mid a relentless stream of events that are not what we bargained for, one tiny good thing has come out of nowhere: the sudden return of the cult Glasgow band Life Without Buildings, thanks to viral ubiquity on TikTok. All over the app, teenagers (notably young women) are using a 15-second slice of the band’s math-y post-rock single The Leanover, released before they were born, to soundtrack videos in which they, well, do what teenagers do: bleach their hair, demonstrate “fairycore” makeup, vape exuberantly or simply emote for the front-facing camera. Most often, though, they mime enthusiastically to singer Sue Tompkins’ remarkable vocal performance, which veers charismatically somewhere between the stylings of Gertrude Stein and TLC’s Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes. “If I lose you, if I lose you,” she chants, over Chris Evans’ bass thrum, “uh huh, uh huh, uh huh, mm-mmm.” A stuttering, sung-spoken incantation of wired and insensible longing, it sounds improvised, as if it fell out of her mouth fully formed, though it wasn’t. One TikToker captioned their video: “These aren’t words but I like them.” Another wrote: “I have no idea what this means but I love it.” The Leanover began circulating just before Christmas, gaining traction when it was shared by young singer-songwriter Beabadoobee. It has now appeared in at least 80,000 videos and there’s been a knock-on effect on its Spotify streams, which have surged to more than 3.5m. Meanwhile, the band’s monthly listeners have jumped from 30,000 to 200,000. “I was immediately struck by the fact it was predominantly young women getting into it and sharing their videos,” Tompkins told the website Paste. “I was really moved by that and mostly how you could see them just purely expressing themselves, and hopefully feeling loads of freedom!” There’s a curious timeliness to the song’s belated popularity. Next month marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Life Without Buildings’ first and only studio album, Any Other City. This spiky, intricate guitar music inspired by bands including Don Caballero and Mission of Burma, and fronted by an artist-turned-singer who’s preoccupied with turning language inside out, perhaps shouldn’t work, but it really does. The band’s two kinds of energy are not so very far apart: both parts are irrepressible and sometimes ferocious, sometimes disarmingly sweet. On songs like PS Exclusive, Juno and New Town, Tompkins’ voice makes the music’s recursive complexity feel exuberant and nimble and, in turn, her voice is lent weight to push against and a rhythm to spar with by its backdrop. “Do we need order?” she asks 14 times in the song Philip. The answer is no – just pure, scrappy charisma. The band, comprised mostly of ex-students from Glasgow School of Art, supported the Strokes at their first London headline gig in 2001, but the high-profile billing was “a booking accident… a category error” according to drummer Will Bradley. They never seemed bothered about making it big, and then did that rare thing: made one brilliant record and quit, in 2002. A live album, Live at the Annandale Hotel, appeared in 2007. “The band was never meant to last,” Bradley recalled almost a decade after the split. “We did everything we set out to do.” Guitarist Robert Johnston said that, “for Sue, I think it turned from a laugh into being a commitment she’d never signed up for”. She successfully pursued a career in visual art. So why TikTok, and why now? Social media churns through popular culture at a remarkable rate, but TikTok is particularly dizzying and unpredictable. Exactly what gets salvaged and drawn back into circulation – last week it was sea shanties – can be difficult to unpick, but in this case it’s likely because Life Without Buildings, drawing equally upon 80s post-hardcore and 90s R&B, still sound like nothing else. When people like this band, they really, really like this band. The Leanover, especially, has lived on as a semi-secret passcode among initiates; there’s something about its euphoria that’s contagious. Shared affection for the song seems to forge bonds between strangers, cement friendships, even egg people on to fall for one another. I know some people who cannot bring themselves to listen to it any more, as it’s so deeply implicated in some old love; I know others who can’t help but let it play on repeat. Perhaps ending up on TikTok – an anarchic, endlessly scrolling mutant song-and-dance variety show – isn’t such a peculiar fate for a song like The Leanover. With its chopped up and repurposed allusions to Television, Roxy Music, My Bloody Valentine and others, in part it is a song about songs, a virtuosic rendition of how we mediate big feelings through music; it reframes the ordinary and lends it cinematic proportions. The appeal might be simpler, though. “Contact, contact, just sweet remember contact,” Tompkins mutters at one point and, oh, we do. Maybe Life Without Buildings have come back around because a cathartic song about vital force, delivered by a vital force, is exactly what we need to hear over the stream of constant news.