The Used have spent their whole career sounding like a band about to fall apart, which is exactly what made them great. Bert McCracken’s voice cracks and tears at the edges of nearly every song they’ve put out since 2002, Quinn Allman’s guitars (and later Joey Bradford’s) lurch between pretty and brutal, and the rhythm section has always played like it’s trying to keep up with a fire. Their self-titled debut turned a group of kids from Orem, Utah, into one of the defining acts of the Warped Tour era, and two years later, In Love and Death made them stars.
Then they kept going. Lies for the Liars got weirder and bigger, Artwork got heavier, and the run from Vulnerable through MEDZ saw them chase everything from arena pop to full-on hardcore without ever settling into one lane. Lineup changes came and went. The songs mostly held.
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Now the catalog has gotten its strangest reinvention yet. A Mid Summer Night’s Symphony, the band’s Sydney Opera House set with a full orchestra and choir, premiered last week at the Landmark Nuart in Los Angeles, and hearing these songs stripped of distortion and rebuilt for strings makes a strong case for how well they were written in the first place. With that in mind, we asked the fans to make their picks for the Used’s best song. Here’s where they landed.
5. “The Taste of Ink”
The song that got them out of Orem. A clean, almost acoustic opening gives way to one of the biggest choruses of the early 2000s, and that chorus is still what the whole room sings back at them two decades later. If you only know one Used song, it’s this one.
4. “A Box Full of Sharp Objects”
Track one on the self-titled, first single, and the song McCracken tells crowds every night is the greatest ever written. It opens the catalog at a full sprint, no warmup, and sets the template for everything after: a hook built on a scream and a rhythm section that sounds like it’s about to come apart. Live, it still ends sets.
3. “I Caught Fire”
The lone In Love and Death song in the top five, and the record’s big love song. The arrangement is softer than anything on the debut, and McCracken sings most of it rather than screaming it, which only makes the chorus land harder. A frequent first dance, despite the title.
2. “Buried Myself Alive”
The self-titled album’s third single and its heaviest hit, Branden Steineckert’s drums pushing the whole thing forward while Bert trades between the clean verse and a chorus that’s mostly throat. Gerard Way has jumped on it with them live more than once (including at Hollywood Bowl last month). Easily the most chaotic song to earn a spot this high.
1. “Blue and Yellow”
The winner, from a band known for screaming: a slow, bare ballad where McCracken never really raises his voice. The arrangement is barely there, which is why it translated so well to a full orchestra and choir at the Sydney Opera House. It was the quiet one on the debut, and it turned out to be the one that stuck.
