“Look Outside,” the ninth track on The Noise Made By People, only has two lines of lyrics: “I look outside and wherever I go you are there. You color in the every day wherever I go.” The rest of the song is instrumental, with a keyboard, a light guitar part, and splashing cymbals joined by Trish Keenan’s wordless voice that blends into the sound. It’s constructed in a way to make the listener ponder those simple words and what they might mean. It could just be a love song, but it also describes one of the core principles behind Broadcast’s music: the idea of psychedelia as a way to elevate the ordinary.

That theme is conveyed on this album through music that is consciously accessible and basic on the surface. Especially compared to their future releases, nothing that happens here is too complicated and the songs tend to stick to familiar pop structures. The lyrics in particular are written in a very elementary vocabulary with a lot of one-syllable words. The opening track,”Long was the Year,” introduces the band’s strategic use of brevity with lyrics like “be like the sun/never gone” and “sleep long and fast/let the past be the past.” This approach to language emphasizes the sing-songy qualities of Keenan’s voice while also being much more psychedelic and thought-provoking than many bands that write overly complex lyrics.

Keenan understood that the best art is the type that goes “off the page” and isn’t easily explained. The brief lyrics on The Noise Made By People are like sketches that hint at certain emotions or feelings, but are left to be fully colored in by the listener. This sort of ambiguity is a gift: it allows people to project themselves onto the music and to find their own way through the space that the band creates. It’s the key to why this is one of the most enduring albums I listen to and why I consider it a classic.

In an interview with Wired (which I’ll be using a lot because it has so many good Trish quotes), Keenan outlined how she views psychedelia as “a door through to another way of thinking about sound and song. Not a world only reachable by hallucinogens but obtainable by questioning what we think is real and right, by challenging the conventions of form and temper.” And that seems to be a particular focus on this album, which I usually describe in oxymoronic terms. It’s electronic but deeply human, it’s simple and yet so complex, and it sounds like the past and the future at the same time.

It made me reconsider certain preconceptions that I had about psychedelic music. I always assumed it meant there would be 10-minute songs that used words like “cosmotronic.” Broadcast proved that a whole world could be opened up through three-minute pop songs. It inspired me as a writer, the way the band sounded so smart and communicated such complex ideas through simple, unpretentious language — that’s something I aspire to. It made me appreciate electronic music, which I had previously written off almost entirely because I didn’t think I could connect to it like I did with this.

I already wrote about “Come On Let’s Go” and “Echo’s Answer,” which are the two opposite ends of the spectrum on this album. The rest of the songs occupy a space in between those extremes, combining beguiling pop and gentle psychedelia. It’s a style that usually gets labeled as “dream pop,” but Broadcast’s music is more about conscious thought than dreaming. The Noise Made By People tingles the brain in a way that few albums do — it’s a joy to listen to because of its songwriting and can be pondered for eternity without being completely solved.

Thus far I’ve been snubbing Trish Keenan’s bandmates (James Cargill, Roj Stevens, Tim Felton, Steve Perkins), but they shine on this album, especially given that surprisingly little of it features her voice. That outro on “Look Outside” is their best moment, but they also play a trio of instrumentals (“Minus One,” “Tower of Our Tuning,” and the finale “Dead the Long Year”) that add some pacing and texture to the album. And while Keenan’s voice and delivery has natural psychedelic qualities, a lot of that comes out in the retro-futuristic sound, which was inspired by eerie 60s groups but still feels like something no one else has caught up to.

“Unchanging Window” is one of the other songs on this album that is definitively Broadcast. It has that vague intangible quality that “Echo’s Answer” does while also being catchy in its own way with another memorable instrumental outro. The titular window goes back to the motif on “Look Outside” that runs through this album: the idea of seeing and thinking differently through music. The window doesn’t change, but what you perceive through it does.

Poppy songs like “City in Progress” and “Papercuts” contribute to making this Broadcast’s most accessible album. That is often said in a snobbish and dismissive way, but the elegance and listenability of The Noise Made By People strengthen its themes and make it an album that will endure forever, as long as people get the chance to hear it. Anyone who finds it will get the ultimate musical experience: an album that opens your eyes and makes you see the world differently.

Let’s face it: a lot of musicians sound like assholes. Music as a medium lends itself to mopey whining or egotistical displays of bravura and skill. Think of any breakup song ever written or any long guitar solo. This isn’t even necessarily a criticism, because it’s sometimes fun to listen to and I like my share of socially maladjusted artists. But I’ve also found in recent years that I really like it when musicians sound nice, even though that’s often associated with being boring.

That might all spring from “Come On Let’s Go,” which is the first Broadcast song I loved and Trish Keenan’s most endearing performance — one that shows how a single song can totally color your perception of a performer. It’s about a nearly taboo topic in music: being a kind, caring, generous person.

This is the second single off The Noise Made By People, and it’s quite a contrast to “Echo’s Answer.” While that song is inscrutable and bewildering, “Come On Let’s Go” is immediate. It’s the purest pop song the band ever made and it was easy for me to embrace the bouncy sound, Trish’s warm voice, and the straight-forward, relatable lyrics. The positioning of these songs as the first two singles that appear consecutively on the album has linked them together in my mind, and I believe it was a conscious strategy by the band.

Part of it is showing the range of the band in two songs, a way of saying “look what we can do” to the listener. They can make a perfect, catchy pop song, then follow it up with something strange and baffling that barely resembles a song at all. Functionally, “Come On Let’s Go” also serves as a gateway into Broadcast’s music. As a less experienced listener, this is the song I gravitated towards because it was so simple and got stuck in my head, and my love for it helped me get into all of their other songs like “Echo’s Answer.”

Once I got into those songs, there was a period where I didn’t listen to “Come On Let’s Go” much, and I’m ashamed to admit at times I felt like I’d “moved on” from it. Now I’ve come full circle as I’ve gained an appreciation the craft of a pop song, especially one that holds up as well as this one after almost 20 years. In fact, some of its lyrics might resonate now more than they did when the song was originally written.

No lyrics describe life in the social media age as well as “it’s hard to tell who is real in here” and “what’s the point in wasting time on people that you’ll never know.” Now more than ever, it’s really easy to get caught up in what other people think and to spend tons of mental energy endearing yourself to strangers who don’t actually care about you. Whenever I find myself doing that, this song echoes in my mind. It’s like a gentle pep talk from Keenan to stop being so stupid.

It’s not like these lyrics are revolutionary concepts, but there is something about Keenan’s delivery and the warm sound that makes them feel that way. She is just so matter-of-fact and sincere about it: “yeah, I’ll be your friend forever and I’ll always be here.” That is one of the deepest, most human feelings there is, and there aren’t as many songs about it as I feel like there should be. And this really shapes my perception of Keenan, who comes across in her music as such a caring, genuine person, which forms a contrast with so many other artists. “Come On Let’s Go” is one of the songs that separates Broadcast from other electronic/psychedelic bands who twiddle on their instruments but don’t make that human connection.

The ironic part of “what’s the point in wasting time on people that you’ll never know” is that it can apply so easily to the artists we listen to and obsess over. A lot of loving music is forming that one-sided connection with an artist, where they mean the world to you and have no idea who you are. I didn’t know Trish Keenan, and she wasn’t a very public person, but through songs like this I feel like I did. She felt real and I never sensed an ounce of pretension or acting in her music. If this isn’t who she really was, then she was an even more incredible and convincing performer than I realized.

Sometimes I hear a song and instantly think it’s amazing and everyone needs to hear it this instant and it’s an absolute crime, a travesty that this song isn’t getting showered with praise. Then I listen to it like five or ten more times and realize that actually it isn’t that great and I should probably chill out with the knee-jerk reactions. Other times, I love a song for awhile and then it kind of fades away, and when (if) I go back to listen to it, I still like it, but I don’t remember why I loved it. And even with most of my long-term favorite songs, my enthusiasm for them is often slowly decaying each time I listen to it as I run out of new things to discover in them.

“Echo’s Answer,” which Broadcast released as a single in 1999 and then included on their first full-length, The Noise Made By People, defies that typical life cycle. It might be the only song I’ve heard where I feel like I love it more every time I listen to it, and I’ve listened to it hundreds of times. I don’t have a great story of when I first heard it and like, time stopped and I just looked out the window for eight straight hours listening to it on repeat because I could feel my entire life changing forever. I just remember gradually going from liking it to loving it to now where I hear it and think “HOW DID THEY DO THIS. HOW CAN THIS HAPPEN.”

No experience could be more emblematic of Broadcast. Their music doesn’t necessarily make the greatest first impression, but it always lingers in your memory and never ages. What sounds simple on the surface becomes more complex and inscrutable with every listen. There’s never that moment where it’s “solved” and it’s time to move on. It reverberates forever, like an echo that gets answered infinite times.

What remains remarkable about this song is just how little is going on in it.   There’s no chorus, no hook, just that lonely keyboard part, a ton of space, and Keenan’s sighing vocals. I always think it’s more like a musical painting: the sound is not about telling a story with a clear meaning, but about creating a moment or an image. I picture Keenan standing on a mountain, whispering her words into the wind and hoping for an answer. Sometimes it feels lonely, other times it’s warm and soothing because of the calm sound and her voice. Either way, it’s always beautiful and bewildering.

The placidness of “Echo’s Answer” is audacious, maybe even defiant. It’s so the opposite of what many people expect from music, which is that feeling of getting instantly swept off their feet by a song like they’re a character in Garden State. I cynically wonder if a song like this would ever really find its audience in today’s music landscape, which is so based on virality and getting that instant reaction that feeds algorithms. Subtlety and sophistication are skills that are rarely rewarded with popularity, especially now, but they make songs like this last forever.

I’m not here to rank Broadcast’s songs and albums against each other, which feels like a pretty pointless exercise. But I do think of “Echo’s Answer” as their most defining song as well as their clear creative breakthrough. Anyone who wrote them off as being just a kitschy throwback act after their first singles had to feel like a big idiot when they came out with this. It obliterated any comparisons people had made to other contemporary bands and really put Broadcast into a world of their own, one they explored with so much artistry and depth over the next several years.