6. Teen Suicide - “It’s Just A  Pop Song”

This jam is a perfect bite of bliss. It’s concise and beautiful, crisp and yet fuzzy, somehow blurring the line and finding an unlikely balance between Pop music and its Lo-fi antithesis. It’s infectious, and it does so not by pandering to human vulnerability and imperfection, but rather by invoking it. Like much of Pop music it speaks to the universality of the human experience. However, it doesn’t then try to mask the struggle of that emotion within the gloss of unseemly plastic production. Instead it captures the emotion in its purest and rawest form, drenching it in humanity and soaking it in a beautiful sense of uncertainty. It speaks directly to the soul, without any need for filters or translations, and its this candid pureness that allows the track to resonate so deeply.

It’s a Pop song without embellishment or adornment, or rather ‘just’ a Pop song. It’s unassuming, almost to the point of self-deprecation, full of wit and worry and composed almost entriely of scattered stream of consciousness thought blots. It’s a song not simply for the people, but of the people. It’s proletariat Pop, wonderfully capturing the emotion and apathy of the human experience to display an ennui at once both beautiful and numbing. It’s perfectly imperfect, and its this apparently contradictory juxtaposition that makes it so relatable.