clubs agreed: in 1983 it sat at number four on the American dance chart for five weeks and crossed into the Billboard Hot 100.

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