Just Hear Me Out: Alice DJ’s ‘Better Off Alone’ Is The Best Song Of All-Time

Alice DJ’s ‘Better Off Alone’, according to The Pudding’s deep algorithmic analysis of the US Billboard Hot 100, is the most lyrically repetitive hit of the 2000s.

Across its 3 minutes and 37 seconds, there are only two lines: ‘Do you think you’re better off alone?’ and ‘Talk to me, ooooh/Talk to me’. But it contains everything we need.

Besides, the one-hit wonder Eurodance track is in some top-notch quality. Among the decade’s top 10 most repetitive songs, there are game-changers (Daft Punk’s ‘One More Time’), pop perfections (Madonna’s ‘Hung Up’) and all-time greats (Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ ‘Maps’). These are songs that know you can convey a lot with little, whether that be pure elation or absolute heartbreak.

Alice DJ’s ‘Better Off Alone’ sits somewhere in-between those emotions. It is devastatingly ecstatic, powered by anger, resentment, loneliness — and a 137bpm beat that pounds with the relentless searching pain that comes with a breakup. Here’s why we think it’s one of the best songs we’ve ever heard.

Who Needs Guitars, Anyway?

Alice DJ (formerly styled as Alice Deejay) was a covert project, created by several Netherlands trance-pop DJs — DJ Jurgen, Vengaboys producers DJ Delmundo and Danski, as well as producer duo Pronti & Kalmani.

They had a plan: release it first under Jurgen’s name as an instrumental in 1998, then again with vocals by Judith Pronk, under the name ‘DJ Jurgen presents Alice DeeJay’, offering it some credibility. The story goes that the producers, as with their work with the Vengaboys, didn’t want to be directly associated with the project.

‘Better Off Alone’ was picked up slowly — and it was the shorter radio edit, released in 1999, that landed in top 10 charts across the world. In Australia, it reached #4, and was the 88th biggest single of 2000 — a solid effort for a dance track.

An album, Who Needs Guitars, Anyway?, followed in 2000, but ‘Better Off Alone’ stands shoulders above the album, which largely attempts to recreate its magic. A closer look at the record reveals what makes ‘Better Off Alone’ so special: songs like ‘Will I Ever’ and ‘The Lonely One’ copy the general formula of the hit — high BPM Euro-dance songs with anonymous, near-soulless female vocals singing repetitive lyrics about finding love — but they miss the mark.

There’s something that aches in ‘Better Off Alone’ — the way the song’s questioning lyric (‘Do you think you’re better off alone?’) repeats without answer. Despite the vocal take sounding exactly the same each time (is it just the one take of the line?), the resonance changes as the song’s bloops and bleeps build up and up and up.

That constant siren is like a signal being sent out to space, piercing empty air — so the singer, surrounded only by inhuman, alien sounds, changes tack. “Talk to me/oooh/Talk to me?/oooh/Talk to me!”, the line seeming to gain a different tone each time — devastation, pleads, anger. At the song’s end, the beat continues as if the song loops again in its search for an answer, travelling through endless space.

That constant siren is like a signal being sent out to space, piercing empty air.

To us, it’s right up there with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ ‘Maps’ or Robyn’s ‘With Every Heartbeat’ or ‘Missing U’. All four are songs which expand out and out, somehow, through their sonic entropy — repeating lyrics or arpeggiator loops to express an emotion so severe it can’t actually be expressed. It can only be repeated and mindlessly gestured towards in our attempt to move past it — which will will, eventually, maybe once we’ve danced it out.

Back in 2016, Meaghan Garvey wrote for MTV about Eurodance nostalgia, noting that songs like  ‘Better Off Alone’ and Haddaway’s ‘What Is Love’ weren’t treated at release with the reverence they were now. She describes hearing an “undercurrent of melancholy” throughout them, describing them as “dance tracks built around unanswerable questions”.

Listening back to ‘Better Off Alone’ 20 years since it was first released, the song gains a top-layer of melancholy — there is a sense that the world it was created in — both sonic and emotional — no longer really exists. It’s turn-of-the-millennium sounds are incredibly dated, and, in an odd way, land like a Burial track — a nostalgic pining for a club culture that no longer exists in a pure form.

The song’s sense of isolation only grows deeper; singing along, we’re just another echo in space.

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Jared Richards is a staff writer at Junkee, and co-host of Sleepless In Sydney on FBi Radio. Follow him on Twitter.