3 Songs... about 23

It was only recently, while listening to Baby Queen's new-ish track '23' that I realised how many recent songs there are about the experience of being 23.

Overcoats appear to have begun this trend back in 2017 with their debut album Young, which featured the track '23', a poignant tale of early marriage, bucket lists gone sour and the rueing of wasted opportunities amidst the dawning knowledge that the marriage is failing. 

Leeds band Lucky Iris, meanwhile, released their own snapshot of early 20s life earlier this year, when they released their own song, also titled '23'. While it's not technically about hitting the age 23 so much as arriving at the year 2023, it taps into similar feelings about early twenties life. The track hasn't received as much attention as recent tracks 'Blowing Kisses', 'Maybe I'm too much' and its hyper pop re-work 'Maybe you are not enough', but it's still worth a listen. In comparison to the Overcoats track, in which our heroine has ticked off every one of her goals and has still failed to find happiness and satisfaction, Lucky Iris' Maeve instead finds herself musing that she always thought she'd have life figured out by the time she reached 2023: That she'd be "so old now" and have a decent job, a house, stuff... but it hasn't happened yet. The peculiar extended adolescence of the early twentysomething is what has happened instead and she's not sure how she feels about that. 

This state of peculiarly extended adolescence is not so much baffled about as celebrated by Baby Queen in her own recent track, also called '23', which is something of a hymn to hedonism. That mad spontaneous thing you were thinking of doing? That late night drinking spree on a weeknight? You might as well go off and do it, she says, lighten up - you're 23, this is what it's like, it's what expected of you. 

While each of the three tracks have been written by women in their twenties in a six year period, they all have very different perspectives on the early twenties life moment, and what they all suggest is a sense of a generation in flux. There's a real sense of insecurity and doubt that comes across, even in the Baby Queen song (although perhaps not as obviously as in earlier track 'We Can Be Anything') and perhaps it's no accident that these songs are coming out when they are. A few generations ago, it might have been 18 that was the pivotal moment. Now, it's 23.