Pandemic music makes me feel weird now.

Triggering, much?

Before there was brat summer, there was lockdown winter. In the middle of 2020, Charli XCX released how i'm feeling now, an album born from the pop star’s Californian bedroom. It raged and kicked and thrashed about, furious about the state of things. “I'm so bored,” Charli ranted on ‘anthems’. “Wake up late, eat some cereal.”

At the time, I loved that record. It captured everything I was feeling at that time: trapped, bereft, desperate for contact with the outside world, for a taste of normality, for stimulation, for anything that wasn’t where I was right then. Most of all, I wanted to enjoy live music again, something that had been taken away from all of us.

And there was Charli, many miles away, experiencing exactly what I was experiencing, what everyone was experiencing, letting it all out in a deliciously abrasive way. “I just wanna go to parties,” she sang. “Wanna feel the heat from all the bodies.”

In the wake of brat's success, I tried re-listening to how i'm feeling now. It didn't work for me. It's an agitated, itchy, insular listen that feels very much of its time. Three years ago, how i’m feeling now felt entirely appropriate. Right now? It’s the musical equivalent of nails down a blackboard. In other words, it’s 100% triggering.

Returning to that particular pandemic record took me back to that moment: masks, 1pm debriefs, queuing for groceries, kids being home-schooled, and sitting on the edge of my bed, the door wedged shut so a BBC-style interruption didn’t occur while I discussed how i’m feeling now live on air.

I didn’t want to go back to that moment. I don’t want to be reminded of it. That time sucked. It was a terrible time. Nothing felt inspiring. Everyone was in survival mode.

Artists faced taking a huge risk: do they shut up and wait for Covid to pass? Or do they attempt to meet that moment by releasing something inspired by all of it?

As a journalistic experiment, I decided to force myself to return to those terrible times, to listen to all the music that was made during this sad, mad, bad period, back when a pandemic soundtrack was being made on the fly.

A lot of music came out between 2020, and 2022, but I chose to return to the albums I listened to back then, the ones I was the most familiar with.

The results were … well … ahh … umm …

They were awful.