From Girls to Alt-J: why some things are worth retrieving from the dustbin of millennial culture

The Guardian

11-04-2025

Not in living memory has a generation received more abuse than millennials. First the older generation told them their economic woes were due to a weak handshake in job interviews and a crippling addiction to brunch. Now, an even more malignant torrent of abuse is coming from below. Gen Z, in an attempt to distance themselves from the tragic fate of their forebears, have declared war.
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Every young person seems to be mocking the sincerity and optimism of a generation – born roughly between 1981 and 1996 – who imbibed the spirit of the Obama era and seemed to believe that if they worked hard, their dreams would come true. Except they didn't: instead came Brexit, Trump, Covid and AI-generated videos of Elon Musk doing the moonwalk.
TikToker Kyle Gordon, for example, is now going viral for a parody millennial folk-pop song called We Will Never Die that blends We Are Young by Fun and Ho Hey by the Lumineers with the waistcoats and flat caps of Mumford & Sons. The song's lyrics satirise the simplistic political messaging prevalent in the era of Occupy and Kony 2012: 'Yup, we did a thing / We let our voices ring / Politicians, hear us sing, stop lyin'.
As a gen Zer (just – I'm 1997) who has been shaped by millennial culture, I have seen a sharp rise in this sort of elder abuse. So much so that it informs much of my new show, Return of the Space Cowboy, which mines the tension between my innate gen Z scepticism and my desperate need to find something to believe in. As such, I simply cannot take the slander of my noble elders any more.
They are a generation too old to be cool but too young to be viewed through rose-tinted (and fashionably oversized) frames. But mark my words, the near future will see the streets lined with millennial-themed bars with exposed brick walls and cocktails served out of mason jars. MGMT's Time to Pretend will be triumphantly blasting out of the speakers as you remark that your 'dad loves these guys'. People will start taking bathroom selfies with an iPhone 3G for that retro digital feel, while clad in smart-casual numbers, waistcoats with jeans, blazers with skinny chinos, fedoras and fraying festival wristbands snaking up their arms. Soon young people will be lamenting being born in the wrong era and say things like 'take me back to 2013 so I can wear a bow tie while I penny board to my job making BuzzFeed listicles about which Friends character you are'.
As a tribute to this maligned group of pioneers, I've collected four masterpieces made by millennials that have inspired me and deserve their place in the cultural canon.
In Girls, Hannah Horvath says to her parents: 'I don't want to freak you out but I might be the voice of my generation … well a voice … of a generation.' The line was intended to highlight Hannah's narcissism and self delusion but I do sincerely think that with Girls, Lena Dunham, who created the show and stars as Hannah, stakes a solid claim to being the voice of the millennials.
No show better captures the essence of the 2010s more than Girls. A sitcom for an era that felt uniquely confusing and hard to define compared to the ones that came before. The groundbreaking realism of relationships shown for all their glorious awkwardness and weirdness – a far cry from the gloss of Friends or Sex and the City. A show that paired the uncertainty of being in your 20s with the uncertainty of post-financial crash New York.
A show that was as heartbreaking as it was hilarious – take the opening scene where Hannah is being cut off from her middle-class parents and she reminds them, 'I could be a drug addict. Do you realise how lucky you are?' Or there was the truly excruciating moment when Marnie tries to get back at her ex-boyfriend by singing a sincere rendition of Kanye West's Stronger; a scene so toe-curling that I have to hide behind the sofa like a dog on Bonfire Night whenever I watch it.
It is one of the few shows I can watch over and over again because unlike most 30-minute TV shows it doesn't follow a repetitive formula. Every episode is so unpredictable, the depth and complexity of the characters so much more than your usual sitcom archetypes, that I learn something new on every rewatch.
At their worst, millennial films become pretentious aesthetic exercises in style over substance. But when it's done right, as it was by Richard Ayoade in his debut feature, it results in a charming and hilarious coming-of-age film enriched with a patchwork of aesthetic references from French, Italian and British new wave cinema.
We follow teenage oddball Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) in his quest for love in front of the bleak industrial backdrop of 1980s Swansea. I saw this film in the cinema when I was 13 years old and couldn't believe that a film could be so beautifully made and cinematically vibrant while simultaneously being so packed with so many great jokes. The 2010s was the era of the 'dramedy', AKA the blending of comedy and drama, and maybe there is no better example of this than Submarine.
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My generation would do well to remember that we're standing on the shoulders of giants. Millennial giants such as Eric André. The first time I saw André's truly bizarre talkshow parody when I was 16 years old it felt as if I was watching a new sense of humour come into being. It is not as characteristically 'millennial' as other things on this list because in many ways it was laying the ground for the unhinged brain-rot humour that defines the TikTok generation today.
The Eric Andre Show felt like it was only understandable to a generation that grew up with the internet. Whether it was getting seemingly unsuspecting celebrities on as guests and then making the atmosphere as deranged and chaotic as possible – the host throwing up and eating his own sick until the guest leaves, or the consistent smashing up of his desk – André was an early proponent of the unhinged humour that is now very much in the mainstream. The absurdist end of TikTok virality can be traced back to André's underrated masterpiece.
Alt-J's Mercury prize-winning debut album An Awesome Wave is a true millennial masterpiece. Not only because it's a great album, but the rise and fall of Alt-J as a band is one of the great millennial tragedies. I was 14 when this album came out and people were musing that the new Radiohead, or even Pink Floyd, had arrived. The album was packed with obscure literary and cinematic references over a rich pulsating soundscape of haunting voices. White guys finally had new music to lecture women about.
Until, in 2016, disaster struck. A video went viral of two drunk students making a parody of Alt-J's music using a loop machine, a tambourine and repeatedly singing 'put it up my butt' in different harmonies. It showed that anyone could make a song as good as any Alt-J song. Never before have I seen a parody song so quickly unpack a band's mystique, and frankly Alt-J never recovered. Part of the reason they never recovered was because the band members have as much charisma as a recycling bin. Do you even remember any of their names? Exactly.
Millennial internet culture had a tendency to eat itself – things became cool and uncool at ever quickening rates leaving little to hold on to. But sifting back through the archives of the early 2010s, I do think An Awesome Wave is a gorgeous album, worthy of its acclaim.
Horatio Gould is touring the UK with Return of the Space Cowboy from 2 to 23 May; tour starts Glasgow. The podcast Fin vs History with Fin Taylor and Horatio Gould is available now.