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In the summer of 2009, a shambolic Los Angeles band called Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros released a single titled \u201cHome.\u201d A romantic duet between the group\u2019s founder and lead singer, Alex Ebert, and his bandmate and sometime girlfriend, Jade Castrinos, it sounded like a parody of a folk standard, with whistling, jangling tambourine, and lyrics such as \u201cWell, holy moly, me oh my \/ You\u2019re the apple of my eye.\u201d The song climbed Billboard\u2019s<\/em> U.S. alternative charts, but, more important, it left a mark on the American psyche, turning the band into one of those one-hit wonders that stands in for the vibe of an entire era. If you were living in Brooklyn during that time, in the cranking furnace of the faux-lumberjack, mustachioed, Mason-jar-clutching, acoustic-guitar-strumming hipster Zeitgeist, the Magnetic Zeros were ubiquitous. By 2011, the track had been used in commercials for the N.F.L., Microsoft, and Levi\u2019s. Even Pitchfork<\/em>, which gave the album on which the single appeared a score of 4.1 out of 10, allowed that \u201cHome\u201d was worthy of attention. As the economic casualties of the 2008 financial crisis reverberated, the song captured an accessible vision of American domesticity. It made you want to bail on the impossible job search and start a commune somewhere.<\/p>\n \u201cHome\u201d represented a mode of earnest self-expression that was utterly of its time; there was no irony or self-awareness behind the band\u2019s D.I.Y., travelling-circus vibe. Ebert styled his hair like a cult leader\u2019s, with a bushy beard below and a braided-mullet situation on top, and he took to wearing an unbuttoned white blazer over his bare chest. Castrinos\u2019s voice was twee and na\u00eff, the aural equivalent of a bob haircut and a polka-dot skirt worn to a Williamsburg dive bar. From the vantage of today, when the cultural lingua franca leans toward an incoherent, chronically online nihilism, it all appears rather alien\u2014which is why a clip from the band\u2019s 2009 performance for NPR\u2019s Tiny Desk concert series has been electrifying the internet over the past week. The footage surfaced when the children\u2019s-book author Justin Boldaji shared it in response to a (now deleted) prompt on X requesting the \u201cworst songs ever\u201d; Boldaji included the decisive caption \u201cWorst song ever made.\u201d The post<\/a> is now nearing a hundred million views and inspiring paroxysms of millennial self-reckoning. Hailing from a time before the relentless onslaught of social media, Trumpian politics, COVID<\/em>, and artificial intelligence, the Magnetic Zeros\u2019 prelapsarian sincerity now appears disastrously blithe. For better or worse, the band members didn\u2019t know what was coming; they possessed an almost jealousy-inspiring innocence.<\/p>\n Driving the clip\u2019s virality is a simultaneous disgust at and attraction to the artifacts and styles now known as millennial cringe. The disgust stems both from that aura of obliviousness and from a retrospective knowledge that the sincerity of late-two-thousands indie music was quickly co-opted into a more commercial version of itself. Even in 2009, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros appeared cynical and trend chasing compared to the likes of Sufjan Stevens or Arcade Fire; Ebert had previously led an electro-pop band called Ima Robot, but pivoted in a folk direction when that group failed. The Magnetic Zeros came to be associated with \u201cstomp-clap-hey\u201d music, a term coined for the folk revival of the mid-twenty-tens, as practiced by bands such as Mumford & Sons, Of Monsters and Men, and the Lumineers. (The Lumineers\u2019 2012 song \u201cHo Hey,\u201d featuring banal lovelorn lyrics and literal stomping, is, if anything, much worse than \u201cHome.\u201d) These other bands were significantly more financially successful than the Magnetic Zeros. Their music provided a suitably self-important soundtrack as Great Recession-era artisanal hipsterdom faded into the careerist hopefulness of the latter Obama years, when Everlane minimalism supplanted lumberjack plaid.<\/p>\n That moment passed, too, and gave way to our ongoing era of political, economic, and technological polycrisis;<\/a> now Americana vibes have become associated with resurgent MAGA<\/em> nationalism and isolationism. Hence the persistent attraction to the rustic, unmediated emotion of the Magnetic Zeros clip and its ilk. On TikTok, you can find montages of hipster imagery under the hashtag #2010snostalgia, including one eulogizing summer, 2012<\/a>, \u201cwhen life felt like an indie movie.\u201d The images are all heavily filtered, as on early Instagram, and everyone in them has bangs. One TikTok<\/a> simply features a series of yellow-tinted photos taken at Starbucks in 2010; it has nearly a hundred and fifty thousand likes. Millennial commenters express a desire to rewind to that era of their lives; younger posters wish that they could have lived through it in the first place. Like \u201cHome,\u201d these other relics hark back to an unencumbered life outside of our performative digital panopticon. As a bit of internet-vernacular wisdom puts it, \u201cI am cringe but I am free.\u201d Alex Ebert expressed as much in a recent monologue that he posted to Instagram, responding to the \u201cHome\u201d resurfacing. Through the music, he wanted to spread \u201cporous happenstance incidentalism,\u201d he said, conjuring some classic hipster pretension. In other words, the track was intentionally slipshod. \u201cIf the bones let the song survive context\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. it\u2019s a good song,\u201d he concluded.<\/p>\n However much people love ragging on \u201cHome,\u201d it could be that millennial sincerity is tiptoeing back into fashion. The song reminded me of another, earlier twee-pop track by the British band Noah and the Whale, from 2008, called \u201c5 Years Time.\u201d It was also a duet, between the group\u2019s front man, Charlie Fink, and the singer-songwriter Laura Marling, complete with whistling and nursery-rhyme lyrics: \u201csun, sun, sun,\u201d \u201cfun, fun, fun.\u201d (After Marling and Fink broke up, she began dating and performing with Marcus Mumford, of Mumford & Sons, whose guitarist, Winston Marshall, eventually departed over his political views and became an outspoken supporter of Trump policies. Everything is connected.) Then, out of the blue this year, \u201c5 Years Time\u201d made a comeback as the soundtrack to a climactic moment<\/a> in the new \u201cSuperman<\/a>.\u201d The seventeen-year-old mandolin-and-violin tune that millennials played with anticipatory nostalgia during college is now accompanying social-media video clips about the DC Universe, its cringe wholly recuperated as commodity.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n<\/div>\n