When you load up Spotify, a great big chunk of the time you can’t think what to play, right? You default back to your old favourites, those albums and songs you played on repeat when you first discovered you could make them yours.
This isn’t about guilty pleasures; it’s about those songs you’ll still be listening to when you’re old and in your rocking chair. So, enter Teenage Kicks – a playlist series that sees bands running through the music they listened to in their formative years.
Next up, Divorce.
Kasper
Adult Jazz – Spook
I was just finishing college when this album came out, and it absolutely floored me; I’d never heard anything so painstakingly crafted, and the creativity of the production STILL inspires me. This song is sort of the centrepiece of the album, and I think it’s perfect.
Grizzly Bear – On a Neck, On a Spit
This was the first folky band I got into; I’d never really been into acoustic-led music because I was a big ROCK boy. This album straddled the gap between folk and indie perfectly for me at the time, and this song has such a great balance of calm and chaos.
Adam
Paolo Nutini – Growing Up Beside You
I plunged my hand into the canyon of cringe, and unfortunately, I’ve pulled out far too much. Having thoroughly scrubbed my fingers I’ve chosen to skip those weird bits and go with something that sums up the end of my teenage years and felt like a formative moment in my musical history. In hindsight, most of my friends were emo kids or metal heads, and my two older brothers both had fairly eclectic taste (think Tenacious D and Weird Al), so no wonder the canyon became so chasmic. I had brief encounters with System Of A Down, Coheed and Cambria, Blink 182 and Incubus. Starting to write my own music with an acoustic guitar led me to folk music and playing unplugged folk sessions at local pubs around Uttoxeter. This track by Paolo Nutini summed up the end of my teenage years. My friend Matt and I used to sing this song to each other almost like a mantra of endearment.
Andy McKee – For My Father
I was about 15 when my eldest brother first showed me Andy McKee’s ‘Drifting’ on YouTube when internet virality was first becoming a thing. I remember thinking how impossible it looked and how it made me feel completely determined to become a better guitar player. Drifting was put onto Andy McKee’s first record’ Art Of Motion’, and I reckon my love affair with ambient instrumental music began here. ‘For My Father’ was a track I kept coming back to again and again because I couldn’t wrap my head around how it sounded like a conversation even though it had no lyrics. Looking back, there were many fingerstyle guitarists I listened to that are technically perfect, but the approach Andy McKee has to writing music forever inspires me to form melodies that help tell stories without words.
Felix
Stornoway – The Coldharbour Road
I could have chosen any of the songs from ‘Beachcomber’s Windowsill’. That album soundtracked so much of my early adolescence. I loved the melancholy of the lyrics, the character and textures in the instrumentation and the vividness of the pastoral imagery. They also didn’t seem like super cool wanky rock stars, which I think I found a lot of comfort in and related to. The second gig I ever went to was Stornoway at Rescue Rooms in Nottingham.
Laura Marling – Take The Night Off
Again, any of the songs on this record would have fit the brief, although this track is basically the first part of four continuous songs that begin the record. ‘Once I Was An Eagle’ (along with the rest of Laura Marling’s work) meant and still means so much to me. I used to lie in bed and listen to the full record every night, I remember feeling ecstatically grateful that people could make music like this. These first few songs were some of the first I ever taught myself to play on guitar. She did a secret cinema event for the album’s release and I snuck in underage, which was crazy for me as a very anxious kid. As soon as I walked in, Willy Mason was playing inside in a tiny chapel, and I was also blown away by him.
Tiger
The Velvet Underground – I’ll Be Your Mirror
The Velvet Underground were such a formative band for me. I remember falling in love for the first time, and this song, in particular, really soundtracking that. I kind of recall it also being the first time I really came to appreciate imperfections in music and I think Nico’s voice is the epitome of perfect imperfection; often slightly pitchy, sometimes out of time, but truly iconic and soulful. I tend to gravitate towards this in the music I choose to listen to and also in the music that I make with Divorce.
Lady Gaga – Judas
I want to take it back to my early teens here; some of the first music I discovered by myself, independent of my parents, were pop girlies. Big deals for me were Beyonce, Rihanna, Katy Perry and obviously Gaga. Something shifted deep inside me after hearing her music in depth for the first time; I’m a little monster til I die, and I’m picking ‘Judas’ because I loved the drama she gave, centring herself in a love triangle with Jesus and Judas. She was the only one who could do it. It’s pure theatre, and it’s funny and draggy and campy and everything I was obsessed with as a 13-year-old.
Taken from the June 2025 issue of Dork.
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