There is a persistent belief that the strongest song belongs at the front, on the theory that listeners decide within thirty seconds whether to continue. That is true of a playlist. It is much less true of an album, where the opening track is doing a different job: setting a world, establishing a voice, telling you how to listen to everything that follows.
Placing your most immediate song second or third is often the smarter move. It rewards the listener who stayed, and it gives the opener permission to be atmospheric or strange in a way that a lead single cannot afford to be.
The other underused position is the penultimate slot. A record that saves something genuinely surprising for track nine of ten leaves people with the sense that it kept giving, which is a large part of why anyone returns to an album at all.
