Falling down the rabbit hole and embracing guilty musical pleasures | Jack Marshall's column

The mushy and terrifyingly impressionable grey matter of adolescent brains is a fascinating beast when left to its own devices, let alone when it’s blasted with punk metal and subjected to GCSEs. Just as the mind is finding its synaptic feet and flooding the body’s stock market with hormones, trembling 13-year-olds are hit with attractive guitarists and moody lyrics, too.

This is like giving hard drives acne and a confused instinct for tame rebellion and menthol cigarettes.

Is it any wonder your Spotify playlist contains so many teenage bangers whose stylistic value is just a slight diagonal step away from your more fully-fledged adult tastes? Not really. Every treble clef and cymbal crash of these songs is seared into your squishy, nostalgia-hungry amygdala. Forever.

This is nothing to be embarrassed by, this is a homely pleasure to be embraced.

Recently, a tune from this time in my own life resurfaced from the depths of my subconscious, like a life-jacket suddenly inflated. No idea what triggered it, but there it was like a bee sting.

My fingers sprang towards Spotify and, like Alice and the rabbit hole, down I went, never once considering how in the world I was to get out again.

This one song led to more by the same artist, each album cover art painting another smile on my dumb face. Then, it was across to other bands from the same genre. More brain-dead smirks.

Like a genre-hopping dot-to-dot, each new band - along with a zesty fresh dopamine hit - paved the way to another. Heavy metal became psychedelic rock which became thrash metal, which became punk rock, which became nu metal, which became industrial, then alt rock, garage, indie rock, pop rock, and on and on and on.

It was like slipping down a waterslide made of cherished songs and sounds, each affixed with a blurry memory dashed at the edges with colour - a trip back to a dusty childhood bedroom in a part of the mind long-forgotten.

And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Go back in time and embrace the nostalgia of guilty musical pleasures. After all, Alice’s adventures in Wonderland were all a dream, not a nightmare.