Kids

MGMT wrote “Kids” as college students playing in a dorm room and then watched it become one of the defining indie-pop songs of a decade — a synthesizer anthem so insistent that it was, for several years, impossible to escape. That ubiquity would have ruined any lesser song. This one just kept working.

The arpeggiated synth figure at the top is one of the great hooks of the 21st century. The arrangement is maximalist without being busy. And the emotional trick — that a song this upbeat somehow sounds elegiac for the very thing it seems to be celebrating — is the specific quality that makes any ordinary afternoon feel, for five minutes, like the credits of a movie you were the lead in. The ordinary is lifted. The feeling holds.