And So It Starts: The Inevitable Chokehold LCD Soundsystem’s Music Has On University Students.

University induces many introspective alterations for young adults like myself. Reducing the entirety of your existence to a couple of bags and relocating to unprecedented places with strange buildings and even stranger people - it’s almost biblically required to question the makings of yourself whilst the ‘new you’ becomes discovered. Simultaneously, your personal taste is amplified: what once rhymed is now obviously prosaic and the background music to your innovations is LCD Soundsystem before you’re granted the choice to question it. Unbeknownst to me, this American electric dance-punk band, that formed before I developed consciousness, articulated the beginnings of adulthood that in my reluctance to relinquish youth I had not established the words for yet.

I stumbled upon their art through my tiny phone screen, as one does in this Age of Enlightenment armoured with media and musical monotony. It was James Murphy illuminated in both image and sound; blue and purple floodlights decorated him like a mosaic with hundreds of scattered people beneath him whose sole affinity to each other was this ability to be moved by music, quite literally. I was transcended, it was impossible to defy the allure of Murphy's guttural version of ‘Dance Yrself Clean’. Despite being situated halfway across the world, I was there: exhilarated, airborne and collectively comprehended.

My resonance particularly lies with ‘All My Friends’; released in 2007 and over 7 minutes long, it conveys the desperation of retaining life as it is now. Being riddled with nostalgia, I am no stranger to the transience of phases in my life and the grief that advances as they conclude. I listened to ‘All My Friends’ 18 times in the last week of my first year at university - it became a passage to my pre-emptive mourning of adolescent innocence and excusable mistakes, intoxicated sunrise stumbles back to a warm house of laughter and dirty dishes and friends who you never would’ve known with faces you could now trace with your eyes closed. LCD Soundsystem translates sentiments no university student is foreign to, the musical devastation of time's liminal state and how even with our ignorance, it is always

running out.

I can envision myself on graduation day, degree in hand, tear stained cheeks and surrounded by people whose smiles I’ve memorised. We will laugh and drink and for the last moment our freedom will be infinite. Gradually our interlocked bodies will be released and LCD Soundsystem will accompany me home as I spend “the next five years trying to be with [my] friends again.”

Words by Willow Donnachie, she/her