When Girl in Red sang “I’m running low on serotonin”, how many could relate? I’ve lived with depression and anxiety ebbing and flowing variously for over a decade now, and made more depression playlists on Spotify over the years than I care to admit, with the search for serotonin remaining the motivation.
But my love for music preceded the mental health issues – I was a primary school kid of the McFly, Busted, Avril Lavigne and Girls Aloud generation – and I often go back to the radio-friendly pop-rock of the noughties as a nostalgic comfort blanket of sorts. After all, who doesn’t want to hear about the girl with five colours in her hair or what we can expect from the year 3000?
My taste has evolved and expanded over the years, and now those aforementioned playlists feature artists as varied as Greentea Peng, Phoebe Bridgers (obviously), Bring Me The Horizon, Emmylou Harris, and IDLES.
Those who know me know that I seldom shut up about IDLES (I’ve been there, got the tattoos) and they couldn’t have dropped ‘Samaritans’ at a better time for me. My mental health was at its lowest, and I was a couple of weeks away from being put on antidepressants, which I went on to rely on for a further three years.
This angry, passionate mental health awareness anthem didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know, per se, but to have that sort of message coming from one of my favourite bands was something I really needed at the time.
It followed the release of ‘From Under Liquid Glass’ by Peace, everyone’s favourite mid-2010s baggy revivalists, a few months prior. Never a band to shy away from mental health and the sort of struggles that Gen Z indie kids could relate to, as ‘Perfect Skin’ and ‘I’m a Girl’ prove, the lyrics were music to my 18-year-old ears.
Peace were one of my favourite bands from the moment they arrived, championed as one of the saviours of Proper Music alongside the rest of the B-Town crowd and Palma Violets too. Whether I was in year nine having my mind blown by ‘Bloodshake’ or in my first year of uni really soaking in the lyrics to ‘From Under Liquid Glass’, they were a constant through those difficult years.
Not all the songs we find solace in are going to be quite so on the nose in terms of mental health – even if I do love Hot Milk’s ‘I Think I Hate Myself’. Even if a song doesn’t have mental health as its subject matter, it might remind you of a good time in your life, or of loved ones.
And music’s versatile. Sometimes you want to wallow in your low mood, with songs that make you feel as though the artists relate. Other times, you want something a bit more angry, allowing for a release, or something more upbeat and motivational, giving you the impetus to target your mental health head-on.
Indeed, not only helping me through the toughest times, music has given me some of my most euphoric moments. Getting to see My Chemical Romance over the summer with some of my closest friends is an experience I’ll never forget, while seeing Lorde perform ‘Solar Power’ a few days later and Little Simz doing Introvert last December were just as memorable. And that’s just in the last year.
I got into My Chemical Romance relatively late - but whether you’re listening to ‘I’m Not Okay (I Promise’ after a shit day at school in 2004 or 2014 (or 2024) the sentiment remains firmly the same. And when Little Simz dropped ‘Introvert’ last year, it really resonated with me. The idea of sometimes being an introvert – that it’s okay to be introverted, but that you don’t have to be an introvert all the time – was something I could relate to.
I’ve made friends through music – whether we met on the tills at Primark, in a uni lecture, or through our work in the industry – and the impact of that on my mental health can’t be understated. And some of my now favourite artists, like Little Simz and Dominic Fike, have been introduced to me through friends.
Music isn’t a magic cure. Depression doesn’t go away when you connect the aux cord. It won’t put more money into your bank account when you’re struggling to cope with the cost of living crisis.
We might laugh when we look back at ourselves listening to The Smiths on repeat - yes, I was one of those teenagers - or reblogging black and white photos of Alex Turner smoking on Tumblr, but it just shows the importance of music to identity and in turn to mental health. If you’ve had a rough day and all you want to do is go home and listen to Unknown Pleasures (or whatever else floats your boat) why not just do it?
