"100,000 Fireflies" is the first single by the American

indie pop Indie pop (also typeset as indie-pop or indiepop) is a music genre and subculture that combines guitar pop with DIY ethic in opposition to the style and tone of mainstream pop music. It originated from British post-punk in the late 1970s and sub ...

band

The Magnetic Fields The Magnetic Fields (named after the André Breton/Philippe Soupault novel ''Les Champs Magnétiques'') are an American Band (rock and pop), band founded and led by Stephin Merritt. Merritt is the group's primary songwriter, producer, and vocali ...

, taken from their first studio album ''

Distant Plastic Trees ''Distant Plastic Trees'' is the debut studio album by American indie pop band The Magnetic Fields, released in 1991. Lead vocals on the album are performed by Susan Anway. The album is noteworthy for its stripped down sound and largely synthes ...

'', released in 1991. It is known for its bleak, tongue-in-cheek lyrics and black humour and for Susan Anway's sparse, soprano vocal performance. The song saw play on alternative and college radio stations on its release and slowly grew into a

cult classic A cult following refers to a group of fans who are highly dedicated to some person, idea, object, movement, or work, often an artist, in particular a performing artist, or an artwork in some medium. The lattermost is often called a cult classic. ...

, becoming "the ultimate staple" of indie mixtape culture during the 1990s. Because of its re-release in 1995 as part of the 2 for 1 ''

The Wayward Bus ''The Wayward Bus'' is a novel by American author John Steinbeck, published in 1947. The novel's epigraph is a passage from 15th-century English play ''Everyman (15th-century play), Everyman'', with its archaic English intact; the quotation refe ...

'' album, ''Glide'' magazine named it the second best modern rock song of the previous decade in 2004. Music critic Tom Ewing ranked the song at number 11 in his list of the "Top 100 Singles of the 90s", and said that, "for '100,000 Fireflies' everything is trebly and close, the drum reduced to a stern background thud and the song almost completely driven by the cycling, calliope-tinted keyboards and Amway’s cut-glass singing. Like the song and the situation it describes, the result is a perfect mix of intimacy with claustrophobia."

References

{{authority control 1991 songs 1991 debut singles The Magnetic Fields songs