The Teenagers - 'The Homecoming'

I have a habit of wondering the parched, soulless offices in which I daily toil mumbling snatches of songs which have made themselves stick in my head. So I'm in trouble here, biting tongue as I slope from one pointless meeting to another to stop myself bursting into a quick rendition of a central line from this song.

"I fucked my American cunt."

I know, by the way, that as a person who has recently moved down a row on any survey in which you are required to belong to an age range, I'm years behind the curve on this one. A perfunctory google suggests oceans of hype have washed around this bunch, none of which has crossed my cloistered consciousness. And yes, since you do ask, I do at times, as an ageing music obsessive, feel somewhat like a creepy uncle eavesdropping on the beautiful young things. But damn it, I refuse to concede the space and go gentle into that good night. That I'm not a spotty teen but a cynic who feels he's heard everything before but still loves this says something interesting, surely?

But then I've always been a sucker for boy/girl, call and response tunes. I love the cynicism and amorality of this, and the way it twists to suggest something sweeter towards the end. I love the difference between the boy and girl viewpoints. I love it when the girl speaks and it's exactly like something out of Clueless, that smartest of Jane Austen adaptations. I love the accents, I love the distant, barely there music, and I don't know or care what genre we're supposed to call this. Knowing, smart, cool, it's the perfect tune for our fractured, knowing but neurotic, post-my space, over-social networked but simultaneously atomised times.

There's more than this to The Teenagers - and of course, the name is perfect too - and new single Starlett Johanssonn is increasingly claiming headspace as well. They do a good line in filth, this much is clear. You can buy this stuff from, say, Pure Groove, and when that isn't enough you can do what I just seem to have spent a large part of the afternoon doing, and trawling via Hype Machine blogs which are better than this one because you can download illegal music from them to get more. We may just have found the definitive band of this era.