Headhunter (song)

"Headhunter" is a 1988 song by the Belgian EBM band Front 242. The song was a major hit in the electronic and industrial music scenes, and Front By Front subsequently became the top selling album in the history of Wax Trax! Records.

"Headhunter" was released in 1988 on the album Front By Front, in two versions (Version 1.0 and Version 3.0). Version 1.0 was then released as a single and includes Version 2.0 as one of the b-sides. Version 2.0 was accompanied by a music video directed by Anton Corbijn. It depicted the bandmembers in an urban landscape of Brussels, including the Berlaymont building and the Atomium that had been built for the 1958 World's Fair, and used eggs as a visual theme. According to bandmember Patrick Codenys this was because Corbijn accidentally heard that the song title was "Egg Hunter".

When asked during an interview about the concept for the song, Jean-Luc De Meyer replied, "I had the chance to work in an insurance company before, and I worked in the department of human resources and I saw the way that this company was trying to hire people. It was very polite and very nice with men in suits, but at the same time it was very cut-throat. I wanted to make a parallel between tribal warfare and these activities. The song means both of these activities."

After a long hiatus from 1993 onward, Front 242 regrouped to re-record the song in late 1999, releasing it with multiple remixes on the dual-CD single Headhunter 2000.

COMA Music Magazine ranked "Headhunter" as the greatest industrial song of all time in 2012.

A character in the miniatures game Hordes is based on this song. Many of his abilities are drawn directly from the lyrics, including Bait the Line, Spread the Net and Lock the Target.

The above tracks for Headhunter 2000 were split across four discs in another version of the release. Other versions of the release are listed here at FreeDB and at Discogs. Some of them include additional remixes:

...
Wikipedia