"Under the Milky Way" is a single by Australian alternative rock band the Church, released on 15 February 1988,[1] and appears on their fifth studio album Starfish.

The song was written by bass guitarist and lead vocalist Steve Kilbey and his then-girlfriend Karin Jansson of Curious (Yellow).

[5] In January 2018, as part of Triple M's "Ozzest 100", the 'most Australian' songs of all time, "Under the Milky Way" was ranked number 33.

[6] In 1987, the Church travelled to Los Angeles to record their fifth studio album, Starfish, and worked with producers Waddy Wachtel and Greg Ladanyi.

"[13] According to a press release issued with Starfish, the title is from an Amsterdam music and cultural venue, Melkweg (Dutch for "Milky Way"), which Kilbey used to frequent.

[14] I just stumbled upon it and for some reason it has struck this wonderful sense of universality with people that most of my songs don't.

"Under the Milky Way" features a 12-string acoustic guitar melody, along with a solo composed with an EBow on a Fender Jazzmaster and recorded on a Synclavier, leading to a sound reminiscent of bagpipes.

[9] In October 1990, Jansson told John Tingwell of Drum Media about songwriting with Kilbey, "it's a very spontaneous thing.

It also appears on the "Sum of the Parts" promotional release and the 2 CD re-issue of the Starfish album.

In December 2011, he told News Limited reporter Cameron Adams: In 2001, the song was featured on the soundtrack for the film Donnie Darko.

Kilbey said after the performance that it was as if the song had been made for the occasion, though in his blog he was critical of the Commonwealth Games as an event.

[29] The authors, John O'Donnell, Toby Creswell and Craig Mathieson, described "Under the Milky Way" as "[The Church's] signature track ... [which] caught them at their peak of guitar-fuelled creativity ... [it is] the elegiac centrepiece of the record ... sounded like an induction, with its soft, monkish keyboard washes and ringing guitar chords, but it never reaches the point of transition where one world gives way to the next ... possibly concerned with drugs, but it transcends any single setting or worldview".

In 2016, Metric released a cover of "Under the Milky Way" for the AmfAR AIDS charity's benefit album The Time Is Now!.