“Wings of a Butterfly” by HIM

HIM kicked off the campaign for Dark Light, their fifth studio album, with "Wings of a Butterfly" in September 2005, a song that sits second on the record under the longer, nastier title "Rip Out the Wings of a Butterfly". The Finnish gothic rockers built the music together, Ville Valo, Mika Karppinen, Mikko Lindström, Mikko Paananen and Janne Puurtinen, and Valo wrote the words alone.

It's melodrama with the amps cranked, Valo crooning like a matinee idol at a funeral over riffs that bite. Finland and Hungary sent it to the top, Germany and the UK took it to number 10, the US to 87, the biggest single the album gave them, and the video, shot at Union Station in Los Angeles, topped MTV2's Rock Countdown for five weeks until it was retired.

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