My favorite band
Considering the amount of time I spend listening to music and thinking about music, it's surprising that I'm not really sure what my favorite band is.
I know what my first favorite band was: Arcade Fire. I started to listen to them at the beginning of high school, and got really into them during 2020. It was the first time I really got into music, spent time trying to figure out what songs meant to me, learnt about the lore of the band and albums. Interestingly I discovered them kind of by accident. I read about them in an article my friend (back then we were barely friends, but now he's one of my best friends) had written about them in the student magazine at my school (I'm pretty sure I was the only one who read that article). And then they were my top artist for many years. I still like them, but I don't listen to them as much as I used to.
I started to wonder what it meant for a band to be my favorite band. The Postal Service is a band I particularly like, and while a lot of it is down to the great music they made, a big part of it is due to the story of the band. Just an album made by some people as a side project which over 20 years grew to become one of the most important indie records of the century. One tour at the beginning, then a couple more every 10 years, and nothing else. It just seems like such an odd story, and I think that's what makes them appealing to me. The story is complete, and it's a great story.
Another good candidate for a favorite band would be The National. Several of their albums are some of my favorites, but what sets them apart is that I like every single album of theirs, which is rare. Usually there is at least one album that I don't really like or listen to, but not for The National. And they have ten albums, so that is quite an achievement. I have been listening to them for years, but I really got into them during my first semester of uni. I wasn't exactly struggling, but it was definitely one of the sadder periods of my life, and I barely listened to anything that wasn't The National for months, so I associate them a lot with that time period.
But I think at the end of the day if I had to choose, I'd say my favorite band is Black Country, New Road. I discovered them at the end of my penultimate year of high school, during a month I wasn't doing so hot. They had only put out their first album then, but it instantly became one of my favorites. I had sunglasses on repeat for what was left of the year, and the band single-handedly got me into the british post-punk revival scene. After Ants From Up There came out I had it on repeat for most of my last year of high school. It's my favorite album. I also got most of my friends to listen to them, but none of them like it quite as much as I do. I remember finding bootlegs of their new songs from shows in 2022 and downloading the files to listen to them on my phone, and I remember watching the Live at Bush Hall video the day it came out, despite the fact I barely had any internet connection at the moment. Simply put: I love them, and they have been the soundtrack to a lot of my recent life and will continue to be into the future.