“Lazy Eye” by Silversun Pickups

"Lazy Eye" was the first single Silversun Pickups pulled from Carnavas, their 2006 debut album, and it's a slow-motion avalanche. Brian Aubert, the band's singer and guitarist, starts out sounding almost fragile, a reedy voice pleading over a guitar that hums like a faulty power line, and then the song keeps piling on weight until it collapses into a glorious fuzz storm. The crescendo is built so patiently that the payoff feels earned.

Dave Cooley produced it and Tony Hoffer mixed it. The track had a life before the album, too: an early take that ran past seven minutes turned up on the band's demo CD of four early tracks, and XM's XMU channel spun that sprawling cut before FM stations and the rest of XM got the trimmed-down single.

The band then made the late-night rounds with it, playing it for David Letterman, Jay Leno, Jools Holland and Carson Daly, and alternative radio's countdowns have kept coming back to it for nearly two decades since.

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