We are edging towards the end of what has felt like much colder winter than the past few years. Not that we see snow on the Kent coast – our winters here are wet and windy, almost constantly. But I grew up further north, on the fringes of the Pennines, where winters hit hard.

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And despite having looked at songs about the heat some seven years ago – during a sweltering summer in London in July 2018 – I’ve never returned to the opposite subject, that of the winter cold, despite asking for song suggestions back at the end of 2022.

So consider this a writing of that wrong, and ticking off another of the suggestion threads that have sat around unused for too long. Thanks, as ever, to everyone who suggested songs for this one (and there were a lot of them, too).

A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/Covenant
/Winter Comes
/Northern Light

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My wife maintains that this is a chilly, somewhat detached album, and one that exists in shades of icy blue – but it contains some of Covenant’s greatest, skyscraping anthems as well. Winter Comes is not one of the latter, mind: it is a great example of the bands skill with ballads, where they slow down the pace and Eskil laments. Here, the arrival of winter appears to be a metaphor for difficult times in a relationship, where distance grows, and tenderness is frozen out. The song is suspended above the ice by a robust, steady beat, and sweeps of synths like an icy wind that see you retreat further within winter clothing.

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/Lycia
/Frozen
/Cold

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There are few albums that so truly embody the feelings and emotions of being in winter than Lycia’s frozen masterpiece Cold: all the more amazing because the band comes from the desert lands of Arizona. Lycia were part of the first wave of bands on Projekt Records: a label devoted to icy, blurry darkwave goth that owed as much to dreampop and shoegaze as it did cider-stained dancefloors, and it was certainly a style of music that preferred to stay deep in the shadows.

The languid, chiming tones of Frozen set the scene perfectly. An hour of elegant, cold misery in the imagined depths of winter, lamenting everything and sounding gorgeous doing so.

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/Kate Bush
/Snowflake
/50 Words for Snow

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I don’t think there are too many songs that I’ll feature where the primary artist steps back and allows their young son to take the lead vocal. But then, Kate Bush never really was like any other artist – much as many have attempted to follow in her footsteps since. In more recent times, too, she has taken a very different tack: just two albums since The Red Shoes in 1993, and one set of celebrated shows in London some years back. 50 Words for Snow was her last album to date in 2011, and was entirely themed around the winter cold: and this opening track visualising a snowflake as it is created in the clouds, and falls gently to the ground. It is quite, quite beautiful, too.

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/:wumpscut:
/Die In Winter (Haujobb Remix)
/Born Again

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It’s been a while since the latest figures were released, but as of 2021-2022 in the UK, approximately 13,000 more people than in non-winter periods died of various winter or cold-related causes. Incredibly, this was the lowest variance in years (use the linked datasets), but then, that might be because during 2021, there was a high level of mortality due to COVID-19 anyway.

The ever cheery Rudy Ratzinger (for he is :wumpscut:, of course), released this track on Bunkertor 7 back in 1995, which appears to be excoriating someone for their perceived sins and wishing their death comes slowly, and in winter. The bleak, sparse Haujobb remix perhaps hits home that bit harder, stripping away much of the vocals and leaving a morose electronic pulse and little more.

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/The Mamas & The Papas
/California Dreamin’
/If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears

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Perhaps the ultimate ode to thinking about home was written by John and Michelle Phillips before they formed The Mamas & The Papas, writing songs in a frigid New York winter and dreaming of home in sunny, southern California. I first visited NYC in late November, and was rewarded with surprisingly mild autumn sunshine (and then got lovely, warm sunshine in LA two weeks later, of course), but from friends who reside in NYC and points further west, I know the winters can be – and often are – brutal.

This wistful inspiration, anyway, provided a glorious song, full of gentle harmonies and soulful sounds, and perhaps couldn’t provide a better advertisement for Los Angeles, particularly in the winter!

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/Arnocorps
/Mr. Freeze
/The Unbelievable

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The Greatest Band of All Time, taking on one of the worst Austroploitation roles of all. There’s been a lot of Batman films over the past four decades, since Michael Keaton first donned the suit in 1989, but none are perhaps as bad as Batman & Robin of 1997, which managed to waste the combined talents of Arnie, George Clooney, Uma Thurman and Alicia Silverstone with a terrible script (not even all of Mr. Freeze’s puns can save it) and a feeling that no-one wanted to be there.

Clearly, the film would have been improved no end if Arnocorps had existed when it was released, and twenty years later, the band took on the, er, not so good end of Austroploitation on The Unbelievable EP. Here, Mr. Freeze fizzes with energy and power, and is memorable for all the good reasons. Listen to this rather than watching the damned film, folks!

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/In Strict Confidence
/Wintermoon (Samsas Traum Remix)
/Where Sun and Moon Unite

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What is one of the greatest albums by German darkwave veterans In Strict Confidence contains something of an embarrassment of riches, and a number of the greatest tracks here are dominated not by Dennis Ostermann’s deep vocals, but instead by the sweeter melodies of Antje Schulz. Interestingly, there are multiple versions of this track: Ostermann provides the darker tones of the album version, but Schulz provides the light as the wintermoon is revealed on this version, her take on the soaring chorus changing the feel of the song for the better.

This is the second song this week comparing the depths of winter to the loss of love, too…

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/Curve
/Frozen
/Frozen EP

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The thundering, industrial-tinged shoegaze of Curve was unusual for two things: the electronic assistance that made their sound so much more aggressive than most of their peers, and the fact that Toni Halliday’s vocals were never buried in the mix. Indeed, Halliday’s scorching delivery was very much key to their appeal: someone who dealt with apparently every single slight against her by turning it in energy to fuel her lyrical fire, and that venom seeped into the music too (the astonishing Fait Accompli being the ultimate example).

Despite that fire, though, they are far from the only band featured here whose songs are distinctly cold in feel. The title track from one of their early, much-celebrated EPs is one of those. Underpinned by one of their trademark depth-charge basslines, Halliday floats above the murky music like the portent of a winter storm, but crucially that threatened storm never arrives: it’s one that remains on the horizon.

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/Kælan Mikla
/Sólstöður
/Undir Köldum Norðurljósum

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Kælan Mikla are from Iceland, a country that knows a thing or two about winter: a country where the summers are pretty much endless daytime, and winters become endless night. Sólstöður (Solstice) sees the band at the peak of winter, celebrating the darkness of night and the blinding white of the snow, and how the depths of winter can provide some form of joy (particularly the glory of the Aurora Borealis, of course).

I’ve been to Iceland in the late Spring and early autumn, and when there in May the days were already almost endless: there’s something very disconcerting indeed about stepping outside a restaurant at 2300 and the sky still being a vivid blue…

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/Pelican
/Last Day of Winter
/The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw

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We are just weeks from the Spring Equinox, and that feeling that we’ve nearly made it out of another winter. Unlike Pelican, I don’t really think that there’s a “last day of winter”, certainly not in the UK, where Spring seems to take over gradually. Down here in the far South-East of England, the snowdrops, crocuses and daffodils – all signs of spring – have already begun appearing, even when the temperatures are just a few above freezing in the daytime.

But soon, those warmer and longer days will come, and we’ll be bathed in warm sunshine again. But sometimes, it feels like we’ve got an age to wait.