Two Door Cinema Club felt novel and strange and like the biggest thing in the world to me, eclipsing all other interests as I began a fervent search to find everything else that sounded like them.
The storytelling was vague at best and nothing about the album was particularly emotive or evocative-it was shiny and impersonal, anxious and ambivalent, just like all of the pop music I’d been listening to up until that point, but it didn’t have that same corroded luster as top 40. It was also the first time I found a library of music that captured exactly what I needed and wanted to hear at that time: unfettered energy, coming out in short bursts of drum machine clicks and Ableton presets. The discovery of that album was the first time I took an active stake in my own music taste and began listening to an artist outside of what pop radio and my parents were spoonfeeding me (a rotation of Jennifer Lopez, Suicidal Tendencies and Zakk Wylde, for the record). Tourist History was the first thing that truly felt like mine. And whatever it was about that album-perhaps the lack of ballads, the current of eerily overproduced electro-pop that underscored the whole thing (which appealed to the part of me that had just emerged from a Lights phase), the consistency of sound or just the fact that I stumbled upon something that none of my peers were interested in-bred this immediate sense of excitement and urgency from within me, that same bright, eager energy that I admired from the song.
What u know 2 door cinema club full#
Replay upon replay led to a genuine liking of the song, which led to a full listen to Tourist History, the album on which “What You Know” is found.
What dug at me was the fact that I knew I’d heard it somewhere before, distinctly that drum pattern leading into a lurching bassline in the chorus- that hook-though searches on TuneFind couldn’t render anything recognizable. The most integral part of this tangle of phases was my Indie Conversion, which began in eighth grade after arbitrarily selecting “What You Know” by Two Door Cinema Club from a friend’s profile on whatever primitive version of Spotify was utilized at that point. A curled One Direction poster lives somewhere in my closet. In a corner below a Live Through This CD insert tacked up with putty, a Warpaint zine is propped up against a scratched Divers disk, and on the opposing wall, photos of Bat For Lashes and Sky Ferreira pulled from issues of Teen Vogue are collaged together. My teenage bedroom still exists as a living repository of them-the unfurled CD insert from 6 Feet Beneath the Moon is taped above a postcard flyer for a DIIV show in Atlanta. Each phase was a reinvention of myself, beginning with boybandry in middle school and plateauing with Hole when I graduated high school, and every band felt bigger and more revelatory than the last. One thing that remained constant throughout my teenage years were several micro-obsessions with these aforementioned generic post-Britpop era artists, many of which I can group into phases that directly correlate to all memories I have of that period. There’s an excitement that comes with finding music not actively rotating on KISS-FM radio stations or synapse-frying top 40 retail mixes it feels like harboring a secret, as if knowing them makes you a part of an in-crowd of people who aren’t passive in their media consumption. Perhaps it was the relief of hearing clean guitar music with big choruses that appealed to us, or the accessibility of that sound in the first place, which felt adjacent to pop and vaguely reminiscent of the music our parents and older brothers listened to- Enema of the State or Justice or The Cult. When I speak with friends of mine who grew up in the same era of the internet as I did-the slow dissolution of Myspace, the primitive predecessor to stan Twitter, which was then referred to as “floating head icon” Twitter, and the calm before Yahoo bought Tumblr-The Kooks, Two Door Cinema Club and their generic post-Britpop era peers are usually mentioned as bands that opened up a door to whatever their personal definition of “indie” is. At least the sentiment stands in this copycat tweet.
Somewhere on the internet there exists a tweet that says something along the lines of “If The Kooks or Two Door Cinema Club weren’t your indie converter bands, who even are you?” I’ve tried again and again to find the original, but I think it’s now lost to the ether. Welcome to our new Gateways column, where Paste writers and editors explore the taste-defining albums, artists, songs or shows that proved to be personal “gateways” into a broader genre, music scene or an artist’s catalogue at-large-for better or worse.
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