Khalid, a 19-year-old vocal prodigy, looks at the same world and doesn’t see hedonism it’s just life. The image of the tortured millennial who hates parties and hookups yet partakes because everyone else does, the old soul, surrounded by shallowness, secretly craving something real - this amounts to a moralistic, hypocritical condemnation of hedonism, a youth-specific version of what Drake and the Weeknd have made careers of. The Chainsmokers can’t, and the crassness of their Memories… Do Not Open represents a nadir. Mitski’s sharp, miserable Puberty 2 pulls it off because the specifics of analysis disappear beneath her guitar feedback in an expertly dramatized outburst of deprivation and rage. The convention when depicting the current generation’s love life is to bemoan the prevalence of hookup culture, social media, and all the concomitant ills that, according to those who think about these very serious issues, ostensibly follow: narcissism, commitmentphobia, phone addiction, inability to emulate the previous generation’s correct behavior, etc. It inhabits its own winningly intimate, hushed, balmy aural space, and it corrects several tendencies that befall artists who address similar subject matter. I’ve been listening to American Teen with increasing fascination since its release in March.
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