20 Best Alternative Love Songs for Valentine’s Day

masked intruder

13. Nick Cave – Into My Arms


‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God’ might not be the most traditional way to open a love song, but in the context of the song and particularly Nick Cave as her person, it couldn’t have started any other way. Though, musically a straightforward, albeit it quite beautiful, piano ballad, it’s Cave’s lyrics that make this track so much more, as he manages to make expressions of atheism (or perhaps agnosticism) sound like some of the most romantic statements you’ll ever here.

 

14. Perfume Genius – Hood


‘Hood’s expression of love isn’t one of the more expected variations, but is in fact, perhaps, one of the more powerful. The song opens with Mike Hadreas explaining a fear many of us will relate to, of feeling that if our loved ones got to know us properly, who we were in the past, and things we’d done, that they could never love us and would leave. A fear fuelled by a deep love that Hadreas sums this up succinctly before closing with, ‘I will fight baby, not to do you wrong’.

 

15. Masked Intruder – Wish You Were Mine


Almost all of Masked Intruder’s songs are love songs in one way or another, it’s just that most of them might be a little too unconventional in that they often involve things like playing loves songs to strangers on their lawn at 3am or breaking and entering. However, if you take the references to the love interest hiding away in her ‘castle away from the pain and the hassle’ as a general hiding away from the world (and not from the masked man she should give a chance), then ‘Wish You Were Mine’ is a profession of love and a want to show said love the world. Romantic.

 

16. The Bluetones – Autophilia or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love my Car


There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that this is a love song, it’s just not particularly conventional love being expressed through it. In so much as it is a song, as the title suggests, conveying a deep and passionate love for an automobile. Apparently, whilst selling a car is a lot like making love to a beautiful woman, loving a car is also a lot like loving a beautiful woman. Of course, it could all be a metaphor, but then it could not. Regardless, love is love, and this is an exquisitely composed love song.

 

17. Animal Collective – Bluish


Though Animal Collective’s ‘Bluish’, off of the masterful Merriweather Post Pavillion, may appear musically murky to most at first, it is lyrically clear as day. Well, as clear as day as a song with two possible readings can be anyway. Whichever camp of lyrical content you fall into, they’re both very romantic, and the song is a love song either way. The song is either a quite conventional love song (lyrically, there’s nothing conventional about its beautiful instrumentation and composition), or it is (more than likely) a song about performing cunnilingus in the most sweet and sentimental manner.

 

18. Run The Jewels – Love Again (Akinyele Back)


Okay, there’s no two ways about this one. This is a fuck song. I mean, in no way can I pretend otherwise, but you know what, it comes from a place of love. After all, Killer Mike’s verse has him stating how he’ll let his ‘dirty girl’ to be herself, in fact wants nothing else, and how he’s in love. Then you’ve got El-P discussing how smart and unique his ‘chick’ is and how he loves her, before wanting to go down on her like a true gentleman. Then you’ve got Gangsta Boo dropping her guest verse and giving as good as the Jewels, before changing up the chorus to suit her own genital needs.  It’s fucking filthy, but what great love story doesn’t have that side to it?

 

19. Nine Inch Nails – The Perfect Drug


Love is a drug. Then again, it might not be the drug but the addiction, which seems to be very much the message for Trent Reznor is conveying to his special someone on ‘The Perfect Drug’. Displaying all the characteristic traits of an addict, Reznor’s love interest is the perfect drug of the title and he’s going all in. It’s one of NIN’s most straightforward rock songs, and Reznor hates it, but it’s also a great example of those intense loves where it feels to be all or nothing, when without them ‘everything falls apart [and] it’s not as much fun to pick up the pieces.’

 

20. Placebo – Special K


For Brian Molko, his love is not just like a drug, but a very specific drug. Throughout Placebo’s moody, atmospheric and dynamic track, Molko compares his love interest and the feelings initiated by them to the sensation of ingesting ketamine. Going so far as to compare it to smashing half his stash in one go. Now that’s love. The song mainly deals with the rush and knockout feeling of each time you see your love, never wanting that feeling to end, and the dreariness in between. Something the rise and fall of the track matches to a T.

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