Every so often I go into a musical funk (sadly not the Bootsy Collins kind), and start to doubt whether new music has the capacity to excite me any more. Fortunately it’s usually not too long before I realise I’m being daft. It’s true that it can take a lot of time listening to the mediocre and merely quite good before I discover a gem that truly excites me, but I have to remind myself that this was always the case, and that it’s the rarity that makes those discoveries so delightful.

Let’s Eat Grandma were not a band I had especially expected great things from. I’d heard their debut album back in 2016 when they’d had a little hype after emerging from Norwich at a very young age, and I’d enjoyed it, particularly the single ‘Deep Six Textbook’. Like a lot of bands though they remained at the back of my concsiousness, only hearing about them occsionally, and unfairly assuming they had failed to live up their initial promise.

Then one spring day in 2022, another song of theirs popped up one of my playlists. I can’t remember whether I’d put it there myself or whether it had popped on one of those auto generated playlists from <insert evil streaming service of your choice>, but it didn’t matter. In that moment nothing mattered other than the fact that ‘Happy New Year’ was one of the most joyous songs I’d heard in a very long time. I played it. I played it again. I played it again and again. I’m not the sort of person who typically puts a song on repeat, but this was an exception, and I must have played it 6 or 7 times on my walk from the train station to the University campus where I worked.

I remember that day vividly, one of the first sunny days of spring 2022, when it felt like the worst of the Covid pandemic might be over, the campus was buzzing with life and students, and I walked into work with a smile on my face for the first time in ages. 2020 & 2021 were not years where I was able to listen to much new music, or much music at all, working from home, on irregular shifts, trying to home school two young children. This was some way down the list, of the biggest problems caused by Covid of cause, but it contributed to me being in one of my aforementioned funks, and that day, listening to ‘Happy New Year’ was one of the first times I felt like things might be ok. I was still here, music was still here, and it was wonderful.

To some extent the joy I take from the song is caught up in the joy I was feeling when I first heard it, but it’s a wonderful song in its own right. Straddling perfectly that line between indie-pop and electro-pop, avoiding the tweeness that can come with the former, but with the heart that can sometimes be lacking from the latter, it’s a tale of childhood and friendship that makes my heart sing every time I hear it. It even has fireworks.

It feels like an under-appreciated song. It’s not one I hear played on the radio, or discussed on social media much, although I was pleased to see it pick up some votes in a BlueSky music challenge of the best songs of the 2020s to date. I like to imagine this is because few people have heard the song, and to know it is to love it, rather than to think that everyone has heard it and just doesn’t like it, but I may well be wrong.

The band themselves have never reached more than a sort of middling popularity, haven’t put an album out for a few years, and one of the two core members has just released a solo single (although they swear Let’s Eat Grandma will be back). It’s quite feasible that the song will remain little known, and highly likely that there are few people in the world who love it quite like me.

I have a playlist of about one hundred of my very favourite songs of all time, and this is one of the few songs from the current decade to make that list. Not because the music of the 2020s is worse than any other decade, but because it typically takes time for me to fall in love with a song so deeply. Happy New Year was a rare exception, and it brings me as much joy today as it did the first time I heard it. More even than that, it reminds me that the time I spend listening to new music is worthwhile, that little else brings me the same pleasure as falling in love with a new song. It’s a pleasure that makes each moment feel like a mythical midnight on New Year’s Eve where, unlike any of my real NYE experiences and to quote another resident of Norwich, all shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.

A little early, but Happy New Year to you.