“Melt!” is a song by English post-punk band Siouxsie and the Banshees. Record label Polydor released it in 1982 as a double A-sided single with “Il Est Né, Le Divin Enfant.” It is the second and final single from the band’s fifth studio album, A Kiss in the Dreamhouse (the Christmas carol adaptation does not appear on that album).
Lyrics: Sex, Death, and S&M Imagery
The sensual lyrics compare an intense sexual interlude with a lover to dying—orgasm and annihilation braided into one fever dream. Lines can also be read as an S&M encounter: “Handcuffed in lace, blood and sperm / Swimming in poison / Gasping in the fragrance / Sweat carves a screenplay / Of discipline and devotion…” Handcuffs, discipline, blood-and-sperm excess, and devotion language place the track firmly in BDSM-adjacent pop imagery even when the band never labels it a scene tutorial.
Dave Morrison of Select observed that “The Baudelairean imagery of ‘Melt’ evokes claustrophobic scents of opium, sex and sickly flowers, and lapses into morbidity with lines like, ‘You are the melting man and, as you melt, you are beheaded.’” Decadent literature, perfume-heavy lust, and beheading metaphors keep the song in gothic erotic territory familiar to goth and post-punk fans who already treat bondage aesthetics as wardrobe and atmosphere.
B-Side and Chart Performance
“Il est né, le divin Enfant” adapts a traditional French Christmas carol. For years the track stayed single-exclusive until the Siouxsie and the Banshees box set Downside Up (2004) collected it for LP/CD audiences. “Melt!” itself hit shops on 26 November 1982 and peaked at number 49 on the UK Singles Chart, issued in both 7″ and 12″ formats.
For listeners mapping songs about BDSM, “Melt!” is classic Banshees: not a leather-bar anthem with checklist toys, but a polished post-punk single that eroticizes restraint, discipline, and lethal intimacy. Handcuffs in lace, sweat as screenplay, discipline as devotion—the vocabulary is pure power-exchange poetry wrapped in Dreamhouse production gloss.
