Citizen’s ‘Youth’ turns 10 this weekend, the band has an anniversary tour coming up, and we’ve got an exclusive tri-color vinyl variant of the 10th anniversary reissue. In this essay, writer Danielle Chelosky looks back on the impact of the classic album.
I’m not lying when I say that if I had to pick a piece of music to encapsulate my teenage years, the title of it is Youth. But that album, by the Toledo, OH-based band Citizen, is always what comes to mind when I think of high school. My adolescent anxiety was soundtracked by bleak, heavy guitars as powerful in their hopelessness as Joy Division’s are to me now; Mat Kerekes’s detached yells were more comforting and familiar than the sound of my friends’ voices.
Unveiled on June 11, 2013 — ten years ago this weekend — via Run For Cover records, Youth was the strongest a debut record could possibly be. It immediately solidified their place in the scene amongst bands like La Dispute and Neck Deep, who I got into as I started high school by traversing through Tumblr. I was graduating from my attachment to third wave emo bands like My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy, easing into alternative indie (or as Tumblr called it, “soft grunge”) groups like Arctic Monkeys and The Neighbourhood. Somewhere in the mess, the artwork of Youth caught my eye: The title spelled out in all roses, looking like a design on a Brandy Melville shirt or a piece of Lana Del Rey merchandise. It wasn’t just that; I came across gifs reciting the lyrics of their hit “The Night I Drove Alone” that captured the unbridled depression that would soak the internet for the rest of eternity: “I should’ve crashed the car / The night I drove alone.”
After school, I took the bus to my minimum wage job washing dishes at a bakery where I would put earphones in and blast music until my eardrums hurt while I wielded a sponge over an array of culinary utensils for hours. The first time I saw Citizen was at Warped Tour, where I bought Youth on CD and they all signed it for me, as well as a sticker with their name on it. I saved enough money to buy a used 2006 Nissan Sentra and I slapped the sticker on the bumper. It was not until a few years later that I saw them again. In those years, I left the CD in the slot of my car and blared it while I drove around suburban neighborhoods aimlessly at night, feeling vaguely existential. I memorized every line and every song transition; it flowed through me the way time seemed to move through everyone. It was familiar yet every time I listened to it I felt closer to it, like I was digging deeper into it, as if it were a place.
I fell in love for the first time around five years after the release of the album. I was about to graduate high school. He disappeared into rehab and I was alone again. It was the winter and I cried to Youth almost every night on my drives.
A few months later, Citizen embarked on a tour with Basement. I bought tickets for Long Island, Brooklyn, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Though they’d released more albums since then — 2015’s morbid Everybody Is Going To Heaven and 2017’s As You Please, which are both phenomenal — the setlist was Youth-laden, as if they couldn’t let go of those songs either. In that week of gigs at intimate venues, I accrued a mosaic of colorful bruises on my legs. “It looks like I abuse you, I don’t like it,” my new boyfriend said, but I liked that the marks were a physical materialization of my passion. The songs resonated so deeply within me — every riff, every yell, every rhythm — that I felt compelled to express it fully with my body, jumping and crowdsurfing. In the hallways at school, I was so nervous I felt my heart randomly palpitate. But in the audience of the rowdy shows I went hysterical, completely untethered from the burden of anxiety, finally myself.
I’d found plenty of bands — especially ones on Run For Cover — that meant a lot to me by then. But few moments in music invigorated me as much as the crashing intro of the Youth opener “Roam The Room.” Even now, it immediately brings me back into past mosh pits; it’s a battle call to catapult myself over people’s heads and immerse myself in that intense moment where nothing else matters and the body is not a burden but a vessel for expression. It brings me back to being 17, when I could fling my limbs around, slamming into others and headbanging without having to worry about heartburn or neck pain. The energy of Youth is the kind that could only exist in a teenager.
“The Summer” still retains its visceral gut-punch; the seething frustration is overwhelming in Kerekes’s voice as he shouts the simple, heart-wrenching line: “You said you’d stay.” There are more boisterous tracks on the LP, like “Your Head Got Misplaced” and “Drawn Out,” which just means there’s a relative lightness and exuberant riffs that juxtapose the dark words: “You’ve got a place to hide / Somewhere safe you found / So I locked you in and I burned it down,” he bellows on the former.
Youth has definitely been memed over the years, and some parts can make you laugh at just how searingly miserable they are. “The Night I Drove Alone” is embarrassingly eviscerating. “Sleep” is insane: “You spent so many days alone / So I’ll kill myself to make things fair,” Kerekes deadpans as the second line of the song, against gentle, Interpol-like chords that sound like ringing in your ears. Youth, clocking in at 30 minutes, feels like an immersion into a depressive episode. It feels like the tunnel vision you get where you’re convinced nothing has ever felt good and nothing will ever feel good. It feels like everything is fundamentally wrong.
Yet, on those many drives I endured as a teenager blasting Youth, I was quietly grateful to be inexplicably understood by this piece of music I found on the internet. I cherished the way it reverberated through my body, forcing me to realize I was not unmoored. I was not empty-handed or alone. Undoubtedly, Citizen’s cult following will be reflecting on this for the anniversary, probably thinking about how amazing it is that we’ve made it this far.
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Citizen’s Youth anniversary tour with openers Fiddlehead (who share a member with the aforementioned Basement and also just announced their new album this week) begins in NYC on June 14 at Knockdown Center. All dates are listed below.
Pick up our exclusive tri-color vinyl variant of the Youth 10th anniversary reissue in the BV shop, along with the new Fiddlehead album.
Citizen — 2023 Tour Dates
Jun 14, 2023 Knockdown Center New York, NY *
Jun 15, 2023 House of Blues Boston Boston, MA *
Jun 17, 2023 House of Blues Chicago Chicago, IL *
Jun 18, 2023 Metro Chicago, IL *
Jun 22, 2023 Emo’s Austin Austin, TX *
Jun 24, 2023 The Wiltern Los Angeles, CA *
Jun 25, 2023 House of Blues Anaheim Anaheim, CA *
Oct 21 & 22 2023 When We Were Young Las Vegas, NV
* – Youth show with Fiddlehead
