Young

The most melancholy thing on the Chainsmokers' debut album, and the one where Drew Taggart's own limited, slightly nasal voice does the heavy lifting instead of a hired guest. The production is muted for them — a slack, muffled kick, a guitar-like pluck patch, plenty of space and reverb tail — closer to bedroom pop than to a festival main stage, with the beat dropping out entirely under the confessional lines. It's a breakup song aimed at a specific kind of failure: two people who were together too early, who wanted the same thing but had no idea how to build it, and the narrator keeps circling the excuse and the truth at once — we're just young, which is both the reason it ended and a thing he doesn't quite believe anymore. There's real self-implication in it, an admission that he was the one who couldn't stay. Against the album's glossier singles it plays as the record's quiet apology. Best heard alone, driving home in the very early morning after a night that ended badly, or in that stretch of your twenties when you start noticing that "we were young" has stopped being an available defense.