The Stranglers' Iconic Song Golden Brown Is Blowing Up On Instagram — But In 1982, US Charts Ignored It

A viral social media phenomenon in the 2020s, it took more than four decades for the magical and ethereal "Golden Brown" by the Stranglers to make a big impression in the United States. A rough-edged, hard-to-classify band that predated but was still associated with punk rock when it was invented in the U.K. in the 1970s, the Stranglers' sound evolved into something more progressive and experimental by late 1981 for its album "La Folie." Issued the following year as a single, many people are of the opinion that "Golden Brown," a rock song from 1982, sounds even cooler today.

First re-emerging to moderate attention in 2000, when it appeared in the international hit film "Snatch," "Golden Brown" broke out in a big way in 2025 on Instagram, marking the first time that the song was a bona fide hit in the United States. Here's how "Golden Brown" finally exploded on Instagram and with Americans more than 40 years after it was released.

"Golden Brown" is dominated by a swirling and repeating harpsichord riff — not a frequently used rock instrument — played in a constantly changing time signature. "It's about heroin and also about a girl," frontman Hugh Cornwell wrote in "The Stranglers: Song by Song." It's certainly different from what the Stranglers had previously done, and anything else on the radio in the early 1980s. 

The band, recently forced onto a new record label, almost had to bury "Golden Brown." "They said punk was over and we were finished, and then we forced them to release that record," Stranglers bassist Jean Jacques Burnel told Reminiscin.' "They released it before Christmas thinking it would kinda die a death, but it developed its own legs." Indeed, it did. Of the Stranglers' 23 Top 40 hits in the U.K., the biggest was "Golden Brown," a No. 2 smash. In the U.S., the Stranglers was never a particularly popular band; "Golden Brown" didn't make any American charts at all at the time.

It took time to take off. With a baroque sound that provides a dreamy, spooky, and medieval feel, Instagram users have adopted "Golden Brown" as the go-to song for videos and collages of fantasy art and material about castles, kings, and knights. Since 2025, "Golden Brown" became among the most popular Instagram songs, employed in hundreds if not thousands of such posts dreaming of the age of chivalry.