10 of the Best Songs Celebrating Ecstasy

This is that most unlikely of creatures, an MDMA metal song. Hidden away on Florida nu-metal outfit Nonpoint’s debut album is a nearly eight minute ode to days spent on extra-large, double-dose pills. “Do you hear that techno sound?” roars singer Elias Soriano as the song rides a lithe slap bassline. Eventually it warps off into a suitably spaced out psychedelic jam that hints its makers knew what they were singing about.

Sample lyric: “The MDMA up in my veins making me insane/Warm squiggles up and down my brain, brain, brain, brain, brain/ I got that funky feelin’, I feel it all around”

The only British hit for Chicago techno-house original Curtis Jones (AKA Cajmere) was a stridently anti-Ecstasy number. Released at the height of the electroclash phenomenon, it’s a stark robotic outing that emphasises the drug’s synthetic simulation of happiness as sinister, false, and quite possibly addictive, before concluding, “Has anybody seen my brain today?/Can anybody pay my rent today?” The ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’-style video, set in a mental hospital-cum-nightclub, accentuates the point.

Sample lyric: “Something ‘bout those little pills, unreal, the thrills, they yield, until they kill a million brain cells”