If you’re under 24 you can stop reading right now. Don’t waste your time here.

Isn’t that what we’re told at Triple J – only in reverse? That ageing hipsters like me are one birthday too many beyond the station’s target 18-24 demographic and should quietly move along?

After five years living overseas, I returned to Australia, at the age of 30, and discovered I no longer got the music being played on our national youth station. Stadium rock bands had been replaced by stadium EDM DJs. All those songs about young love, young heartbreak and partying now left me cold. And the station managers seemed to be in love with a man called Chet Faker and an army of wannabes; playlists awash with soft-focus, R&B-infused electronica.

“Bah, humbug!” I cried, shaking my fist at the car radio.

Someone suggested I try Double J. The newly established digital radio station was apparently targeting Triple J listener alumni – like a kind of hip radio retirement village – and to bring that point home had hired many former Triple J hosts such as Caz Tran and Myf Warhurst (disclaimer: who also writes for Guardian Australia).

Switching to Double J was like coming to terms with the fact it was time to try on a size 12 dress after a lifetime of size 10s. I found it fit like a glove. I loved it, much like the way I loved Triple J as a teenager.

The station, which celebrates its first birthday this week, still plays the songs of heady youth, but it’s our youth and we tune in with a nostalgic twinkle in our eyes. No longer are we in the midst of that intense, adolescent craving and wretched angst; we merely want to recall that feeling from our past. Cue revisiting the stripped back rock of sultry Adalita Srsen in Magic Dirt, singing about how she hadn’t washed her jeans in three months or more, or doing a few Kong Foo Sing air kicks to electro rockers Regurgitator (who wasn’t a rock band on Triple J in the 90s?)

Each generation considers the height of musical greatness to be the music they encountered during their own teenage years, as they say. Which may be true enough, but growing older shouldn’t mean having to amputate your love of new music (even if your enthusiasm for it is muffled). It simply means listening to a different kind of new music.

Remember Augie March, Missy Higgins and John Butler Trio? Guess what, they’re still making music, great music in fact, and they don’t gel with the puppies at Triple J either. In fact, there is an entire Australia of music, from the grizzled blues of CW Stoneking to the Arabic-influenced jazz of Joseph Tawadros, and the theatrical pop of Teeth & Tongue, that falls outside Triple J’s narrow, trend-driven charter.

Faker or not, Triple J is hard to leave because it was such an integral part of our childhood. A friend of mine remembers when the station finally arrived in his tiny Tasmanian town of Penguin. Prior to that, his only avenue to alternative music was cadging a lift to the nearest big town and its one record store, where the best he could hope for were a few Nirvana and Powderfinger albums in stock. They cost $30 each. For so many rural communities in pre-internet 90s Australia, the arrival of Triple J felt like a stairway dropping down from music heaven.

But time to leave it is. Goodbye Triple J and hello Double J, size-12, elastic-waisted skirts and a whole new world of music designed for an old fogey hipster like me.