Watch Broken Social Scene play Lover’s Spit live End of the Road festival, 2016 They’ve got a new album out by now, but the highlight again comes from You Forgot It In People: a version of the ballad Lover’s Spit that is bruised and beautiful, the sound of dignified sadness it sounds like the best song ever written, and for days afterwards I listen to the version on their odds-and-sods compilation Bee Hives on repeat. It’s again packed and sweltering, and BSS once more have only an hour or so to play with. A new singer called Lisa Lobsinger taking the female vocal parts. Two years later, and BSS are back at the same room. Feist, if it is indeed she, takes the mic for You Forgot It In People’s standout, Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl, a song that perfectly captures the adolescent yearnings of either sex: “Bleaching your teeth, smiling flash, talking trash, under my window … Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me.” It’s spine-tingling, ecstatic in its stillness. I’m pretty sure both Feist and Emily Haines of Metric are among them, though I can’t be sure (at this point, neither Feist nor Metric mean anything to UK audiences).

They get an hour or so on stage it’s swelteringly hot and they pitch their set perfectly, singers wandering on and off to take the different songs. Still, I enjoy it enough to buy tickets to see them play at the Barfly, a few minutes’ walk from my house. To me, it sounds like a whole lot of good ideas that don’t always swim into focus, but which explode into colour when all the elements align (and it still does, to be honest). “You Forgot It In People explodes with song after song of endlessly replayable, perfect pop,” gushes Pitchfork’s Ryan Schreiber, though I’m not sure I’d go anywhere near that far for a start, it’s not perfect pop, it’s art rock that manages to anchor itself to melodies long enough to intrigue. Like a great many others, I’m excited enough about the review to go off and buy the album – you couldn’t try it first on streaming services, so distant and remote in history is this juncture. Early 2003, and the Canadian collective Broken Social Scene become one of the first beneficiaries of what becomes known as “the Pitchfork effect”, when their album You Forgot It In People gets a rave review from the US website, which is just approaching its position of the Most Influential Thing in Indie (it will help break Arcade Fire and destroy Travis Morrison).

Best broken social scene songs