Sentimentalism is the defining characteristic of age. As I arrive for a Deafheaven concert I cannot help wandering back to my teenage years. Cultural groups had much sharper boundaries and it was so much easier to see who belonged to which group. Punks wore leather jackets with nihilistic slogans. They had spiky hair in all the colours of the rainbow. The safety-pin was their favourite ornament. Goths always chose black, no matter what the occasion, the time of day or the outside temperature. Metalheads always wore denim and cultivated their hair like Samson. And cute little girls? They just had to stay in their bedroom and listen to Madonna. Concerts were battlefields; no matter who was playing, up-tempo songs always resulted in moshing. With a bit of luck the Skinheads would even participate to turn it into a real fight.

And here I am…

Deafheaven is playing a small hipster venue in Zürich-West. I see cute little girls everywhere. I also spot a couple of big bald Afro-Americans. No leather, hardly any guys with long hair and an alarming high percentage of shorts. Welcome to 2017. Then I see the guitar player. He is wearing an iconic New order T-shirt; the shirt of their first single, Ceremony/In a lonely place (Fac.33). It almost looks like a piece of advice. It says: listen to the space in between my brutal metal riffs, find melancholy in silence. It’s a surreal statement. I can almost see Ian Curtis smiling.