CULLI. //: HOW_TO_LIVE_FOREVER_: A Song That Feels Like Teenage Time Travel
Photo courtesy of Culi.
A love letter to the song that let me hang out with my teenage self for three minutes and three seconds
Written By: Syn Devereaux
Imagine you’re me, a 32 year old millennial who may also moonlight as a boomer when it comes to trends and certain social media practices. I do my best to stay with the times, not wanting to fall in the ‘ancient’ basket the gen-z’ers are so quick to throw people around my age and above in. People tell me I seem so much younger than I am and although that’s a mighty compliment, my knees and hips say otherwise.
I use tiktok like any other 30-something— crying on the internet to Taylor Swift songs, longingly staring out bus windows, yearning for the prophecy of singlehood to end. I post for no one but me, and my FYP? Oh, that shit is gold. Curated over half a decade into something so specific and intimately mine, it rarely misses. Every now and then, I get lucky and a little treasure finds its way through the doom scroll— new music, some random delight, or both. In this case? All of the above.
Now, just like any other person my age, I spend a lot of time bed-rotting in my enclosure, laying horizontal on social media to dissociate myself from the world around me. When I came across Netherlands indie artist, Culi. (pronounced cuh-lee)— I sat up, watched the fifteen second video too many times and the hook of his song, HOW_TO_LIVE_FOREVER_ wrapped me in heavy drum beats and a razor sharp bassline. The visualizer for the song? UN.FUCKING.REAL. Well, if you’re into a gritty, grunge, multiple tv set up type deal— (which personally, I am)— you’ll get it. But even beyond the aesthetic, it’s so cleverly built. The best part? Culi. is a fully self-actualized artist, crafting every bit of it from his bedroom.
Obviously I have taste and IMMEDIATELY ran to Spotify to find the full version. And god, I was not disappointed. The track opens with a tape being changed in the tape deck and an 8-bit blip, only to fully launch you into full bass and drums and ripping guitars. The angst is so real and you not only hear it, feeling like you’re sixteen again wanting to sneak out to go to a show at Knitting Factory you’re too young for, but you can see it in the visualizer videos Culi. posts on his social media. Culi.’s DIY approach is so fucking fresh in an age where everything is mass produced in shiny bows and wrapping paper. Culi. isn’t just making music, he’s crafting portals– the very kind of portals that transcend time and space and take you back to your own inner teenager. (Can I have those knees back, again please?)
Listening to this song you feel like you’re right in the middle of an indie-coming-of-age film, saturated in film grain and yellows and greens; moody blues and violet lighting. Culi.’s visualizer acts as the perfect launch pad to create a visual landscape to let the music take you deeper into his world. Outside of posters plastered on the walls with no open space, TVs stacked and chefs kiss amazing stop motion animation– listening to this feels like peak 2013 tumblr girl aesthetic, full with the chokers, fishnets and Doc Marten boots. It's equal parts anthemic and nostalgic for a time that I so badly wish in ways I could go back to.
This would have slayed as an opener on a burnt mixed cd in high school, riding passenger in my best friend's blue Chevy Aveo (affectionately named, The Blueberry) with the windows down and the cool desert air on my skin. I know younger me would have definitely been hanging out the window. But if I close my eyes and I’m running along the track's progression down a deserted low lamp-lit street, only to have my hands on my knees, bent over, out of breath but free.
The visualizers act as a liminal dreamscape between analog and digital, blurring lines and pixels, creating a pound of flesh that beats along to the track's rhythm. It’s scrappy but well earned– living as a piece of true art. The glitchy, gritty visuals are a love letter to anyone who spent their formative years fighting with their siblings over MTV2, FUSE, and accidentally downloading too many viruses on their family’s home computer with Limewire.
It’s Myspace charm is not overdone or overstated, it’s fucking real. This track sounds and feels like the years of pent up romanticization for that indie-teen-movie life I always dreamt of. It’s an actualization of something I never knew I fully needed until it was staring straight at me on my screen at 2 am. This a mixtape moment for the group of music lovers who wrote on their shoes and emo lyrics on their Facebook in 2007 (I’m really aging myself here). It’s a timestamp on an era we all thought was long gone, but proves this kind of music never left. It isn’t some shiny, soulless nostalgia-bait. It’s a genuine time machine.
HOW_TO_LIVE_FOREVER_ feels like an early oughts pop-punk moment, studded belt from Hot Topic, not included. The layered yells throughout the chorus soundtrack an entire mind movie, where teenage angst and three full acts are absolutely included. It’s the kind of song that doesn’t only worm its way between your ears, but your muscle memory as well. The entire time writing this, I’ve had it on repeat, tapping my foot alongside the drum, moving my body along in stims. This song doesn’t just breathe, it’s alive with an electric pulse radiating through its three minutes and three seconds of soundscaping. But that’s the beauty of Culi.– an alt-rock bedroom-born sound bleeding into the rest of the sonic home you build in your playlist, the perfectly imperfect textures, the visualizers that feel like late-night channel surfing through a world only you recognize. In an age where everything feels algorithmic and over-polished, HOW_TO_LIVE_FOREVER_ punches through the noise with raw, deliberate imperfection — and that’s exactly what makes it feel so human. It’s not trying to be timeless. It just is.
This song has a sound that doesn’t just remind you of being a tortured and emo high schooler, drunk on the possibility of the future — it fully transports you. You’re not just listening to the track, you’re back there: crimping your hair, scrubbing eyeliner onto waterline-heavy eyes, bright blue eye shadow, lacing up battered Chuck Taylors, laying on your bedroom floor staring at glow-in-the-dark stars taped to your popcorn ceiling, waiting for your friend to text you the plan. It's not cheap or gimmicky nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake — it’s emotional time travel, engineered with a precision only someone who lives and breathes their art can pull off. It works because the track is created in the very same kind of bedrooms as the ones listening to it on the other end.
And lucky for me, the song wasn’t the end of the story, but the beginning. I got the chance to ask Culi. a few questions about the process behind HOW_TO_LIVE_FOREVER_, his visual style, upcoming work, and the delicate art of making music that feels both nostalgic and entirely new. Check out my b-side interview with Culi. here.
Culi. proves that you can teach old dogs (me) new tricks. That social media isn’t the evil machine everyone makes it out to be. That in fact, the exact opposite, because without it, I never would have found this (or maybe I would have) and felt it exactly as I did or where I did. A testament to the art and the artist, tattooing sound and nostalgia on an inner teenager’s bleeding heart. A smash hit that I truly hope gets all the recognition (I know it will, it’s just too good not to) and tiktok virality it deserves. It’s well fucking earned.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from diving headfirst into the world of Culi., it’s that music still has the power to find you exactly when you need it — like the universe sliding a burnt CD across your desk in homeroom, scribbled in Sharpie: listen to this, it’ll save your life.
HOW_TO_LIVE_FOREVER_ isn’t just a song, it’s a reminder that the future we used to dream about in those sticky summer nights, backlit by MySpace layouts and the smell of flat-ironed hair, isn’t gone — it’s alive, it’s looping, it’s waiting for us. And it’s artists like Culi. who hand us the aux cord back and say, “Here, press play.”
So do it. Press play. Head bang. Air guitar. Get lost. Grow up. Grow back down. Feel everything. Feel forever. You won’t regret it.
B-side coming soon!
