In today’s edition of the greatest records ever put to wax, Wilco’s seminal Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Dropped on September 18, 2001, in an America deeply embroiled in that nation’s largest collective post-war trauma,YHF became an accidental synecdoche. Sonically, the album captured something of the upheaval and incongruity of that era in the history of America and the world, while lyrically striking a tone of surreal apathy. In perfecting this balancing act: a close-to-the-surface vulnerability, sheathed by a protective layer of sardonicity, the album has sealed a spot in the post-millennial popular music canon. Today, it epitomises the discomfort of introspection: the itching at scabs, the oozing blood, the bandaid that is side-eye always at hand.

A song like Jesus, Etc., for instance, starting with its title, masks the serious (and likely unanswerable) questions with which it deals: questions of how one must live a life in which one is both an island and part of an ill-defined community that is simultaneously massive and in constant flux. IsHeavy Metal Drummera ditty about a girl in love with the drummer of a metal band that plays the occasional KISS cover? Or is it a meditation on innocence lost? Likely a bit of both. Much of the album rests in the wide space between playful and serious, occasionally swinging to one or the other end before reaching a more natural equilibrium between both.

It’s a remarkably difficult trick to execute, one I don’t think any other album I’ve ever heard does as effortlessly. While a lot can be said about the genius of the mixing, the instrumental choices that took Wilco from alt-country stalwarts to a much harder to define indie sensation, and the perfectly-executed sonic undulations littered through the album’s runtime, what sets Yankee Hotel Foxtrot apart for me is its ability to always feel light without ever feeling shallow.