Leave Them All Behind

Eight and a half minutes, and "Leave Them All Behind" uses every second of it without ever feeling long. It begins with a guitar figure cycling over and over, hypnotic and slightly motorik, establishing a groove before the full band enters and the sound simply expands — outward, upward — until it has filled every available space. The production here is overwhelming in the best sense: guitars layered so densely they stop functioning as discrete instruments and become a single roaring organism, the bass locked in tight with the kick drum creating a physical propulsion that rides beneath all that noise. Gardener and Goswell share the vocal, their voices rising together in a chant that is less about lyric meaning than about texture and repetition, the words circling back until they become mantra. This is the track where Ride sound most certain of themselves, most deliberately epic — there is nothing tentative or searching about the energy here. It belongs to the post-Nevermind moment when British guitar music briefly went loud and unafraid, before Britpop arrived and tightened everything back up. You listen to this driving fast on an empty road, or standing at the front of a show, or anywhere you need to feel the particular kind of freedom that comes from giving yourself over completely to something that is bigger and louder than you are.