The 25 most essential Blur songs

The last single pulled from The Great Escape effectively acts as a punctuation mark on Blur’s Britpop era. Firmly within the tradition the Kinks established with “A Well-Respected Man,” one Blur already expanded with “Tracy Jacks,” “Charmless Man” is a portrait of a tactless glad-hander who can never resist a game of cultural one-upmanship. Unlike their subject, Blur is filled with charm here: the fleet, twisting riffs of Graham Coxon complement Damon Albarn’s singalong vocal hooks, while Alex James and Dave Rowntree lend muscle to this pure pop.

Styled as a pounding old-fashioned knees-up—Blur hammered home the connection by recording “Daisy Bell” and “Let’s All Go Down The Strand,” a pair of vintage musical hall tunes, for its B-sides—“Sunday Sunday” is as much a satire as it is a salute. What prevents the song from succumbing to cynicism is Damon Albarn’s carefully rendered vignettes and Blur’s vigor: when the song descends into a double-time break, it seems like it could careen out of control.

The noisiest cut on Blur’s sublime middle-aged meditation The Ballad Of Darren, “St. Charles Square” functions in a similar role on this 2023 album as “Advert” did three decades earlier on Modern Life Is Rubbish: after a slower opener, it kicks the album into gear. “St. Charles Square” plays much differently than “Advert” or other similar Blur blasts of cacophony. It moves at a slower pace, a rhythm that allows the song’s sense of self-loathing dread—conveyed succinctly by Damon Albarn’s opening line of “I fucked up”—loom large, a sense of foreboding accentuated by Graham Coxon’s ugly bursts of distortion.

Blur mended fences with guitarist Graham Coxon toward the end of the 2000s, prompting a series of intermittent concerts that ran into the early 2010s. During one of those tours, they wound up stranded in Hong Kong after the cancellation of a Japanese tour, leading the band to record new material for five days. Coxon and the band’s ’90s producer Stephen Street continued work on the record throughout 2014, resulting in 2015's Magic Whip, the original lineup’s first album since the 1990s. “Go Out,” the album’s first single, wasn’t a huge hit, possibly because it zeroed in on Blur’s artier side. Slithering with menace, “Go Out” plays like an aural collage, with Alex James’ loping bass and Coxon’s shards of guitar seeming in battle with Damon Albarn’s cut-and-paste vocal hooks.

A sequel of sorts to Blur’s stillborn “Popscene,” “Advert” also channels the frenzied blast of punk into a sharply written pop song about cultural discontent. Here, Damon Albarn paints a picture of advertisements offering a speedy escape from the squalor of modern life but his sneer is as effective as Blur’s clamor at portraying the emptiness of the entire enterprise.

SBK, Blur’s American record label in 1993, requested the band add a song to Modern Life Is Rubbish that could possibly appeal to American listeners. “Chemical World” is the band’s response and it’s as resolutely British as the rest of the record—a vaguely psychedelic sketch of despair woven by a woozy guitar and a sing-song melody. The song’s understated sense of discontent ties it into its parent album and points the way to Blur’s Ameri-indie-addled work of the late ’90s.

Blur’s first hit single “There’s No Other Way” is emblematic of Baggy, the Madchester offshoot steeped in psychedelic fashion and overcooked house beats. Bustling with color and rhythm, the single is fast fashion—it represents a particular time and place, namely the paisley-speckled British indie scene before it was blown out by grunge—but Blur’s inherent pop gifts lend it a lasting appeal.

An early Blur song revived and refurbished for Blur’s indie makeover of the late 1990s, “Death Of A Party” benefited greatly by not being cut at the time of Leisure. While Blur could manage to conjure bewitching psychedelia at the outset of their career—witness “Sing,” which received a re-airing in 1996 as part of the Trainspotting soundtrack—the beaten and battered Blur of ’97 could give “Death of a Party” the eerie, open textures it needs: the tense guitar and spectral organ make the song sound suspended in time.

The origins of “The Ballad” lie in “Half A Song,” a cut on Damon Albarn’s low-profile solo EP whose title conveys the tune’s unfinished state. Darren “Smoggy” Evans spent years encouraging Albarn to complete the tune and the songwriter eventually complied, turning it into the gorgeous keynote “The Ballad” for their 2023 album The Ballad Of Darren. Reminiscent of early Blur excursions into ’60s lounge, “The Ballad” doesn’t hit its target as directly as “To the End”: it luxuriates in its own languid pace, creating a sense of middle-age melancholy that’s oddly comforting.

Pitched partway between new wave flash and post-punk dread, “Trouble In The Message Centre” strikes a discordant note on the otherwise jubilant Parklife. Blur doesn’t abandon their pop instincts here—the guitar and keyboard riffs are sharpened, Damon Albarn offers a singalong chant of “la-la-la” toward its conclusion—which only makes the song sound more barbed and urgent.

The first Blur single to be sung by Graham Coxon—previously, he took the lead on the Blur album track “You’re So Great”—“Coffee & TV’ evokes the miniature charms of the American indie rock the guitarist loved so. Coxon’s subject is small—he’s writing about alienation, yearning to detach himself from the modern world—he sings in a tentative, earnest voice that seems as unaffected as any number of lo-fi rockers from the States. “Coffee & TV” still seems like a Blur song, thanks to its lively cadence and bright melody.

Originally released as the B-side of “Beetlebum,” the single that introduced Blur’s Ameri-Indie makeover, “All Your Life” plays like a farewell to Britpop, complete with a pre-chorus where Damon Albarn sings “Oh England, my love, you lost me, made me look a fool.” Perhaps this lyric proved too direct for the abstract Blur yet the immediacy of “All Your Life” is why it endures: it’s pitched precisely between the crystalline pop charms of Britpop and the noisy ecstasy of late-90s Blur.

Blur’s first number-one single arrived with great fanfare. They triumphed over archrivals Oasis in a battle of the charts, a rivalry that spilled out of the music press and into the mainstream in a moment that marked the apex of Britpop. “Country House” fittingly sounds like the high-water mark for Britpop, a smirking satire of a dissatisfied professional who ditches the city for a huge house in the country, punctuated by blaring brass, candied harmonies, and knotty guitar.

Arriving just a few years before Y2K, “End Of A Century” does contain a trace of pre-millennial malaise—the changing of the calendar, “it’s nothing special”—but the true focus of the song is another kind of ending. Damon Albarn paints a portrait of a couple whose love is slowly dissipating—“we kiss with dry lips when we say goodnight”—the disconnection slightly camouflaged by Blur’s sighing harmonies and brass, not to mention Graham Coxon’s winding guitar.

Most of Parklife is devoted to barbed guitar-pop or new-wave revivalism, making the lush contours of “To The End” even more distinctive. Wrapped in an orchestra as cinematic as anything Burt Bacharach or John Barry conjured, Blur evokes the louche lounge-pop of the 1960s, enlisting Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier as Damon Albarn’s sultry foil.

Blur reacted to Britpop curdling into boorish laddism by incorporating elements of American indie-rock and lo-fi, a shift that mirrored the tastes of guitarist Graham Coxon. “Beetlebum,” the first single from the eponymous 1997 album that reinvented and revived the band, moves at a foreboding, almost narcotic pace, letting Damon Albarn’s dreamy melody be tarnished by Coxon’s gnarled guitar riffs. Blur’s slow creep accentuates the song’s essential unease, a startling sound arriving in the thick of Cool Britannia and one that retains its gloomy allure decades later.

A distant cousin to the lush pop of “To The End,” “The Universal” deploys its sumptuous orchestra to an unnerving effect. The sweep of the strings is soothing yet slightly unsettling, mirroring Damon Albarn’s vision of a near-future comprised of satellites in every home and a populace subdued by a medication called “The Universal.” Albarn’s prognostications don’t seem far-fetched from a 21st-century vantage but that’s not the reason why “The Universal” still seems potent. The song’s power is undiminished because Blur created an uncanny valley between retro-style and futurism, letting “The Universal” exist somewhat out of time.

The second song on Parklife, Blur’s masterful concept album about modern British life in the 1990s, is the one song on the record with the clearest lineage to the Kinks, the band that laid the foundation for wry British pop in the 1960s. Like “David Watts,” “Tracy Jacks” is a character sketch of a specific English type: a middle-aged workaday drone who suddenly snaps, deciding normal is so overrated. Graham Coxon’s guitar is as punchy as Damon Albarn’s lyrics and producer Stephen Street gives the song an alluring gleam, never leaning into the strings or synths too heavily.

13 is Blur’s breakup album, one where Damon Albarn processed the end of his romance with Elastica’s Justine Frischmann while his relationship with Graham Coxon hurtled toward a rift, accelerated by tensions in the recording studio. The pair did manage to co-write “Tender,” a gospel-inflected ballad that pleads for empathy and love. The empathy of “Tender” is startling: throughout Blur’s first decade, Albarn often danced around direct emotions, so hearing him sing plainly about a broken heart is a welcome maturation.

Modern life has reduced “Parklife” to a meme which is perhaps not an unjust fate for a song conceived as something of a novelty. Hiring Phil Daniels, the actor who starred as chief face Jimmy in the cinematic adaptation of the Who’s mod opera Quadrophenia, to recite the verses depicting mundane neighborhood occurrences was a masterstroke: he wrings dry humor out of the lines, leaving Damon Albarn to shout “Parklife” as a punchline. It’s thoroughly British—there are no points of reference for an average American to use as an introduction—but it’s so lively, colorful, and funny, it plays like gangbusters outside of the UK anyway.

America did not agree with Blur. The band spent 1992 slogging it out in the States to an audience that was besotted by grunge. Damon Albarn recoiled from anything covered in flannel, choosing to embrace an exaggerated Britishness when writing music for Modern Life Is Rubbish, Blur’s second album. Albarn’s celebration of British culture eventually devolved into Cool Britannia but “For Tomorrow,” the first single from Modern Life Is Rubbish and the great opening fanfare for the Britpop era, remains startlingly gorgeous, capturing twentieth-century girls and boys brought down by the past as they hold on for tomorrow.

Blur’s biggest American hit—its chart placement doesn’t convey its omnipresence in 1997, as it arrived at a time when record labels didn’t release physical singles so they could goose the sales of albums—is effectively a parody of grunge, one that flips alt-rock angst into the bubblegum shout of “Woo-hoo!” The chorus might be frivolous but the sound of “Song 2" is crushingly heavy thanks to fuzzy bass and gargantuan guitar, plus the song’s hook is bolder and bigger than so many of the post-grunge entities that wandered America in the wake of Nirvana. Blur beat those cumbersome rockers at their own game.

Blur crashed into the British Top Ten in the spring of 1994 with “Girls & Boys,” a piss-take on Eurodisco so clever that the Pet Shop Boys happily remixed the tune for one of the single’s B-sides. “Girls & Boys” helped kick off the reign of Cool Britannia in the mid-1990s but it’s nothing like the plodding trad-rock that came to define Britpop: it’s bright, colorful, vibrant, and cynical, as much art as it is pop.

One of a handful of singles that could be credibly called the opening salvo in Britpop, “Popscene” imploded in the spring of 1992, barely cracking the UK’s Top 40. Commercially, it may have stiffed but its onslaught of frenzied riffs and frenetic rhythms, all punctuated by blaring horns, synthesized two classic British pop eras: it was grounded in 1960s pop and played with the energy of punk, a combination that would come to define the sound of the UK in the 1990s. It’s also where Damon Albarn began to develop his flinty cynicism: he’s sneering at the “Popscene” as much as he is celebrating it.

The origins of “This Is A Low,” the majestic conclusion of Parklife, lie in a broadcast recitation of the Shipping Forecast, one warning of an impending bit of bad weather. As Damon Albarn circles Britain’s shipping ports—“Hit traffic on the Dogger Bank/Up the Thames to find a taxi rank”—Blur creates a psychedelic sway that transcends the song’s prosaic origins. As the group swirls and sighs, riding waves of sweet melody and disquieting distortion, they create a shimmering piece of music that is soothing in its gentle ebb and flow.