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A statement of just a few lines. "To our fans and friends: as R.E.M., as lifelong friends and co-conspirators, we've decided to call it a day as a band." On September 21, 2011, the announcement on the Athens group's official website closed the "perfect circle" of a story spanning 31 years. An exit made almost on tiptoe, for one of the most important and beloved bands in the world. So let's try to retrace the thread of their story in this playlist, which runs through every phase of their career. An unstoppable progression. Just like that Rapid Eye Movement, harbinger of dreams, that gave them their perfect acronym. From the golden era of college radio, which amplified their underground legend, to the "graduation diploma" of "Document", which would ferry them into the multimillion-dollar harbor of the majors as early as the following "Green", right through to the era of the blockbusters ("Out Of Time" and "Automatic For The People") and a surprisingly vital maturity, culminating in the epic and courageous "New Adventures In Hi-Fi". A run that seemed to have reached its end with the departure of drummer Bill Berry, but which instead carried on even as a "three-legged dog", through ups and downs, all the way to the final stop of "Collapse Into Now".

30. Supernatural Superserious

The final surge of energy before the last stop. Fresh off the flop of "Around The Sun" (just 240,000 copies sold in the US), R.E.M. refuse to throw in the towel: they hit the gas, crank up the volume and polish up their guitars again, just like in the days of "Monster", unleashing their tightest album of the past decade. A record of honest, no-frills rock, lean and to the point (35 minutes in all), featuring the freshest, most buoyant songs Stipe wrote during the "three-legged dog" era (the one without good old Berry). Synthesis is the new watchword. And the album's lead single rediscovers its lost freshness with the bare essentials: Buck's blazing riffs, the driving rhythm and Mills' spot-on harmonies. Recorded at Dublin's Olympia Theatre and originally titled "Disguised", the track got its new name on the suggestion of their friend Chris Martin of Coldplay. The result is an anthem to adolescence at its most awkward and gawky, with all its painful experiences to face and exorcise.

29. Leaving New York

From the ill-fated "Around The Sun", though, we can rescue this quintessentially R.E.M. ballad, which builds momentum amid the band's usual chiming guitar figures and Stipe's modulated sing-song delivery, until that melodic spark of a chorus arrives to give us back, for a moment, the lost magic. The lyrics are a love letter to a city still wounded by the tragic events of September 11, colored by fresh reflections on loneliness and detachment. A ballad crafted with all the right ingredients, taking its place in the noble lineage of its many predecessors (from "Everybody Hurts" to "Daysleeper").

28. Oh My Heart

The last dive into the heart. “Collapse Into Now” closes out the Georgians’ epic story in 2011. A final act that stands, above all, as a summa of the R.E.M. songbook, though struggling to find an identity of its own. The exception is this poignant ballad, one of those the band never gets wrong. Complete with mandolin, accordion and an evocative horn intro. Nostalgic southern aromas drift through it, along with hints of Celtic folk and gospel touches in the solemn epic sweep of the refrain, sung in unison. “A very quiet and meditative song, dedicated to New Orleans,” Stipe called it. And it works, even if it can’t help recalling the old “Houston”. A probably conscious echo (“Hear the song, rearranged”). What changes, though, is the political context surrounding the battered New Orleans: compared to that earlier, virulent invective, the tones here have softened, settling into the melancholy of those ghostly trees singing in the storm-ravaged ghost town. Always, however, with the hope of a moral rebuilding. More than a political anthem, then, this is a moved elegy for a beloved, suffering city trying to piece itself back together – its social and human fabric, even before its economic one.

27. Daysleeper

Misunderstood at the time, reassessed over the years, “Up” (1998) is the first R.E.M. album without drummer Bill Berry, who left the band shaken by his onstage collapse in Lausanne and tired of playing a rock-star role that never suited him. Adrift, Michael, Peter and Mike decide to start over as a trio, because “a three-legged dog is still a dog, it just has to learn to walk again,” as Stipe would later put it. So drum machines, layers of electronics and assorted studio trickery try to make up for what’s missing. Even among fans who would struggle to recognize “their” R.E.M., clinging to it as the album’s one true instant classic, is this ballad in six-eight time, with the band’s trademark shimmering arpeggios, Stipe’s heartfelt delivery, and a refrain that opens up radiantly. Its protagonist is a stockbroker living a life out of sync with the rest of humanity: working nights while everyone else sleeps, resting by day, drowning out the hum of the world with an “ocean machine,” a device that mimics the sound of the ocean to help him rest. But living out of step with everyone else is a wearing experience, and so the daysleeper, numbed by lights and caffeine, vents all his distress (“I cried the other night/ I can’t even say why/ Fluorescent flat caffeine lights/ Its furious balancing”). A sliver of a secluded, isolated, out-of-step life. Rather like the one Michael Stipe himself has always led.

26. Can’t Get There From Here

In the mid 1980s, R.E.M. landed in England at Livingstone Studios, under the wing of Joe Boyd, the deus ex machina behind early Pink Floyd and a guiding spirit of British folk acts like Fairport Convention, Incredible String Band, Richard Thompson and Nick Drake. The result was their most bucolically purist LP: “Fables Of The Reconstruction” (1985). A return to roots – the roots of a raw, rural folk with no borders. Whether it’s the lush prairies of Georgia or the misty countryside of Albion, the secret lies in that pastoral, mysterious humus, steeped in tradition, nostalgia and honesty. Paradoxically, it’s precisely far from home that Stipe and company rediscover their Southern identity, flipping through an album of old yellowed snapshots and campfire tales. These are the reconstruction fables of a South torn apart by the Civil War, trying to rise again. In this pastiche of eccentricities and visions of southerness, Stipe also finds room for the man who once dedicated a famous song to his home state (“Georgia On My Mind”). “Can’t Get There From Here”, in fact, isn’t just a divertissement inspired by a Southern turn of phrase (“you can’t get there from here”), but also a tribute to Ray Charles (name-checked twice in the lyrics) and to soul music. Trumpets and saxophones step into the picture, the guitars turn almost funky, in a daring flirtation with jingle-jangle, while a bouncing bassline and dry drumming drive the whole thing forward. It’s a song built entirely on the contrast between the backing vocal (“I’ve been here, I know the way”) and Stipe’s reply (“You can’t get there from here”). A Stipe never so cocky, pulling out every register of his voice, from the darkness of the verse to the falsetto shout of the chorus.

25. Bang And Blame

As is well known, “Monster” is the album that revved R.E.M.’s sound back up in 1994, after the aching ballads of “Automatic For The People”. An emphatic return to rock, noisier and more distorted than ever, with no trace left of the serene, mature awareness achieved on the two preceding albums – only the snapshot of a fresh nervous breakdown, of the collapsed certainties of an adrift Generation X. It’s a lurching reggae-rock gait, in the vein of The Police, that props up this “Bang And Blame”, with Mills’s bass calling the shots and Buck weaving tremulous guitar chords into the background. A track that explodes in the chorus yet stays melancholy at the same time, especially in Stipe’s desolate vocal, which tells of a tormented love story degenerating into possessiveness and aggression, breeding bewilderment and a breakdown in communication. The specter of domestic violence hovers around the driving riffs.

24. All The Way To Reno

“Reveal” (2001) wasn’t a particularly fortunate album. Its sound goes back to smoothing off the rough edges, turning rounder and more orchestral, yet there’s no shortage of visionary, melodic moments, with an eye on America’s vast landscapes. But the high point is, once again, a house specialty: a classic old-style ballad, one of those airy, enchanted ones that Stipe can still paint with unmatched grace. All The Way To Reno (You’re Gonna Be A Star). The road to fame runs, inevitably, through Reno, Nevada. A budding starlet sets off down the path to stardom, brushing aside the skepticism of her detractors. But it’s a road strewn with pitfalls, especially if you let yourself be lulled too much by dreams. And then the nagging suspicion can arise that you’ve gone too far. A simple lyric, dressed however in a sumptuous musical setting: dreamy acoustic guitar arpeggios, delicate electronic textures woven by the keyboards, horns and strings – expertly synthesized by Johnny Tate – that conjure a sense of romantic surrender.

23. Orange Crush

“Green”. The color of the environmental movement, which R.E.M. embraced enthusiastically – but also the color of dollars. A sardonic nod to the pile of cash that had just rained down on them? Whatever the case, having bid farewell to the little Irs label that had watched them grow up, Stipe & co. sign on with Warner. With a jaw-dropping deal: 10 million dollars. But they have no intention of backing down, and they don’t give up their political invective, as in this “Orange Crush”, with Berry’s drums – practically a machine-gun burst – hurling us straight into the hell of Vietnam. The black hole of the American civic conscience is stained orange, the color of Agent Orange, the terrible chemical compound used to strip away vegetation in order to flush out the Viet Cong. A defoliant even more devastating than napalm, which left irreparable damage on the land there, going on to badly contaminate people too, both the Vietnamese and American war veterans. A fierce antimilitarist, environmentalist invective, one that hides an autobiographical detail: Michael’s father, a helicopter pilot, may well have taken part in those raids, during the infamous Operation Ranch Hand. Angry and deathly, then, with a fierce sound, carved out by martial drumming and epic guitar work.

22. Leave

The black-and-white snapshots of “New Adventures In Hi-Fi” (1996) mark another turning point in R.E.M.’s career. The journey is the literary device used to tell stories of (extra)ordinary humanity, of new losers and marginal lives, suspended between everyday gloom and sudden flashes of illumination. And, as further proof of the album’s experimental nature, it also contains the longest song in R.E.M.’s entire catalogue. Across the more than 7 minutes of “Leave”, reckless plot twists pile up one after another: a dreamy acoustic intro that, after a minute, morphs into a blazing rock’n’roll, scarred by an obsessive siren (mixed by Scott McCaughey by pushing up the octave switch of an old Arp Odyssey synthesizer) and a swarm of electronic effects, with Stipe once again raising his voice, condensing into an epic refrain this sort of elegy on departure and the torments that come with it. A reflection suspended in doubt, in the uncertainty of a parting, of a new path to be taken, one that nonetheless appears to be the only way out for chasing one’s dreams. It’s the album’s manifesto, both musically – since it distills the sonic research and insights of the record, futuristic despite the primitive recording technology used – and conceptually, since it explores in depth the dominant theme: the journey, the departure, the search for oneself.

21. Find The River

Here is the first single lifted from the monumental “Automatic For The People” (1992), the most pensive and funereal album by the Georgia band. The shift toward the ballad format is completed once and for all, with an almost chamber-music austerity paired with solemn orchestral arrangements, credited to John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin and Knox Chandler of the Psychedelic Furs. “Find The River” is almost a country serenade in the vein of Fred Neil. Piano-led, with a solemn choir and the breath of the accordion lending depth. The death of Athens poet John Seawright inspires an acoustic epitaph of trembling intensity. A hymn to beauty and life, where the search for the river is yet another existential metaphor, and the suggestions of nature blend with memory and reflection. A stream of memories, colors, scents (“of ginger, lemon or indigo… cilantro stems and hay flowers”). It’s the pursuit of the infinite, that eternal yearning that drives every individual toward spiritual illumination. An inevitable path, like that of the river toward the Ocean.

20. Time After Time (Annelise)

The full extent of R.E.M.’s debt to the Velvet Underground settled in a single song. An exotic, Eastern-tinged raga, thick with psychedelic fumes and assorted eccentricities, from the utterly peculiar sound of the guitars building in crescendo to the extraordinary bed of percussion, achieved by producer Mitch Easter striking the steel leg of a chair with metal pipes. All the possessed anguish of the Velvet Underground’s liturgies is captured in the three and a half minutes of one of the most eccentric tracks in the Georgians’ catalogue, yet still so recognizable, with Stipe’s unmistakable vocalizing and grunts giving shape to yet another mysterious story. There’s no way of knowing who the Annelise of the title is, nor what her role might be. All the band has ever explained about the story is that it draws on a night of mischief when Mike Mills was out roaming Athens with two female friends, one of whom would later become Buck’s wife. But she isn’t Annelise… It’s one of those tracks that will long have many fans pining for the indie-era R.E.M. Brilliant and lysergic, a pure exercise in creativity with no commercial ambitions whatsoever. For Easter, it’s the finest song on “Reckoning”, the 1984 album, recorded at Reflection Sound Studios in Charlotte, North Carolina.

19. Radio Free Europe

The first song ever released by R.E.M. A single, recorded in a 7-square-metre garage (Mitch Easter's "Drive-In Studio") and pressed in a run of a thousand copies by a tiny indie label, Hib-Tone. It would soon become an underground cult hit through the college radio circuit, laying the groundwork for the LP debut of "Murmur" (1983). For Stipe and co., the time was ripe for the big breakthrough. And never mind that their beloved Dodge van had broken down on them at the worst possible moment. That cherished old wreck wasn't needed anymore, because far greater journeys awaited them. "Radio Free Europe" opens the album and immediately lays down the coordinates of a sound that would remain unmistakable for the whole decade: chiming guitars, a bass line with wave-inflected roots, graceful melodic lines and Stipe's magnificent voice sketching out a mysterious story, made even more intriguing by the ghostly echo of the backing vocals, which lend it a distinctly hymn-like quality. Radio Free Europe was the station through which Americans broadcast their propaganda into the countries behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. Even the back cover of the 7-inch, where none of the band members look at the camera, would exert an enormous influence on the imagery of countless indie bands to come.

18. Everybody Hurts

The abyss of pain and desolation on the (already funereal) "Automatic For The People". The frail triplets of the electric piano support a robust melody, sung by Stipe with the fervour of a soulman and the searing power of a funeral lament, building to a peak of pathos with the entrance of strings and electric guitar. Yet the lyrics reveal a message of hope, an invitation not to give up in the face of suffering and despair that can push people to the brink of ending it all. Born from an autobiographical spark (the story of a fifteen-year-old student of Stipe's sister who had attempted suicide), the song echoes the spirit of "Don't Give Up", the famous 1986 duet between Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, but also brings to mind - however consciously - another famous suicide from rock history, the one staged by Ziggy Stardust in "Rock'n'Roll Suicide". "Just turn on with me, and you're not alone", sang Bowie. "No, no, no, you're not alone" Stipe echoes back. But the grandeur of that glam anthem is tempered here into an almost chamber-music austerity. All the pain of the world condensed into a handful of disarmingly simple lines. Lyrics of striking simplicity by the standards of early Stipe, matched to music that had never before sounded so sweetly melodic, bending every convention of melodic pop to R.E.M.'s own aesthetic. Against the odds, it works.

17. Maps And Legends

The masterstroke on the yellowing pages of Fables of the Reconstruction. Stipe looks back to the myths of the Frontier, to Southern literature. Southern Gothic resurfaces disguised behind that absurd surrealist image of a tin ear the band chose for the cover. "Maps And Legends" is thus the cartography of this fantastical imaginary world, populated by improbable heroes and magnificent losers. An imagery not unlike the one found in the visionary folk iconography of Reverend Howard Finster from Georgia, who had already provided the artwork for "Reckoning", to whom the band pays an affectionate tribute ("He's not to be reached, he's to be reached/ Called the fool and the company"). An ode to Finster's misunderstood genius, but also to all of Athens' wandering misfits and outcast artists. Musically, it's a classic R.E.M. structure, where amid the usual vocal harmonies and guitar interplay, strings peek through, lending it faint Celtic fragrances.

16. Pretty Persuasion

A rhythm section polished to a shine. Powerful and energetic like never before. The engine driving "Pretty Persuasion" is a relentless machine. Another ballad, yes, but one charged with adrenaline like a rock gallop. It's no coincidence that it had been an R.E.M. live staple from their earliest shows. And yet, as producer Easter would recall, the band couldn't quite bring themselves to record it. Lucky for us they eventually did, because it's one of the gems of "Reckoning", with those ringing guitars and that terse, urgent refrain, animating lyrics that return to darker territory, leaning above all on the play of assonance between words and music. The evocative interweaving of Stipe and Mills's voices, meanwhile, recalls The Mamas & The Papas, as the singer himself would candidly admit, adding only that "it was missing the tambourine" (!).

15. What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?

"Monster" is R.E.M.'s response to a period of grief and deep hardship. They emerge from it by plugging the guitars back in. And unleashing all the pent-up rage in "a disquieting collection that explodes right in your face", as Buck would describe it. Drowned in a swarm of feedback and reverb, with that razor-sharp riff and that relentless, unforgiving chorus, "What's The Frequency, Kenneth?" is the battle cry of this new, acidic and brash chapter. A story of madness and violence, concealed, as ever, behind a veil of nonsense. The spark was a real incident involving famed CBS anchorman Dan Rather, who was assaulted in Manhattan by a deranged man who kept repeating "Kenneth, what is the frequency?". Arrested shortly afterwards, the attacker, William Tager, explained that he had attacked Rather because he was convinced the media were controlling him by sending signals directly into his head. The song, however, is anything but lighthearted. This is confirmed by the second verse too, which alludes to the apathy of the infamous Generation X, a term coined by Douglas Coupland's 1991 novel of the same name and often linked precisely to the grunge boom.

14. E-Bow The Letter

And in the end, the long-awaited meeting finally happened. Michael Stipe finally shares the mic with his lifelong muse, Patti Smith, on a mesmerising, hallucinatory ballad, sarcastically dismissed by Buck as "a folk-rock whine", which would nonetheless surprisingly become the first single lifted from "New Adventures in Hi-Fi". The title refers to the e-bow, that peculiar device which generates a magnetic field and, when placed against guitar strings, produces a variable, virtually limitless sustain. Buck puts it to masterful use, with enveloping guitar tails weaving into a haze of mellotron, moog and electrified sitar. An almost art-rock atmosphere that suits perfectly the magical interplay of the two voices: subdued and drawling, almost à-la Dylan, Stipe's voice; feverish and spectral, Smith's. A "letter never sent", written on the tour bus at 4am, that turns into a fresh stream of consciousness: Stipe addresses Smith, handing her a kind of counter-melody. Michael's mantra flows on like a river in flood, until Patti finally joins him for a spine-tingling refrain.

13. Nightswimming

Once upon a time, in Athens, there were four young men, a group of friends and rowdy nights out, ending with swims under the stars in the still waters of Lake Ball Pump. This was the Perfect Circle of youth and innocence. Before the spectres of drugs and AIDS stretched their shadow over an entire generation. That's the story told by this suspended ballad of memory and nostalgia: the quiet night, lit only by scattered streetlamps, the barely rippling waters of the lake, and that old photo on the dashboard ("The photograph on the dashboard, taken years ago... The moon is low tonight"). But these are memories now yellowed by the wear of adulthood and all its fears. What does it cost to leave those days of freedom and carefree ease behind? What is the price of a fame that has forever upended one's habits and way of life? A cyclical, descending piano line, which recalls that of "Perfect Circle", is the backbone of a ballad made even more poignant by the hushed, trembling swell of the strings and by Stipe's deeply moved delivery. This is how we want to remember them, the four friends from Athens: happy and thrilled, swimming in the lake under the moon, still unaware of the bright future awaiting them.

12. Lotus

If "Up" deserves reappraisal (some have called it "an 'Automatic' produced by Brian Eno in the 1970s"), it's partly thanks to this formidable single. "Lotus" revives the adrenaline of "Monster", dusting off real drum parts and polishing Buck's electric guitar for fresh, raw, biting riffs, with Stipe's voice growing hoarser and increasingly languid. According to Greek mythology, the sweet lotus flower granted oblivion from worldly cares. And it's not hard to imagine what Stipe wanted to erase from his mind, after months of suffering and uncertainty. In lyrics that unfold in fragments, through fresh free associations and cryptic imagery, eating the lotus thus becomes a cathartic experience, washing away sins like rain and purifying the conscience of all guilt ("Dot dot dot and I feel fine", sings Stipe, quoting It's The End Of The World As We Know It). A giant, flashing lotus would be chosen as the backdrop for the "Up" tour, on stage behind the band.

11. Perfect Circle

Among the high points of the dazzling debut "Murmur" is this melancholy ballad, which would go on to define something of an R.E.M. archetype. Understated, minimal harmonies, cradled by keyboard chimes. And a thin filigree of guitar, played almost like a mandolin, amid the disjointed strikes of the percussion. In all likelihood, a story of friendship, where the "perfect circle" is precisely that of young people bound together by a strong sense of belonging. The tone is one of evocation. Almost like a film, with grainy images of memories flashing quickly by, flashbacks hanging on the thread of nostalgia. What carries the song, then, is once again pathos, feeling, sublimated by Stipe's soft vocalising and by that circular keyboard phrase that musically echoes the title, mimicking a kind of hypnotic trance. If the lyrics bear all the hallmarks of Stipe's style, the music, composed on keyboard, is largely the work of Berry, a precious and all too often underrated member of the band. A perfect blend that also takes shape thanks to an eccentric touch: a backwards guitar track and two pianos, one of them out of tune, playing the same part.

10. So Fast, So Numb

Taut, wound-up fuzz guitars and psychedelic echoes run through another magical display of Remmian arte povera. All it takes is one incisive riff and a melodic opening shaped by Stipe in the refrain to set alight the heart of a song that immediately stakes its claim as one of the most gripping on "New Adventures In Hi-Fi". It's another invocation, addressed directly, in the first person, to a boy ("motor boy") who risks burning up his own life. (“Anyone could scratch your surface now/ It’s all amphetamine/ You’re blasting yourself into the present/ To blur some past indignity”) From the allusion to amphetamines to the need to erase the past, everything points to yet another situation on the edge, one that risks tipping into tragedy, as it already had for friends Kurt Cobain and River Phoenix, mourned on "Monster". It's one of R.E.M.'s last great roars, tucked between the pages of this on-the-road travel diary, sketched onto an imaginary notepad, with its stylized soundscapes and experimental tones, projected into a hypothetical future that, for the band, perhaps would never arrive. Because "New Adventures In Hi-Fi" is also, in a sense, R.E.M.'s swan song. At least of the original lineup, the classic one.

9. Talk About The Passion

A love song? Not quite. The "passion" of the title is in fact meant in its Christian sense: suffering and ultimate sacrifice. Like that of Jesus, who died for humanity's salvation, but also like the passion lived daily by the destitute and the homeless on the roadside: they, in fact, are the protagonists of the eponymous video, shot by Jem Cohen in a black and white of austere poetry. There's no pity, though, in Stipe's words, but rather an indictment of the "empty prayers" that fill men's "empty mouths". Sterile babbling that does nothing to improve the condition of those who can no longer bear the weight of the world on their shoulders ("Not everyone can carry the weight of the world"). The singer's impassioned delivery contributes decisively to the song's magic, which also features a cello part played by "a lady who plays in a symphony orchestra, whom we paid 25 dollars", according to Buck's account. "Talk About The Passion" is an archetype of the "R.E.M. ballad" for all eternity: the walls of aching guitars, the immortal charm of the jingle-jangle, the Velvet-like rhythmic-melodic weave, Stipe's slurred yet incredibly "musical" singing, the drum breaks, the off-beat pulse. Simple and perfect in its elegant essentiality.

8. So. Central Rain

A devastating flood paralyzes Athens, cutting off every connection. From Los Angeles, where the band had a concert scheduled, Peter Buck tries in vain to reach his family in Georgia after the flood. From this real-life episode comes "So. Central Rain", where "So." is the curious abbreviation for "Southern". A lyric that is, on the surface, one of the plainest R.E.M. ever wrote, though Stipe still can't resist one of his typical figures of speech ("rivers of suggestion"), as if drawing a parallel between nature's fury and the flood of anguished thoughts gripping the mind of someone who's lost touch with his family. It's another proof of the band's ability to paint dreamy, melancholy melodies with the barest of means: a bonsai folk arpeggio introduces Stipe's lament, set to the cadence of Buck's guitar, dry, cutting riffs, building to the spectral crescendo of the finale. The chorus is a burning cry: "I'm sorry", in which Stipe condenses all his grief. It's the single, and the most intense track, on "Reckoning", the feat of a still-young band that was already tackling themes like pain, transition and redemption with total ease, without losing an ounce of its vibrant expressive urgency.

7. These Days

Under the skilled guidance of Don Gehman, in the quiet town of Bloomington, Indiana, the troubled R.E.M. of 1986 rediscover harmony and good humor: a taste for that "human comedy" that is life itself — "Lifes Rich Pageant", a title inspired by a line from the Peter Sellers film "A Shot in the Dark", one of the best entries in the Pink Panther saga. On the album, Gehman manages to make the sound fuller and catchier, in order to win over a wider audience, with more powerful drumming and a bellows organ acting as glue. And Stipe dares more than ever. If the opening "Begin The Begin" is an exhortation to shake off apathy, "These Days" goes further, drawing the band into an unusual attempt to establish direct feedback with its own audience. It's a manifesto of hope, in which R.E.M. picture themselves standing at a moral crossroads, becoming first-person mouthpieces for generational aims and ambitions. Even though a true symbiosis between artist and audience is impossible ("Now I'm not feeding off you"), for the first time the Georgians adopt an almost hymn-like stance: "We are young despite the years we are concern/ We are hope despite the times" ("Siamo giovani nonostante gli anni, siamo la preoccupazione/ Siamo la speranza, nonostante i tempi"). Stipe, then, increasingly reveals himself as the voice of a generational anxiety he shares with the indie nation, with his own audience. His words sound as biting as ever, underscored by aggressive sonics that brush up against punk fury. A clattering gallop, with Mills finding room for a counter-melody worthy of epics and gunpowder.

6. Texarkana

A return to the crossroads between joy and melancholy. But also a real crossroads, the one dividing two American states, Texas and Arkansas. "Texarkana" is the ideal contraction of the two (but also an actual Texan city, right on the border between them). A name that evokes dusty, desert-like visions, like those of a long journey in search of something — or perhaps simply of oneself. A journey that, by definition, can never end, and one that can be read as the clearest metaphor for the human condition. Mike Mills reworks an original sketch left unfinished by Stipe, turning it into one of the great feats on "Out Of Time". A dreamy, aching Western ballad, sung by the bassist himself with vibrant pathos, in which the initial twenty thousand miles gradually swell in the lyrics, becoming thirty thousand and then forty thousand, like "the stars in the evening" ("40,000 stars in the evening"), the reasons for living ("40,000 reasons for living") or the tears in the eyes of the beloved ("40,000 tears in your eye"). An existential journey, then, one that pairs the euphoria of motion with a far-from-peaceful reflection, aware that one could "fall" at any moment. "Texarkana" is one of those arte povera gems that only R.E.M. know how to craft. It takes so little: a lovely bassline, swelling strings, nostalgic harmonies in the bridge. Simple and beautiful. Breathtaking.

5. The One I Love

The dry drum hits, the stormy, metallic phrases of the guitar. And Michael Stipe's voice more seductive than ever. For R.E.M., it's time for their first love song — a perfect ballad, one that leaves you spellbound by its melodic grace and vibrant emotional charge. It couldn't help but become a hit, the first great hit for Stipe and co., who finally cross the threshold of the Top Ten: a stunning result for a band from the indie circuit. And yet it isn't really a love song. If anything, it's a cruel reflection on a disposable relationship. After the first two verses, in which R.E.M. use the fateful word "love" for the first time, the third verse reveals the true nature of that love (a mere pastime), sarcastically betraying any notion of real feeling. "It's a brutal kind of song and I don't know how many people get it", Stipe would later reveal to Q magazine. "The One I Love" is the ticket to stardom, the song that turns R.E.M. from a college band into celebrities before they've even noticed it happening. Because the album that contains it, "Document" (1987), recorded in Nashville, seals the end of the age of innocence — not by chance, it would be their last record for I.R.S. The former squatters of Oconee Street would become wealthy rock stars, on the payroll of one of the world's biggest majors, Warner Records. A vibrant farewell to a crumbling world, one in which R.E.M. would ideally remain "the ones who made it", while around them countless fellow travelers watched their careers go up in flames.

4. Losing My Religion

How is an immortal hit born? Perhaps all it really takes is the right melody, well framed by the arrangement. Then everything else helps — including even a lyric that's been universally misread. Because "Losing My Religion" — as Stipe would explain — has nothing to do with atheism or losing one's faith. It's simply an idiomatic expression, popular in the American South, that means roughly "to lose one's patience" or "to be at the end of one's rope" — in this case, because of a desperate, obsessive love affair. Stipe reworks the vein of the beloved "Every Breath You Take" by the Police, to comment on a new kind of emotional pathology, one that also mixes in his own condition as a star "under the spotlight". The melancholy of the lyric pairs beautifully with music that ranks among the most aching the Georgians ever wrote. Carried along by a wave of strings (synthetic ones, in this case) and an urgent rhythm, with Buck's mandolin weaving through Holsapple's acoustic embroidery, "Losing My Religion" soars in an enveloping melody that Stipe sings with a contrite, desolate air, waiting for a chorus that never actually arrives. It's "the" R.E.M. song by definition, the link between their "alternative" origins and their destiny as rock stars, the anthem that — like it or not — will forever represent them, with that opening line, "life is bigger", sounding almost like a prophecy: starting precisely with "Losing My Religion", R.E.M.'s life did indeed become bigger. It would also become their biggest-selling single (No. 4 on the US charts) and win two MTV Music Awards. Paradoxical, for a band that only a few years earlier had declared war on music videos.

3. Drive

Despite its playful title, inspired by the slogan of a soul food restaurant in Athens, "Automatic For The People" is, as we've seen, the Georgians' darkest album. So while in the past it had almost always been upbeat, energetic songs that opened their records, this time the register shifts abruptly, into the spectral clarity of "Drive"'s arpeggios. An orchestral guitar solo destined to become legendary, born as a tribute to Brian May of Queen: "It's a Les Paul plugged into a big Marshall, overdubbed six times and played with a coin", Buck would explain. Around that trick unwinds a bare, moving litany, which Stipe declaims with a fatalistic air, refracted through echo, before a furious electric guitar and a melodramatic string section take over. "Drive" is the archetype of this new R.E.M. sound: mostly acoustic, subdued, almost never uptempo. In the lyrics, meanwhile, Stipe issues a fresh exhortation to the kids not to be fooled by politicians, while painting a far from idyllic picture of youth, caught between drugs and decay. With wordplay like "bushwhacked", which means "to go into hiding" but also nods to the traps of the Bush era: "Stipe says: don't get bushwhacked" was the message the singer had published on the eve of the election that Michael Dukakis went on to lose in 1988. Three years later, the line would instead serve as a kind of lucky omen for Bill Clinton's triumph, which brought the Democrats back to the White House after 12 years. The Times They Are a-Changin'.

2. Fall On Me

As a further reminder that R.E.M. remain, above all, sumptuous balladeers, comes the wondrous single from "Lifes Rich Pageant". Airy and aching, "Fall On Me" is a classic circular ballad, drawing as much on 50s pop as on the psych-folk languor of the Byrds and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young — gorgeous in its brief opening double arpeggio, exemplary in the growing linearity of the verse that leads into a heartfelt chorus, with Mills delivering one of his magical countermelodies. It remains one of the finest melodies R.E.M. ever wrote. "It's a song about oppression, you can apply it to whatever you want", Stipe explains. The lyric again proceeds by accumulating images, allusive yet at the same time explicit in condemning environmental devastation, with a reference to the acid rain that bloodies the sky ("Buy the sky and sell the sky and bleed the sky and tell the sky"). At the height of Reaganite demagoguery, of an America of prosperity racing headlong toward progress, R.E.M. pause to contemplate a nature wounded by a blind, unscrupulous humanity ("keep your conscience in the dark"). A cry of pain that would return in the album's other environmentalist anthem, "Cuyahoga".

1. World Leader Pretend

This writer's favorite, however, is the song that crowns R.E.M. as aspiring world leaders. Another aching ballad, taking flight on Mills' enchanted keyboard riff, before opening up into one of the most powerful and moving refrains in their catalogue. Stipe adds the finishing touch with one of his finest vocal performances: outwardly understated singing, yet brimming with pathos and melancholy. Who is the aspiring master of the world in the title? Perhaps the leader of one of the global superpowers at a time when the Cold War was about to crumble along with the Berlin Wall. But it's hard not to see in Stipe's lyrics – the first of his to be officially printed on an R.E.M. record – a self-mocking, autobiographical metaphor for his new status as a global star, achieved at the cost of some pretense and artifice. At the time of "Green", Stipe was living out a conflict between self-exaltation and fear of his own audience, between the (legitimate) desire to become a star and the fear of losing his own identity. But this path of self-awareness widens into a broader outlook, acknowledging everyone's need to tear down the wall of cynicism that stands in the way of human relationships. "It's a song about an inner battle. Not just mine, but everyone's. It's about all the walls a person has to overcome," he would explain. A kind of catharsis and personal liberation, then, sublimated into one of R.E.M.'s peaks, extraordinarily heartfelt and evocative. For Stipe, it's at once "the most political and the most personal song" he ever wrote.

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07/02/2026