The Vaccines: I Always Knew

The Vaccines came out of nowhere in 2011 and somehow felt inevitable—that jangly, nervous energy, the tight hooks, the way they sounded simultaneously ancient and contemporary. Justin Young’s voice had this quality of barely contained urgency, like he was telling you something he’d already decided you wouldn’t believe. I caught them early and they felt like a secret, which is the most dangerous thing for a band to feel like in the streaming age. Everyone finds it at the same time now.

What held up was the restraint. They never got bigger than the songs needed them to be. If You Wanna is still a perfect piece of nervous guitar pop—it doesn’t apologize, doesn’t reach, just exists exactly as long as it should. That’s harder to pull off than it sounds. Most bands either disappear or bloat. The Vaccines just stayed themselves, which is its own kind of obscurity.