The best closing tracks

What makes a closing track on an album great? What makes them really stand out? It's an age old question, honestly.

In my opinion? It genuinely depends. There are so many different types of closing tracks. But to really be a stand out closer, it needs to be the right fit for the album. It also has to some way, shape or form signal the end of the record. How it does that can differ greatly -- for example, it can be super emotional, cyclical, end credit-esque or reflective.

The Emotional Closer

It's an absolute classic, the emotional closing track. If done right, it hits you right in the feels and leaves you emotional once the curtains close on the album. It's almost always a slow track, often the slowest one on the record.

The best ones are the ones that are packed to the brim with whatever emotion the artist is going for. The listener needs to really feel it with every part of their body.

AS IT IS's "I WENT TO HELL AND BACK" is my most recent favorite by a long shot. The vocals are so chock full of emotion, so real and so raw. Lyrics like "You said tomorrow would be better, but that was yesterday" and "Please just tell me everything’s gonna be alright / I’ll let you break your promise, you can tell me lies" hit you right in the gut every time. The accompanying instrumentals just elevated the emotion seeping out of the track. I cried the first time I heard it, on my first listen of I Went to Hell and Back. When it finished, I hit replay. And then I hit replay again, and again and again. I couldn't get enough, no matter how much I was sobbing on my bed listening to it. And that's the best possible sign of a fantastic closing track.

"Basement Noise" closed All Time Low's most recent album, Wake Up, Sunshine. Similar to "I WENT TO HELL AND BACK," there were absolutely tears on the first listen. And the second. And the third, and the fourth. And quite honestly nearly every time I hear it. I'm tearing up now, listening to it while writing this. The track is, in my opinion, the band's best closing track to date by a long shot. It fits the themes of the record perfectly and wraps it up so seamlessly and incredibly captivatingly too. It's about the band themselves, calling themselves "Just stupid boys making noise in the basement." It's about how far they've come and where they started. The lines "How were we supposed to know / It all adds up when you let go? / And where are we supposed to go from here?" get me every single time. It's a reflective song, with incredible vocals paired with incredible guitars. But real talk, it's the four-part harmony at the very end that gets me every time. When you take everything else out of the equation, the vocals and the lyrics speak volumes for themselves.

The closing track on Lights' Skin & Earth, "Almost Had Me" is such a raw and honest track. It might not make me cry every listen, but it's so vulnerable and so heartbreaking. She bore her soul on a whole other level when it came to this song. The vulnerability, the honesty, the realness are so strong in this track. You can feel the emotions that she's feeling when she wrote this. You're right there with her emotionally. The vibe of the track fits right in with the rest of the album, but the vulnerability in the lyrics and the vocals is what sets it distinguishes it as the closer.

The Fray captures this so well. "Be Still" on Scars & Stories and "Trust Me" on How to Save A Life and "Happiness" on The Fray and "Same As You" on Helios are all phenomenal examples of these kinds of closers. If the albums themselves didn't make me cry at any point, these will be the straw that breaks the camel's back. The tears will be flowing. There's no doubt. There's a level of vulnerability in these tracks specifically that's almost unrivaled in their music. They're vulnerable in pretty much all of their music, to be fair, but these are a different level. They're powerful tracks just packed full of emotion.

There's not a lot of gimmicks to the emotional closers. They're typically simple and they bare their soul. The more personal, the more vulnerable, the better in these cases. When done right, they really stick and hit home with the listener.

Cyclical closers

Cyclical closers create pretty much a never-ending record. When the song ends, it should go right back to the beginning. These are hella rare, especially with the age of digital streaming and shuffle, but when they're done well, they're so friggin' cool.

This is embodied beautifully in Waterparks' "I Felt Younger When We Met." Closing FANDOM, this track ends in perfect sync with the opening track. That'll only make sense (or at least it'll make the most sense) if you listen to "Cherry Red," the records opener, immediately after the closer. "I Felt Younger When We Met" cuts pretty suddenly to static and the sound of a clock towards the end of the track. Slowly, the music starts to rise in from behind the static and clock, flowing perfectly back into the beginning of FANDOM, creating this cyclical record. So in essence, it doesn't necessary wrap the record, but starts it all over again. The flow is so incredibly seamless, too. It doesn't skip a beat, just throws you right back.

End credit closers

These closers act as some sort of a end credit track. They feel like a closing track, far more than any of the others.

"Finale (Can't Wait To See What You Do Next)" by AJR is an interesting example of this. The track opens and closes with the feel of the closing of a movie. The choir of vocals really create this old-timey feeling. That paired with the choir basically saying goodbye ("congratulations on your bit of success / We can't wait to see what you do next" for example) creates this perfect embodiment of what a closing track is. The rest of the track, the elements AJR brings to the table themselves really embodies and encompasses Neotheater as a whole. The track requires a certain element of theatrics that AJR has nailed perfectly to really bring this whole thing home.

In all honesty, though, no band does this better than Marianas Trench. Take "Masterpiece Theatre III" (from Masterpiece Theatre) or "No Place Like Home" (from Ever After) or "End of An Era" (from Astoria) or "The Killing Kind" (from Phantoms) -- all four of their last four closing tracks fit this to a tee. They've even got matching opening tracks that feel like opening credits. I know no band who does openers and closers as impressively as Marianas Trench. Each track embodies the record perfectly in vibe and lyrics. Lyrically they're all written so masterfully to truly embody the theme of the record, but also include the titles of the other tracks. Take "Masterpiece Theatre III" though, with lyrics like "I'd be so good to you" and "Acadia is gone," and "I am right beside you," and "I'll make this perfect again." There's so many more references in the song but I'll stop there. It also takes lyrics and the sound of some of the songs on the record, like "Trading in who I've been for shiny celebrity skin" from "Celebrity Status." The lyricism on these tracks are unparalleled. Genuinely. The songwriting here is on a whole new level.

These tracks by Marianas Trench are always longer, but they're absolutely worth it. They can feel like several songs, sometimes, with how they change up their sound. But they always end with a bang. And they always feel like some sort of an end credit or end scene. It's like the big reprise in a musical. It is absolutely everything the record has built up to. They're perfect, they're phenomenal and I could really write a whole post just about these tracks alone. I could talk about them for hours.

End credit closers feel like the end of the record. The song should conclude and the listener should be fully satisfied by the ending. It's kind of a daunting task because these need to be as close to perfect as possible. They've got to encompass the record so well.

Reflective closers

These ones are usually either reflective inwardly or to the future. These can be so much fun, but they can also hit home the hardest.

"Everything We Need" on A Day to Remember's You're Welcome is a good representation of this. This tracks just really about life. It's mainly just an acoustic guitar and simple vocals. It's reflective in nature, and it hits hard. It's a lot of internal reflection, about driving to clear your mind, about thinking about life. The line "you can't see the skyline from the basement" is one I've thought about often since this song dropped. That's a good sign of a reflective closer: it should imprint something be it a line, a feeling or something else onto the listener.

There's a lot of overlap here with the emotional closers. "Basement Noise" by All Time Low is a good example of that overlap. That's a track that's reflective on everything the band has been through and it is just griping with emotion.

But not every reflective track needs to be super sad or emotional. Waterparks' "See You In the Future" (although it's stylized as "See You In In The Future" on streaming platforms -- long story) is an example of that. This one reflects on life, success, failure and progress and it even looks to the future a bit. It's also a bit of a diss-track. It's a little bit of everything, but the one thing it's not is overly emotional. If there's any emotion seeping off the song, it's anger -- it's a track that actually goes really hard. Give it one listen and I promise something's going to be imprinted on you. For me, this time around, it's "A broken escalator's still stairs."

The curveball closers

These closers have you thinking "what?" They're curveballs, they're unlike the album. When not done too jarringly, these are the absolute most fun that a closer can get.

Let's talk "Vampire Money" by My Chemical Romance. I can't think of a better track to talk about here, honestly. At the end of Danger Days, this track just absolutely has you thinking "what did I just listen to?" It kind of feels separate, yet strangely connected to the rest of an album. Danger Days is in some ways a concept record, but this track just sticks out. It's an absolute banger of a track -- it'll have you jamming in ten seconds flat, with its infectious guitars and drums and its bizarre yet incredibly creative lyrics. "Vampire Money" is unbelievably fun.

Curveballs should be exactly that -- they should be fun. They should be different, of course, but they've also got to be outright fun.

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For the record, this is not by any means a conclusive list of types of closers. There are countless ones. But these are my favorites, or the most common.

However, there's too many of my favorite closers I just didn't address, most likely because I didn't know where they fell, either in any of these categories or in a completely different one, and I absolutely need to mention a couple of them.

"Oh No" by Bring Me the Horizon closes out That's the Spirit in a way that's so absolutely fitting for the record. It builds on the sound the band created throughout the record and really brings it into its own. It's a longer track, but it's really, genuinely beautifully written. But if you don't know the That's the Spirit sound of Bring Me the Horizon, I'm not positive you'd recognize it as their song. That doesn't matter though. Ultimately, "Oh No" is the perfect closer for the record.

PVRIS's "Wish You Well" off Use Me is a track that's perfect closer to its record. The most important thing about a closing track is it needs to fit the album. For example, a super emotional and stripped back album isn't going to benefit from an emotional closer the same way a record eclectic in sound like I Went to Hell and Back or a record that's heavy in sound like I Prevail's TRAUMA will. This is a perfect example of PVRIS knowing exactly what they needed. It's like a goodbye in and of itself, in the same vibe as the rest of the record. It has a sting of hurt but an overwhelming sense of "you know what? I don't need this."

"Monolith" off Boston Manor's GLUE is an accumulation of the anger that's built up throughout the record. Lines like "hey you, fuck you too / I'll do what I want when I want to" embody that energy. It's an album that deals with heavy topics, from suicide and toxic masculinity, to politics and crippling Hollywood standards and literally anything and everything in-between, so the record builds resentment and frustration and anger in its themes and lyrical content. "Monolith" is a release of that, up until the end when it slows down into this totally other vibe that's haunting and truly sticks with you.

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These days, listening to an album front-to-back has gone more "out of style" with streaming and the ability to shuffle, which has created some debate over how necessary a good closing track is. That's not to say they're all trash or that "they were better back in the day" because that's absolutely not the case. Some closers can definitely fall a little short in the overall scheme of things for those like me that always listens to a record front-to-back, but that doesn't make them bad songs either. Look, at the end of the day, I absolutely urge you to listen to records from beginning to end if you don't already do that. You might miss out on the full effect of some truly powerful songs.

Let me tell you, "Basement Noise" and "I WENT TO HELL AND BACK" might both make me cry on most listens, but those emotions are strengthened when I hear it at the end of the record. And all of Marianas Trench's closers may be phenomenal and fun to listen to, but it definitely hits harder when they follow the rest of the album. And those cyclical closers will make a hell lot more of sense when you come across them.

Closing tracks can be so powerful, regardless of the type.