It’s the end of the week, and I want to send everyone off into the weekend with the best vibes possible. That’s why the Daily Music Picks newsletter features a weekly segment called Fun Song Fridays! Regardless of era, genre, or style, the criterion is simple: it must deliver the joy and excitement we all need in our lives.
You can access the entire Fun Song Fridays archive here. A playlist featuring the songs covered with this segment is coming soon!
Hello! 😊👋
Welcome to a new edition of the Daily Music Picks newsletter!
Today’s music pick is a gorgeous, glittering nu-disco song from one of the era’s most underrated voices.
Genre: Nu-Disco, Dance
Label: Polydor
Release Date: December 3, 2001
Vibe: 🕺🪩💃
The catchiest songs in pop music history find a way of worming their way into your brain and staying there, sometimes long after their initial release. Often, these tracks are recontextualized after they’re used as film or TV needle drops (paging Kate Bush post-Stranger Things), buoyed by a renewed 15 minutes of pop cultural fame. Suddenly, they earn the love they deserved all along.
I bring this up because, until a couple of months before I wrote this, I hadn’t thought about Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s delightfully dark “Murder on the Dancefloor” since its initial release and run as a club remix darling in the early-to-mid-2000s. Not because I disliked it or anything like that, but I suppose, at that moment, it didn’t make as strong an impression on me. Cut to November 2023, and I’m sitting in a movie theater watching Saltburn, a Talented Mr. Ripley clone that mostly trades in suspense for performative gross-out moments. That said, there’s a moment where (minor spoiler alert) star Barry Keoghan struts around an empty mansion in the buff while this song plays underneath. As we were walking out of the theater, the first words out of my mouth were, “That movie stunk, but, my goodness, is that song phenomenal!”
In the ensuing weeks, I don’t think I’ve gone more than a couple of days without playing it. Its off-kilter lyrics, which position Ellis-Bextor as a woman who is either a) enjoying herself to the point of pleading with the DJ not to “kill the groove” or b) as a sociopath who will stop at nothing, not even arson, to be the center of attention, are matched by the hilarious music video. The latter takes the song’s theme more literally, showing Ellis-Bextor as a conniving school dance attendee who, among other things, poisons romantic rivals via a punch bowl, unties another dancer’s dress, and chloroforms a female dance competition judge to get her way. It sounds like a lot, but trust me, it’s all in good fun. After all, it stayed on the UK singles chart for 23 weeks, peaking at No. 2.
When Saltburn director Emerald Fennell approached Ellis-Bextor to use “Murder” as the track for the closing dance sequence, the singer didn’t hesitate. “A naked man dancing through the rooms of a stately home…” the singer mused to Variety. “I’ve got a quirky sense of humor, and my main thing was, ‘I’ve got to see that.’” To say the club anthem is getting well-deserved extra attention would be a grave understatement.
👉 Don’t forget to click the album image to stream the album on your favorite platform 👈