5. Frankie Cosmos - “Young”

This jam is like a melancholy disco set to the tune of young adulthood. It’s heartbreaking in its simplicity, taking the joys of youth and painting them blue with the broad brushstrokes of sadness. There’s an emptiness even as it floats within a  sea of warm reverb. It’s the feeling of seeing the world open up before you, gazing at the imminent journey that stretches out full of possibility, and feeling nothing but an overwhelming anxiety and fear. It’s an echoing emptiness, the portrait of a daunted soul, where the expectations aren’t coming from within but without.

She’s been told so many times how she should feel, pressured to not waste away her youth, and to enjoy every day soaking up the vitality and happiness of her existence, that she now feels inadequate being unable to tap into said lust for life. Everything is so distant, and she’s feels removed and disconnected from it all. She’s supposed to be at the climax - the peak of her existence, but instead it’s utterly anti-climatic. She feels like she must be doing something wrong, like somehow she’s guilty of her own wasted youth. She just wants to live, but instead she’s stuck thinking about how she should live. Life has become inauthentic, as if there’s an extra barrier between thought and action, so that any trace of actual authenticity now feels misguided. Her youth has been robbed, co-opted by a society shaped by those left reminiscing of their own bygone youth.