Thursday, February 26, 2026
Leave Me Alone
Every season, I like to pick out a theme song that best represents that time of the year for me. It’s something that I’ve been doing, intentionally or not, ever since as a teen I have started listening to music. “The” song of this winter is New Order’s “Leave Me Alone”. I think to me, the song depicts sadness in a very realistic and primordial way.
The mood of the song describes the feeling of when you are just overwhelmingly sad, in which nothing, nothing you could do would be able to change the situation, or to make yourself feel better. Someone else is trying to console you, but they just can’t. Their words are failing. Everything is so bad that the only response you could muster up, is to try a grin at the other person: “You get these words wrong / Every time / You get these words wrong / I just smile.”
The instruments of the song reinforce that sentiment by providing a sense of crippling dread, mixed with a slight hint of indifference, the depressive kind of which could only exist after one has tried, failed, and finally accepted the loss at long last. But the acceptance is also not the optimistic, silver lining sort of “… everything is terrible and I know it, which makes me feel better somehow!” It’s instead just the quiet, simply living with the pain sort of acceptance; hence “I just smile”.
“Leave Me Alone” is the last track from Power, Corruption & Lies. Although the general consensus is that the first track, “Age of Consent” is the best song out of the album, I honestly prefer “Leave Me Alone” much more than it, since for me I have found it to be replayed more. I have listened to it over and over again countless times in the past five months or so, which also makes “Leave Me Alone” a plausible candidate for the song of 2025’s autumn. However, both tracks are undeniably great, and no comparison between them in words can defeat the experience of actually listening to them. For a month in 2024, I actually did listen to “Age of Consent” incessantly too, and I honestly thought it to be the track that stood out to me the most, for some time before I fell in love with “Leave Me Alone” due to how well it has been resonating with me.
The song is also featured in Queer—a movie adaptation of William S. Burroughs’ eponymous novella. It was the late December of 2025, when I first heard about the song being included in a scene of the movie. Before then I never knew about such, and so when I did I immediately looked it up on YouTube and watched the scene for myself—and it was incredible. I, of course, told myself that I will watch the movie as soon as I could, but before that I had wanted to read the novel that the movie adopted from first, since it’s the original material, and since there’s a prequel to Queer the book, Burroughs’ Junkie, I obviously had to read that too. And so on the day after Christmas, I went ahead and bought the two books together at BMV, and then binge read them during my Christmas break. I got to watch the movie on New Year’s Eve right after I finished the last of the two novels. It was probably the best thing I could have done with the spare time I had during my break.