I am struggling to accept the current, size yet unknown, of mid-2010s nostalgia that seems to be swirling in the air…it’s too soon, myself and my fellow wizened Millennial/Gen Z cuspers cry! We were wearing galaxy printed leggings and going to The Hunger Games midnight movie screenings just yesterday; what do you mean it’s been a decade? And even so, can’t we collectively agree to wait another decade or two and then maybe start peering at ~some~ of it through rose-colored glasses?
The resurgence of trends and media from 2012 to 2016-ish, my prime teenage years, is too weird to witness given how fresh it still feels in my mind and body. Throw it on top of the larger pandemic time warp and it’s kind of making me, now a twenty-seven-year-old teenage girl, feel old. For the record, I am pro-aging but against the startling helplessness I feel watching the rapidly passing trend cycles somehow become faster, the time between the decade being idealized and the current one get smaller. Not cool.
But there is one clear marker to me that the kids are alright. One thing that has aged better than almost anything else, in that it seemingly hasn’t aged and still hits as hard as it did back then, and is rightfully getting its due — the music!
In honor of their ten year anniversaries, I wanted to pen a personal ode to four impactful albums that were, incredibly, released within mere weeks of each other in September 2013…The 1975, Arctic Monkeys’ AM, HAIM’s Days Are Gone, and Lorde’s Pure Heroine. But first, some background on how I found them.
While still a bit disgruntled, I will admit, I cackle with glee when I see a young person online post something like, “I wish more than anything that I’d been a teenager in x year of the 2010s when x artist put out this album.” Because ha, I was! While I didn’t recognize the seismic effects these albums would come to have on the indie/alternative/pop rock music landscape right off the bat, I did know that I was listening to incredible music from promising new artists. And I owe it all to Tumblr.
Tumblr was a lot of different things, not all good (I would write a separate post just on that if the social platform hadn’t already been think-pieced to death), but formative nonetheless, especially for me in 2012 and 2013.
Before social media was completely driven by algorithms, before Spotify’s explosive growth, and before vinyl record obsession kicked in, Tumblr was my main vehicle for music and artist discovery, and it came entirely through whatever the random people I followed were sharing. I miss that simplicity; it feels quaint now.
It was the place where I saw a blurry paparazzi photo of One Direction out on a street in the UK, clad in Jack Wills hoodies and baggy jeans, and wondered who those cute boys were…the rest is fangirl and international music history. I also credit Tumblr with helping me move me beyond thinking of music as fun stuff that played on the radio, which I wanted to get away from anyways as my “not like other girls” strain of angst emerged, and begin to actually experience it.
I’d listen to a song someone had reposted and immediately look up the artist on YouTube, watch a ton of lyric and music videos, and listen to the full album. Then I’d play it on repeat as I scrolled every night — the opposite of the modern doomscroll: flicking through photos of blurred hands flying out of car windows, faceless teenagers kissing in streets, palm trees against vibrant sunsets, neon signs in dive bars, legs wearing black tights and combat boots, books artfully arranged next to coffee or flowers. My brain came to mix the sounds and images and emotions and stories together, creating scenes that stretched beyond the confines of a few minute song and allowed me to get lost in my imagination.
All of this came to create my first understanding of aesthetics, and to form the connective thread that has come to link these four albums in my mind: the romanticization of young adulthood, a particularly potent concept for a teen girl who was in the confusing early part of it and in the weeds of finding her own sense of self.
The 1975, Arctic Monkeys, HAIM, Lorde…it’s remarkable that I can point back to a singular GIF or video on the Internet as my first introduction to these musicians, whose art I have loved and supported ever since! I’ve been lucky enough to see them all in concert over the last few years; take the generational bias into account if you must, but I can attest that the songs from these albums sound just as incredible performed live in 2023 as they did the first time I heard them through crappy earbuds in 2013.
The 1975 – The 1975
I still can’t hear someone open a soda can without reflexively thinking of the “Girls” music video. While this was technically my point of entry into The 1975 via viral GIFs, I was actually being subconsciously primed to love their music in early childhood! Thanks to my parents, I grew up listening to all the great hits from the 1980s and couldn’t get enough of the sometimes dark, sometimes bright, complex, futuristic sounds of New Wave, arena rock, and synth pop music. All together (and knowing nothing about the common subject matter, just vibing), I thought of the songs from that decade as the perfect main character soundtrack to my life, bold and roaring anthems.
The 1975 grabbed my attention immediately because their music made me feel exactly the same way, but with such a refreshing twist on the ’80s sound that it made everything else I was listening to in the early 2010s sound boring. To me, The 1975, their debut record, masterfully captures the total exuberance and experimentation of adolescence. Not just the joy and hopped up hormones, but the overwhelming flow of all emotions, thoughts, people, and information one encounters and plays with as a young adult.
While The 1975 “got political” in following albums, their trademark social commentary starts here. I can’t help but think of a key Nick Carraway quote from The Great Gatsby: “I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.”
Sex, drugs, girls, going out to the bars, judging people at parties, nighttime escapades with best friends, family dynamics, love, ego, the beginning strains of self-reflection, being young and wild and free…these songs explore and embody these topics, narrated from within and without, so well you can’t help but see and hear them play out in your head like a movie.
The guitars, drums, synths, piano, and production combine to create an eclectic soundscape that has bits and pieces of many recognizable genres — rock, pop punk, indie rock, electropop, whatever, The 1975 are truly a genreless band — but is totally unique. Matty Healy’s vocals are smooth and messy exactly when they need to be to convey either the ultra-romanticized or rougher, gritty vignettes of youth. The overall result is stimulating, addictive, and authentic; you can tell this album was made by four guys in their twenties, really living what they’re singing about. It’s smart, brash, cinematic, pop music tailor made for the millennial generation.
It’s no wonder that although my real social life was nowhere near wild, I clung to the sensations from this album to psych myself up and fantasize about how exciting the next phase of my life would be, the late teens and twenties could be, when the world is meant to be one’s oyster. Hell, that’s why I still listen to The 1975 now (among a million other reasons that I could talk about for hours)!
This debut album has an extra special significance to me because in 2014, when I was just a baby in college in a brand new city, I was lucky enough to hear nearly all of it performed live. The 1975 was the first concert I ever went to alone and I felt anxious and electric and invincible. The reward for pushing myself out of my comfort zone is a feeling that was thick in the air at that tiny venue, lingered with me long after, and applies to every project and era this once-in-a-lifetime band has been through since: lightning in a bottle.
Arctic Monkeys – AM
Arctic Monkeys were vaguely familiar to me due to well-known older songs of theirs making the rounds on social media (“505,” “Fluorescent Adolescent,” the like), but it’s safe to say the release of AM catapulted them into another stratosphere of fame. This is the Tumblr album if there ever was one, almost to the point of overexposure; it’s impossible for me to separate it from the platform and 2013 hipster culture given how every artsy photo of the vinyl, stock image with a lyric on it, and “it couple” picture of Alex Turner and Alexa Chung was reblogged ad infinitum.
Aesthetics aside, AM is also beloved because the songs are just that fantastic! My simultaneously occurring obsession with Lana Del Rey had introduced me to this, but upon hearing Alex Turner’s voice in AM I was hit hard with a jolt of understanding how modern music could sound classic and actually be sexy, in a mysterious way completely different from the raunchy club-style bangers on the radio.
From “Do I Wanna Know,” the opening electric guitar riff heard ’round the world as a shout to the youth that rock and roll was not dead, to the slow groove of the obsessively romantic closer “I Wanna Be Yours,” (I wanna be your vacuum cleaner / Breathing in your dust – come on!), this album is all about love. Unrequited love, imagined love, the loss of real love, social posturing to try and get it, secret crushes, situationships, lustful hookups at parties — how could any impressionable teenager resist the pull?
The Monkeys dip into a variety of genres, influences, and tempos that blend together to create perfectly suave and witty songs, carried forward by Turner’s velvety vocals. He makes everything sound cool, even the nervous and desperate and self-chastising energy of one’s twenties as it relates to wanting and chasing romance. As far as I’m concerned, AM stands for Allure and Magnetism, and time is generously giving this record more of both with each passing year.
HAIM – Days Are Gone
Although I’d heard all the songs and watched the music videos online, the first time I saw the cover of Days Are Gone, HAIM’s debut record, was actually in physical form on what may have been my final trip to Hollister (fitting, given the Haim sisters’ West Coast roots). “The Wire” was blasting on the speakers and it was so dimly lit I couldn’t see much other than the CD stand in front of me. I remember being so struck by the girls’ chic black and white outfits and IDGAF stares, the intense power of their “cool girl” vibe magnified by the store’s surroundings, that I didn’t notice they were merely sitting on lawn chairs in the grass until years later.
The first time I heard this album, I envisioned modern-day California more clearly than ever — this was around the time when my dreams of visiting that magical place and fascination with its musical history were really starting to take shape — and my ears immediately heard Fleetwood Mac mixed with Wilson Phillips’ hit song “Hold On.” It may be the closest comparison sound-wise but isn’t quite fair or reflective of reality since Este, Danielle, and Alana Haim are a trio of badass sisters in a pop rock band with a style all their own. You think you’ve heard a catchy song? HAIM takes catchy up ten thousand notches in every vocal and instrumental element of their music. Give one of their songs a few listens and you’ll find yourself singing along and imitating the guitar riffs in no time.
What I love most about Days Are Gone is its core message of self-empowerment. The context in most of the songs is the turbulent ending of a romantic relationship, something I didn’t relate to at 17 years old, but the (re-)discovery of your own identity during a formative time of life? Hell yeah!
The importance of owning your mistakes and the times you fall short, calling people out when they fail you, figuring out the right thing to do based on your own wants and needs, then doing it — this was one big foreign concept to me as an extreme people pleaser, but I still admired the sisters for their strength and hoped one day I could face obstacles in my own life in the same way.
Now that I’ve lived a little and grown a lot, this album consistently inspires me to keep moving forward with a sunny disposition and a steely confidence in who I am…and to move through every day with a little bit of that California cool.
Lorde – Pure Heroine
It feels really special to be a longtime fan of an artist who is the same age as you; you can’t help but follow their journey and evolve with them in real time. It’s kind of built into me to love every Lorde album thus far because her music is always so aligned with what I’m going through, the things I’m learning about the world and myself in various ages and stages of life. To me, Lorde is the only famous person who truly represents my generational slice of Millennial/Gen Z cuspers and authentically speaks for and to us through her music (and her email letters, which are always a delight to read).
This instant relatability began with her flawless debut album, Pure Heroine, released when she was just sixteen years old (!?!!!), which I view as a love letter to the suburban teenage experience and the development of our inner and outer worlds as youth.
Right out of the gate with “Royals,” Lorde disavows the greed of mainstream culture in favor of real, raw experience. Forget diamonds and tigers on a gold beach; she’s confident that only meaning she needs can be found just hanging around with her friends – they are the rulers of their own kingdom. Put critique of materialism, power, status, and society’s expectations in the same cooker as exploration of self, young love, freedom, friendship, and angst, and what do you get? Exactly what it’s like to be a teenager.
The sleek synths, programmed beats, and lyrical syntax throughout the tracks serve to elevate these themes and seemingly banal descriptions of ordinary adolescent life — “And I like you/I love these roads where the houses don’t change/Where we can talk like there’s something to say” — and weave them together into their own glittery, dark, liminal dreamland, a space where driving around with a love interest becomes the only experience that has ever mattered. At this point in time I wholeheartedly hated suburbia and its lack of “significant” things to do other than drive around (teens are snobby, what can I say), but Lorde made it sound so cool that this album helped me accept it as the environment where I was born, raised, and had to be for a bit longer.
Sonically speaking, it is no exaggeration when I say this album had possibly the greatest influence on the modern pop music landscape that would follow it. I hear countless vocal, instrumental, and production echoes of Pure Heroine in the electropop of today (Billie Eilish, Taylor Swift’s Midnights, et cetera). And it makes me so happy to see the cultural and sentimental impact of this album, as the kids of today love it too and rightfully recognize “Ribs” as the honest adolescent anthem that it is.
Ten years later it seems silly to think that I sang the line “It feels so scary getting old” with such earnestness at just seventeen, but at that age it did feel terrifying. On the precipice of adulthood, every emotion feels heightened and every life decision seems monumental; beneath the facade, you just want any bit of reassurance you can get. Lorde’s Pure Heroine was the first time music made me feel seen, heard, and important as a young person with an average life.
These albums are deeply embedded in me and the songs pop up in my mind all the time, but every time I do a full listen, I still can’t believe how phenomenal they are, especially the debuts! When I hear the music now, aside from the absolute joy of singing/dancing/loving every second (which I will continue to do forever!), I am reminded of the naivete of younger me, in the most matter-of-fact way. She had big dreams and fierce determination and she knew next to nothing about the “real world,” powered by idealization, living in her own head most of the time.
There is some mourning involved; I wish she hadn’t spent those years mostly waiting for adolescence to be over and lamenting what her life lacked instead of realizing her own role in adding value to it. But like I did in 2013, I still believe in the spirited sounds each of these records possesses and their promises of freedom, love, desire, adventure, friendship, experimentation, living life on one’s own terms. Back then, I thought all of these things would inevitably happen to me by some external force; now I know I have to — no, get to — seek them out and make them happen for me.
Life as a young(-ish) adult in the 2020s may not look the way my teenage self wished, but as time passes I get to shape it into something that is more and more true to who I am, and that is all I could ever want. All four of these brilliant records remind me to find magic in the oftentimes mundane, to romanticize the journey however I can, to be grateful for the youthful stubborn hope that never left me.
On Solar Power, Lorde’s most recent album, she sings, “All of the music you loved at sixteen, you’ll grow out of.” Respectfully, I have to disagree. I believe that if the music was already poignant when you were sixteen, you will almost certainly cling to it tightly as you get older, needing it even more than you did then, eternally experiencing it anew.
BONUS: Check out this playlist I made for plenty more of my favorite Tumblr-era songs!