If you’re a fan of Billie Holiday, you may know her 1941 recording of the song “Gloomy Sunday,” an aptly-named piece of musical moping originally written by a Hungarian duo in the early 1930s. Forty years before Blue Oyster Cult offered a seductive view of suicide in “Don’t Fear The Reaper,” this song gave us a protagonist whose lover has died and who is planning on joining her/his beloved in the hereafter. The original recording of the song was blamed for a rash of suicides in Budapest in 1932, and the Billie Holiday record was banned by the BBC… though it was actually banned because its dark melancholy lyrics were deemed a poor fit for wartime morale. But that didn’t stop some bright promotional person at Columbia Records from branding it “the Hungarian suicide song,” a name that has stuck ever since. Personally, it all reminds me of the old Monty Python sketch about the world’s most dangerous joke – so funny that it’ll kill you. (In the sketch, the joke is translated into German and used to turn the tide of the war.) But the song does have an undeniably lovely and forlorn melody, and it is the subject of an album coming out this Friday called Hungarian Noir. It includes the original Hungarian version of the song, the Billie Holiday classic, and ten new revisions, remixes, and reconstructions of the tune. There’s Brazilian hip-hop; dance music from Mozambique; Colombian urban folk; and a neat electropop arrangement from Poland’s Kayah. Her version is in Polish, so unless you’re fluent in the language, it should be safe to listen to: