Artist Spotlight: Dead Can Dance’s Top 10 Essential Tracks 🕯️
Dead Can Dance essential tracks — from 1984 post-punk to world music transcendence. Here's why 'The Host of Seraphim' is #1.
The Melbourne-born duo who turned gothic dread into a four-decade pilgrimage through the world’s oldest musical traditions.
Most bands evolve. Dead Can Dance shapeshifted. Over nine studio albums spanning 1984 to 2018, Brendan Perry and Lisa Gerrard didn’t just cross genre boundaries — they erased them entirely. What started as post-punk in Melbourne became medieval chant in London, then Middle Eastern devotion, then African polyrhythm, then Greco-Roman ritual. Each album felt like a different century, a different continent, a different prayer.
And the strangest part? It all sounded unmistakably like Dead Can Dance.
Here are their ten most essential tracks — and yes, their most devastating six minutes claims #1. But first, a journey through four decades of music that refuses to belong to any single time or place.
10. “Saltarello” (1990)
Album: Aion
Dead Can Dance’s take on a medieval Italian dance form is pure kinetic energy. Built around propulsive percussion and swirling instrumentation, “Saltarello” is one of the duo’s most rhythmically driven pieces — a track that proves their exploration of early European music was never about dusty museum reverence. This is music designed to move bodies, just as it did centuries ago. Aion as a whole drew deeply from Renaissance and medieval sources, but “Saltarello” stands apart for its sheer physicality. It’s the track that showed Dead Can Dance could channel ancient forms without losing visceral impact.
9. “Nierika” (1996)
Album: Spiritchaser
Spiritchaser was Dead Can Dance’s most dramatic stylistic shift — abandoning European historical sources for South American and African rhythms. “Nierika” opens the album with percussive intensity and Gerrard’s wordless vocals soaring over polyrhythmic layers. The track became the most-played song on American college radio the year of its release, an improbable achievement for music this uncompromising. Named after an Inuit term for the paths between the underworld, middle world, and higher world that shamans travel, “Nierika” proved that the duo’s restless evolution could find new audiences without sacrificing depth. Spiritchaser charted at #75 on the Billboard 200 and sold over 200,000 copies in the US alone.
8. “Opium” (2012)
Album: Anastasis
Sixteen years of silence. Then this. When Dead Can Dance returned with Anastasis — Greek for “resurrection” — Perry delivered one of his finest vocal performances on “Opium.” The track carries a brooding, almost narcotic weight, with Perry’s baritone navigating a dark landscape of temptation and world-weariness. Anastasis peaked at #46 on the Billboard 200, their highest chart position ever, and “Opium” captures exactly why: this was a band that hadn’t just survived a hiatus — they’d returned with something genuinely urgent to say.
7. “Sanvean (I Am Your Shadow)” (1994)
Album: Toward the Within
Lisa Gerrard’s voice is often described as otherworldly, but “Sanvean” is where that description becomes literal. Performed live on the Toward the Within concert film recorded in Santa Monica, California, the track features Gerrard singing in her invented language — glossolalia — with such emotional precision that the absence of recognizable words becomes irrelevant. You don’t need to understand the lyrics because the voice communicates everything directly. Sarah Brightman later covered “Sanvean” on her 2008 album Symphony, and the track appeared in The West Wing, proving its emotional universality extends far beyond Dead Can Dance’s core audience.
6. “The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove” (1993)
Album: Into the Labyrinth
Perry’s songwriting reached a new level of refinement on Into the Labyrinth, and “The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove” is the evidence. A melancholic story of love and loss set against shimmering electronic textures and delicate acoustic instrumentation, it became a staple on college radio and was instrumental in making Into the Labyrinth their commercial breakthrough. The title references a 1965 episode of the British TV series Danger Man. The song demonstrates Perry’s ability to write conventionally structured songs that still carry Dead Can Dance’s atmospheric weight — accessible without a single compromise.
5. “Cantara” (1987)
Album: Within the Realm of a Dying Sun
If you need one track to understand why Dead Can Dance transcends genre classification, it’s “Cantara.” Gerrard’s vocals explode over driving percussion and Middle Eastern-inflected instrumentation in a performance that feels like a summoning ritual. Within the Realm of a Dying Sun divided its eight tracks evenly — Perry singing the first half, Gerrard the second — and “Cantara” is the crown jewel of Gerrard’s side. The track has remained a live setlist staple for nearly four decades, and for good reason: it’s one of those rare pieces of music that physically affects you whether you encounter it in a cathedral or through earbuds on a train.
4. “Anywhere Out of the World” (1987)
Album: Within the Realm of a Dying Sun
Perry’s counterpart to Gerrard’s “Cantara” on the same album, “Anywhere Out of the World” opens Within the Realm of a Dying Sun with cinematic grandeur. Perry’s deep baritone carries a desperate longing over orchestral swells and brooding atmospherics. The title borrows from a Charles Baudelaire prose poem, and that literary sensibility runs through every second of the track. It’s Dead Can Dance at their most emotionally direct — a straightforward cry for transcendence delivered with the production values of a film score. The song has become one of their most enduring live performances, regularly opening or anchoring their concerts across four decades of touring.
3. “Children of the Sun” (2012)
Album: Anastasis
The opening track of their reunion album is pure resurrection. Perry sings about carnivals beginning and songs filling the air — and anyone familiar with their history hears the meta-narrative: “Carnival of Light” launched their debut in 1984, “The Carnival Is Over” presaged their 1998 split on Into the Labyrinth. Now, the carnival begins again. Musically, “Children of the Sun” blends the world music explorations of their later work with the emotional directness of their earlier albums. At over seven minutes, it builds gradually from sparse beginnings to a triumphant crescendo. It’s the sound of a band proving they still have something essential to offer — and doing it with remarkable confidence.
2. “Yulunga (Spirit Dance)” (1993)
Album: Into the Labyrinth
The opening track of their most commercially successful album is also one of their most hypnotic. Gerrard’s chant-like vocals — again in her invented language — ride over percussive loops and ambient textures for nearly seven minutes, creating a trance-state that draws from Aboriginal, African, and Middle Eastern musical traditions simultaneously. Into the Labyrinth sold 500,000 copies worldwide and made Dead Can Dance 4AD’s highest-selling act. “Yulunga” was used powerfully over scenes of concentration camps and torture in Ron Fricke’s landmark documentary film Baraka (1992), adding devastating emotional weight to already harrowing imagery. The track has been sampled and covered extensively — Björk even referenced it on her album Utopia.
1. “The Host of Seraphim” (1988)
Album: The Serpent’s Egg
This is the track where Lisa Gerrard’s voice stops being a voice and becomes something closer to a force of nature.
“The Host of Seraphim” opens The Serpent’s Egg — the last album recorded while Perry and Gerrard were still a romantic couple — and it is six minutes of unrelenting emotional devastation. Gerrard’s contralto rises from a low drone into cascading waves of glossolalia that feel simultaneously like a lament, a prayer, and a warning. There are no conventional lyrics. There doesn’t need to be. AllMusic called it “so jaw-droppingly good that almost the only reaction is sheer awe.”
The track was recorded largely in a multi-storey apartment block on the Isle of Dogs in London, where Perry and Gerrard were living at the time. That such transcendent music emerged from such mundane surroundings only adds to its mystique.
But what truly cemented “The Host of Seraphim” as Dead Can Dance’s defining moment was its afterlife in film. Ron Fricke used it in Baraka (1992) over scenes of poverty. Frank Darabont placed it in the devastating final moments of The Mist (2007). It appeared in trailers for Terminator 3, in BBC’s Top Gear, in How to Get Away with Murder, and in Zack Snyder’s Legend of the Guardians. Each usage introduced millions of listeners to a track that most had never encountered — and each time, the reaction was the same: what is this, and why does it make me feel everything at once?
Lisa Gerrard went on to win a Golden Globe with Hans Zimmer for the Gladiator soundtrack in 2000 and received an Academy Award nomination for the same score. She contributed vocals to Dune and Dune: Part Two decades later. But “The Host of Seraphim” remains the purest distillation of what makes her voice — and Dead Can Dance — irreplaceable. It’s music that exists outside of genre, outside of era, outside of language itself.
Some tracks you listen to. This one you surrender to.