“Pure Morning” by Placebo

"Pure Morning" was the lead single from Without You I'm Nothing, Placebo's second album, in 1998, and it grew out of a B-side session. The band were cutting extra tracks with Phil Vinall, who had produced "Nancy Boy", when they started fooling with a guitar loop and decided it deserved to become a whole song. It went onto the album at the last minute.

That loop is the engine: a queasy, circling drone that never lets up while Brian Molko's nasal sneer slides over the top. Molko has said he wrote the words off the cuff and only grasped what they meant once the tape had rolled. It matched "Nancy Boy" as the British band's highest-charting UK single, peaking at number four, went to 19 on Billboard's Modern Rock Tracks, their best American showing, and went silver in Britain in 2017.

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