Five modern songs that sound too good to be written today
I’m not saying that modern minds can’t write great songs, but occasionally, great songwriting feels too powerful to have possibly ever been done by a hand that held an iPhone.
In an era of increased brain rot prompted by doom scrolling through the collapse of the world, the theory of contextualism would suggest that modern art can never truly escape its modern confines. The innocence and rawness often found in old music, in part, comes down to the fact that simpler times led to simpler work, or even to something basic, where The Beatles could say ‘All You Need Is Love’, and it felt more radical purely because no one else had put it on tape yet.
By now, we’ve spiralled around musical trends with such veracity that it feels like everything has been said and done a few times over, but occasionally, you stumble upon a song that feels so timeless, so impactful, so classically emotional that it seems like it has been around forever, or at least could have been.
These are songs not trying to be fresh and feel restorative of the grandeur of art as if they landed from god, impartial to the year they were made in.
Five songs that feel too classic to be new
Madra Salach – ‘The Man Who Seeks Pleasure’
The first time I heard ‘The Man Who Seeks Pleasure’, I assumed it must have been some folk classic, sung for an eternity in pub snugs, howled out by generations of old men with accordions or acoustic guitars and remorse to pour out. But really, the same could be said for any of Madra Salach’s tracks.
On this one, though, it’s the clarity and simplicity that make it special. Paul Banks’ vocals led the way, carrying the majority of the song with little more, but then, he spirals around this central lyric, “The man who seeks pleasure is the man who seeks pain”, and as the band then join in, building to a wailing climax, it all just feels too timeless to be fresh.
It feels too wise for any young man roaming the earth now to have written. The band need to be placed amongst the ranks of Irish greats immediately.
Imogen and the Knife – ‘If It Won’t Talk Of Rain’
When I interviewed Imogen and the Knife, I brought up this 2024 track expecting to get a book recommendation. The lyric “what’s a voice of the North if it won’t talk of rain?” once again felt too timeless to be new, the kind of hyper poetic wisdom your Northern grandad would sprout at the dinner table like it’s nothing, like a phrase passed down generation to generation until it’s so commonplace that people forget how stunning it is.
But no, Newcastle’s Imogen just wrote that, and it’s a Notes app special.
A poignant phrase all on its own, it feels even more powerful when positioned in the centre of a song all about her personal experiences of being an artist from the North, and specifically a female artist from the North. Attempting to balance her painful memories with her hometown pride, her love for the North with the suffering she’s experienced in the scene there, the line also taps into the area’s general persona as a place that values the underdog and a degree of gloom.
Laufey – ‘Let You Break My Heart Again’
Any track released by Laufey could make this list, and that’s her whole artistic ethos. Raised in a family of jazz and classical musicians, her entire musical education is in the old school and the standards, and she loves that.
With her career, the aim is always to tie a bow with those influences and her modern pop influences. Bringing contemporary elements into timeless sounds, she sprinkles some Gen-Z thoughts on top of tunes that could be 1950s standards.
Out of all of them, ‘Let You Break My Heart Again’ is the one that feels the most ancient. Especially when performed alongside a full orchestra, it feels like the type of song that should have been in songbooks for generations, sung by countless voices in choirs throughout time.
Hutch – ‘Ice On The Lake’
Sometimes I listen to ‘Ice On The Lake’ and think, how? Especially when the Brighton band play it live, pulling the audience along through these different sections, pauses, false starts and grooves, it all feels too miraculous. It’s tough to imagine the band carving it out or working on it at all, as if it surely just fell into their lap fully formed. Or, more accurately, it feels like the sort of song that the band should have made while tripping on acid in the late 1960s.
This is exactly the kind of song you can imagine being made when The Beatles were in their spiralling Sgt Pepper’s phase. When they opened up the doors to their studio and were inviting all the riff raff in, ‘Ice On The Lake’ sounds like a song a band would have made there and then, under the influence and with a gaggle of fellow trippers to encourage them onwards, push it further.
It certainly doesn’t sound like a song from 2024; this song has never known TikTok, Lime Bikes, or Apple Pay.
Katie Gregson-MacLeod – ‘Love Me Too Well, I’ll Retire Early’
Katie Gregson-MacLeod, I will personally pay you a million pounds to unrelease this song, please, it hurts too much.
My body reacts to this song as if I’m a 70-year-old woman, and this tune reminds me of a one true love I lost in my 20s. Any song that soundtracks a relationship, and subsequent breakup, holds some sting, but there’s something more in this one. Reminiscent of the power of a track like ‘Silver Springs’ that feels absolutely beyond any distinct era, it instead just feels like a bundle of emotion, a pure experience bottled. It could be a hundred years on, and it would still feel so sharp.
The same can be said for a good few of Gregson-MacLeod’s songs, like the ballads ‘White Lies’ and ‘I’m Worried It Will Always Be You’, or the simple folk power of tracks like ‘Mosh Pit’ and ‘Girlfriend’. Clearly, timelessness is something she values in her writing that prioritises that classic feel without neglecting the personal details of the modern age, like references to artists or texting or whatever. But when it comes to the feelings in her work, they feel ancient; yearning is eternal.
