The Killing Moon

The single came out on Korova on 20 January 1984, with Do It Clean on the B-side. It was produced by David Lord and recorded in December 1983 at Amazon in Liverpool and Crescent in Bath. The single version runs 5:47, the album version 5:50. It reached 9 in the UK and 7 in Ireland, and has since gone Gold in the UK.

McCulloch told the oral history Mad World that the song came in stages and that he woke with the words of the chorus in his head. At first he thought the Him of the lyric was himself, then decided it was a higher power. He called it basically a hymn or a prayer, and has said many times that it is the greatest song ever written.

McCulloch told the Guardian in 2015 that he sat bolt upright in bed one morning with the chorus lines in his head, and that he half credits the lyric to God. He called it a psalm, almost hymnal. He then played Bowie's Space Oddity backwards and messed with the chords until it sounded nothing like it. The astronomical imagery came from watching The Sky at Night and Star Trek as a child and remembering the moon landing. Sergeant said a trip to Russia, with a visit to a museum of tractor parts, fed the balalaika-style rumble Pattinson plays in the middle. The producer found a twangy guitar line Sergeant had made while tuning up and insisted it go in the song, and it became the best-known guitar line in their catalogue.

McCulloch refused to sing in Bath, unhappy with the drums, and after catching a cold he finished the song with de Freitas at Amazon studios in Kirkby, with Gil Norton mixing. The strings were just Adam Peters on cello and the producer on keyboards. Sergeant said de Freitas had already been inspired to play brushes by Dave Brubeck's Take Five. When McCulloch played the finished song to his wife, she cried.

Afterlife

Radio X ranks it the band's best song, with about 167 million Spotify streams. It appears in Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), Gia (1998), Donnie Darko (2001) and The Girl Next Door (2004). Pavement covered it on the 1999 EP Major Leagues, Chvrches in 2021 and Thea Gilmore in 2025. The band accepted a one-off 3,000 pounds for Donnie Darko, Sergeant told the Guardian, and the director's cut then replaced the song with INXS's Never Tear Us Apart. The Guardian's 2008 review of the Ocean Rain concert called it the night's most dizzying high, and the BBC's 2008 review called it a gorgeous sweeping romantic gesture.