Broken Social Scene

Since 1999 · Canada

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You Forgot It in People (2002)

You Forgot It in People turns a revolving cast of more than twenty musicians into a single, cohesive wash of guitars, horns, and overlapping vocal lines, chaotic in personnel but never in execution. "Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl" builds a hushed, elliptical verse into a swelling, wordless chorus that functions as pure catharsis rather than narrative. Elsewhere the record shifts from tender to raucous within a single track, treating its own unruliness as a virtue. It remains the clearest argument that a band built on chaos can still make something this unified.

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Broken Social Scene

You Forgot It in People · 2002

Broken Social Scene formed in Toronto in 1999 around Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning as a loose, revolving collective rather than a fixed band, eventually drawing in more than twenty contributors across its recordings and shows, many of whom led their own separate projects. That collaborative, open-door structure became inseparable from the music itself, songs built up from whoever happened to be in the room rather than a single defined lineup.

You Forgot It in People, released in 2002, became the album most responsible for putting the collective on a wider map, and its reputation has only grown since: Pitchfork later named the band among the most important acts of the previous twenty-five years, and "Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl" found a new audience after appearing in the film I Saw the TV Glow. Drew, asked to name his own favorite record, has pointed to Talk Talk's Laughing Stock and Dirty Three's Whatever You Love, You Are as tied for "the most authentic human emotion ever captured on an album" — fitting for a songwriter who later titled his own solo record Influences.