The Verve — Bitter Sweet Symphony - Remastered 2016

Richard Ashcroft's string-swept lament is back across 22 country and platform charts after a brief absence, its orchestral swell as ubiquitous as it was in 1997. The song's second life has always run through screens: its most enduring placement remains the closing scene of Cruel Intentions (1999), where — per Wikipedia — nearly a tenth of the film's roughly $10 million budget went to licensing it. That sync fixed the track's status as a shorthand for elegant heartbreak, a role it still plays in the Cruel Intentions montages and ending-scene edits circulating today, alongside its recent use in a Publix commercial. The looping Andrew Loog Oldham sample gives it an immediately readable emotional register. Its return underscores how durable a single unresolved chord progression can be.