10 of the Best Songs Celebrating Ecstasy

105 years after the Merck Company invented MDMA, popular music is riddled with the stuff, from Miley Cyrus’s ‘We Can’t Stop’ (“Dancing with Molly”) to Jay-Z & Alicia Keys’ ‘Empire State of Mind’ (“MDMA got you feeling like a champion”). And, of course there are a billion dance tunes marinated in the stuff, often with the word ‘Ecstasy’ dropped in liberally throughout. What’s less clear is which are the best actual songs – with words and choruses and all that - devoted to disco biscuits? So here’s our Top 10 countdown of the best ever songs about ecstasy.

The first single from the Brighton synth-pop outfit’s latest album is as catchy as anything they’ve ever done. It’s also a celebration of the way ecstasy combines with music so gloriously. Gradually building and building over a pulsing Moroder-esque bassline, it describes “disintegrating” and “coming apart at the seams” but makes the process sound luscious, before concluding, “I can’t get it out of my system”. After all, music never sounds quite the same after that first dose.

Sample lyric: “You take the minuses and leave me with the plus’s/Oh, my sweet serotonin rushes”

Bangin’ electro-rocker with bags of attack and a driving riff. Still the Dewaele brothers biggest UK hit, reaching No.27 in the charts, partly off the back of their blossoming success as 2ManyDJs. The lyrics are an impressionist portrait of a night out, on it, with a certain sense of unease (“I’m not sure which part I’m playing”), but eventually the “party feels like home”. It may be about E but the video famously features every drug going.

Sample lyric: “Try and look into their eyes/A part of the weekend never dies”

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”

In truth, almost any song off Primal Scream’s career-defining album ‘Screamadelica’ would have done. The whole thing is a paean to the MDMA-munching dance culture explosion these Scottish indie rockers had fallen in love with. From ‘Movin’ On Up’ to ‘Come Together’ to ‘Higher Than The Sun’ to the post-chemical ballad ‘I’m Coming Down’, it’s the ultimate Ecstasy concept piece, with the defiantly live-for-today ‘Don’t Fight It, Feel It’ a contagious, foot-mover.

Sample lyrics: “Rama lama lama fa fa fa/Gonna get high ‘til the day I die”

Mike Skinner’s greatest success, the concept album, ‘A Grand Don’t Come For Free’, contains this gently chatted story of a night out. The narrator is looking for his girlfriend in a club but ends up completely twatted (“Who cares? I’m mashed!”). Skinner’s precise focus on the particulars makes it all too believable; that the E “tastes like hairspray”; that he takes a second, thinking the first is “a dud”. Both funny and poignant, the true shape of everyday urban Brit hedonism.

Sample lyric: “Maybe I shouldn't have done the second one/I feel all fidgety and warm”

There’ll never be another group like The Shamen, Scottish psychedelic evangelists fronted by a north London geezer (Mr C) who hit the top of the charts with an arch ditty about eccies. From the opening “Naughty, naughty, very naughty” to its blatant chorus – “Eezer Goode”(ie, “E’s are good”!) – it mischievously characterised MDMA as an impish “Mr Puncinello”. Its success was a cheeky daytime radio wink to a million pill-poppers at a time when rave was an all-encompassing national phenomenon.

Sample lyric: “He takes you to the top, shakes you all around, then back down, you know, as he gets mellow”

Long before every US MC, from Lil Wayne to Wiz Khalifa, was dropping bars about “Molly”, Missy Elliott and her producer, Timbaland, were on it. By the genre’s standards, there’s almost an innocence to it, for hip hop’s usual obsession with materialism and sex is partly – and joyously - cast aside as Missy, over an elegant housey pulse, embraces dancefloor freedom, celebrating her “ecstasy people” and hinting, very strongly, that she’s partaking. The Basement Jaxx remix is a corker too.

Sample lyric: “I got this feeling and it's all over me/I want to dance with you and lick your face”

Jarvis Cocker’s lyrics poetically, brilliantly encapsulate his ennui at the whole ecstasy/rave experience. From the opening “Is this the way they say the future's meant to feel?/Or just twenty thousand people standing in a field?” to the chorus (“In the middle of the night it feels alright/But then tomorrow morning, oh, oh, then you come down”) to its bummer of an ending (“I lost my friends, I dance alone”), the perfectly detailed narrative nails the hollow side of E-partying.

Sample lyric: “Everybody asks your name, they say we’re all the same and now it's ‘Nice one, geezer’/But that's as far as the conversation went”

Without ever being specific, Hot Chip’s song is at once a critique and a celebration of candied-up looping on the dancefloor, off your bonce on hug beans. MDMA is an empathogen whose side effect is rendering repetition deliciously pleasurable and Hot Chip capture the sense of everyone being in it together (“when you look this way I really am with you”), as well as delivering a pulsing musical peak that matches the words. All in all, an ecstatic electro-pop classic.

Sample lyric: “Like a monkey with a miniature cymbal/The joy of repetition really is in you”

Also, honorary mentions for Tech N9ne ‘T9X’, Flowered Up ‘Weekender’, Magnetic Fields ‘Take Ecstasy With Me’, Arab Strap ‘The Shy Retirer’, and almost anything by Happy Mondays.

Image via MDMA Team