Sometimes music finds you in the right place at the right time. You might be introduced to the perfect song in a club or a breezy tune on a road trip. That perfect intersection of time, place, mood, and sonics. That experience becomes the core memory for a particular song or in this case album. And while most people might have been exposed to the moody and majestic The Virgin Suicides through the viewing of Sofia Coppola’s film, for me, it came at 42,000 feet.
I was already familiar with the French duo of Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel, whose debut album Moon Safari (1998) had already established them as masters of cinematic atmosphere. Moon Safari had been on constant rotation at my home and work since it dropped. When The Virgin Suicides was released I was travelling through Canada, so I grabbed it on CD to listen to on my trusty discman during my next flight.
With the plane disappearing into the clouds, I pressed play. As the music swirled it felt like it was carrying me with it, floating me through a new type of Air. Where Moon Safari was playful and romantic, The Virgin Suicides was something else entirely—darker, sadder, yet just as seductive.
From the first drifting chords of “Playground Love,” the album’s only proper vocal track, Air invites us into a new world. Delivered in a hazy croon by Gordon Tracks (an alias for Phoenix’s Thomas Mars), the song plays teasingly with the idea of adolescent infatuation—the kind that smolders in secret but never quite catches fire. The sultry and mournful woozy saxophone outro sets the tone for the album’s delicate balancing act: beauty and sorrow, longing and loss.
The instrumental pieces that follow feel like transmissions from a dream. “Clouds Up” shimmers with weightless, cascading synths, imbuing the track with a sense of floating. “Bathroom Girl” builds on a hypnotic keyboard loop, its pulsing arpeggios and distant choral whispers evoking the eerie quiet of a house that’s slowly being drained of life.
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“Dead Bodies” stands apart as the album’s most harrowing moment. A looping, robotic chant echoing over an insistent, ominous rhythm, escalating into a frenzied climax that feels like a breaking point. It’s the sound of fate closing in, of helplessness taking hold.
Then there’s “Cemetery Party,” which sways between eerie and beautiful, its distant strings and spectral voices conjuring a surreal, slow-motion waltz. The track feels like a ghostly celebration, as if the sisters have already passed into myth before their story is even over. “Dark Messages” follows with funereal organs and a creeping sense of finality, its title hinting at the unspeakable weight pressing down on the Lisbon household.
As the album drifts toward its final moments, “Highschool Lover” reprises the melody of “Playground Love,” but now it’s stripped of its warmth, reduced to an instrumental echo of something once vibrant. The reprise serves as a haunting coda, a reminder that time erases even our most intense emotions, leaving only traces in its wake.
What makes The Virgin Suicides such an enduring listen is that it stands alone as a piece of art. Yes, the experience is definitely heightened by pairing it with the stunning visuals of the movie, but it isn’t reliant on the association. Having first experienced it as its own creation as I floated towards my destination, it still has the ability to capture that specific, ineffable feeling: the ache of lost innocence, the slow-motion weight of longing. This isn’t just a score for a movie; with The Virgin Suicides, Air scored a mood, a dream, a collective memory of youth fading into the ether.
Twenty-five years later, the album remains as haunting as ever. Beautiful, tragic, and impossible to forget.
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