Velocity Girl (song)

Primal Scream frontman Bobby Gillespie had left his post as the drummer of The Jesus and Mary Chain in early 1986, recording only one album with them, the influential noise pop release Psychocandy in 1985.

That’s how long Primal Scream’s “Velocity Girl” lasts, and the song was enough to have crystallized an entire era and established an undying narrative," noting that as C86's opening track, it "has become iconic", and "sounded humble, but it was not without ambition.

It falls shy of the minute-and-half mark, and shyness can be heard in the song’s desperate refrain: “Leave me alone,” Gillespie pleads in a Glaswegian warble as guitars ring like chimes around him.

It was the sound of soaring punk rock as filtered through the Byrds, and its expression of angry introversion— told in an almost Morrissey-esque manner, via the tale of a troubled, sensitive young woman— was only the first stage of evolution for Primal Scream", concluding that "Velocity Girl" "became C86’s signature song, and it’s the track that, more than any other on the tape, helped turn C86 from a comp into a genre."

"[4] Allmusic said the song was the band's "early sound at its purest: a jangly rush of hyper-strummed guitars over an ultra-simple rhythm section behind Bobby Gillespie's charmingly naïve vocals.