What BPM is best for general running?

PANIC features an average 140 BPM, ideal for general running workouts.

PANIC - Running Music

The curator called it "the sound of the alarm" and that's not metaphor—it's diagnostic precision. This playlist doesn't ease you into the run. It detonates at the starting line with donny.'s "malaysia." and refuses to let your nervous system recalibrate. Forty-four minutes of space rock, neo-psychedelic haze, shoegaze distortion, and garage rock urgency engineered to keep you in fight-or-flight mode. The kind of playlist Past Me built at 2 AM knowing Future Me would need pharmaceutical-grade disorientation to drown out the negotiations my legs start around Mile 3.

What makes PANIC work isn't the tempo—BPM's all over the map, lurching between AK/DK's motorik propulsion and Shelf Lives' jittery garage punk—it's the tonal panic attack that mirrors what happens when running stops being voluntary and starts being survival. "Square Route" hits second and the Krautrock repetition is hypnosis disguised as momentum. Then That Handsome Devil's "A Million Bots" injects paranoid energy right when my brain's still bargaining for the snooze button. The genre blend shouldn't work: space rock wants to float, shoegaze wants to bury you in reverb, garage rock wants to detonate in two-minute bursts. But the collision creates this claustrophobic urgency. You're not running toward something, you're running from the alarm that won't stop ringing inside your skull.

Mile 4 is where Shelf Lives takes over with three tracks in a row—"Skirts & Salads," "Where Did I Go?," "Psycho"—and it's garage rock triage for when my quadriceps start drafting resignation letters. Short, sharp, no time to think. PyPy's "She's Back" lands at the exact moment the fatigue stops being funny and the neo-psychedelic swirl feels like cardiovascular delirium. Then AK/DK's "Return to Zero" resets the panic just when I thought I'd found equilibrium. That's the genius of this sequence: every time the shoegaze threatens to lull you into acceptance, garage rock kicks the door down.

The final stretch—PLEASURE CENTRE's "Heart" through The Soft Pack's "Answer to Yourself"—doesn't offer resolution. It offers sustained alarm. Four minutes of "Heart" feels like running through molasses made of distortion, then AK/DK and The Soft Pack close it out with the same manic energy that started this whole catastrophe. No cool-down, no relief, just the acknowledgment that you chose this suffering and the alarm's still ringing. The playlist ends but the panic doesn't—it just becomes the thing that got you through the miles when your legs were filing formal complaints and your lungs were threatening to unionize.

PANIC

When the alarm goes off at 5 AM, this is the soundtrack for waking up the hard way

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