Despite going three years without releasing an album, the wait was worth it: American alternative band Grouplove is back with their most recent album, Big Mess. The album, released in late 2016, entered my world soon thereafter, and one song in particular has stayed a personal favorite of mine even a year later.

Originally, I was drawn to “Welcome To Your Life” simply due to its catchiness. The upbeat tune of the first ten second repeats in the background throughout and provides a foundation for the song to be built upon. Layers of vocals and and instruments accumulate, adding complexity on top of the underlying repetition, but just when it seems about to peak, it drops back down to the original and simple tune of the beginning.

There’s more to the song than just the instrumentation, however. “Welcome To Your Life” is themed around discovering yourself and growing up, as it was originally written for the newborn daughter of band members Hannah Hooper and Christian Zucconi. The chorus is especially powerful, “welcome to your life (yeah yeah) // it could be your fantasy.” The message of this is to take advantage of being young and to do things which make you happy, creating a world for yourself that leaves you without regrets. With this goes the line “nothing ever comes without a change,” which advises that if something is having a negative impact on your life or you want an aspect of your life to be different, you have to be the one who tries to change things for yourself.

Enjoy “Welcome To Your Life,” and remember: as the song says, “all the roads in this world were made by the young,” so get out there and start changing the world,

Lucy