Released: 2002
The more things change, truly the more things stay the same. The release of Ladytron’s seventh album Time’s Arrow in early 2023 was preceded by a slightly odd background story. Formed in Liverpool at the end of the previous century, the quartet had been more or less staying in the same ever tightening musical lane, onemany artists long into their careers are forced to occupy. Then something changed.
Over a relatively short period of time during 2021 the group, now individually spread around the globe, had blown up on TikTok for reasons which at first were less than clear. After a while it emerged that users were creating endless variants of Seventeen, a track from their 2002 album Light And Magic which in the case of many of the posters seemed to have been released before they were born.
The song’s very simple refrain is “They only want you when you’re seventeen/When you’re twenty-one, you’re no fun”, a multi-faceted commentary on the disposability of youth when gripped by the acid hug of consumerism. As a piece of philosophy this may have sounded naive, but the backdrop – whirring robotic synths, pattering drums, futuristic melancholy – gave it the quality of an android’s first words, a blank tape whirring into just programmed life.
Drawing lines between past and present is a skill that is rapidly being erased from the human condition. Seventeen still works for people from Chennai to Zagreb, but when they no longer want it to, it won’t.
The Voice Of Unreason 