Ride - Leave Them All Behind

One of the hardest-rocking songs in the shoegaze canon, Leave Them All Behind is the only Ride song in my permanent playlist.  For some reason, despite the band's widespread popularity, other Ride songs just don't quite do it for me.  But this one more than makes up for it.  For this song alone they belong in the Shoegaze Hall of Fame.

From the seductive drum-and-bass intro, to the blistering guitar assault, to the reverb-wah solo at 6:15, to the crushing wall of noise at the end, this song takes the all the trappings of the shoegazing style and turns them up to 11.

The song is a case study in interacting harmonic layers, and I can't decide which I enjoy more, the screechy harmonies of Ride's big pile of dirty guitars, or the gorgeous vocal harmonies that start around 4:00.   I've heard this song hundreds of times, and I still get chills when they hit that tonal down-shift in the middle of that choral section.

The unique combination of gut-punch guitars, haunting harmonies, and addictive groove make this song a hard-shoegaze classic.