Another decade and a half on, after a 2005 reissue that found NMH being praised by of-the-moment indie acts like Arcade Fire, Franz Ferdinand, and Caribou, and then following the reformation of the band for a lengthy reunion tour in this decade, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is still finding people. But it’s never been a record for everybody, despite being canonized, at least in the indie-rock world. There’s always been a vocal contingent who not only don’t understand what the fuss is about but who actively loathe the record. As intense as the devotion among the faithful is, there is an equally intense dislike of the record, from both casual music fans and critics and, in some cases, former fans.

To the converts, Aeroplane is a moving meditation on trauma and loss and hope, the kind of record that causes you to look at where you are and where you came from and think about what’s important. To its detractors, including those who once enjoyed it but later found it hard to bear, it’s infantile and even embarrassing, the stream-of-consciousness musings of a privileged dude sharing naive stoner wisdom. What is the root of this conflict? We can start by agreeing that In the Aeroplane Over the Sea isn’t an album you come to for mature revelation, and it’s very difficult to connect its subject matter to anything going on in the world at large. Where some records grow old with you and speak more to your present circumstances with each passing year, Aeroplane centers on a mindset that emerges during a very specific point in life—somewhere between the ages of 14 and 20, say, when you’re old enough to recognize that you no longer have the confused and fractured consciousness of childhood but young enough to remember viscerally what it was like. And that perspective is the key to how the record is received, and why it endures.

Aeroplane keeps renewing itself and finding new generations of fans because the record itself is forever young—it’s like a children’s book or a fairy tale, Where the Wild Things Are on wax. When you are listening to it, there are no adults around. The songs are filled with parents, yes, but we never know who they are or what they think. They exist only as a threat (“Mom would stick a fork right into daddy’s shoulder”) or as a repository for longing and need (“Daddy, please hear this song that I sing”). Their voices may as well be the “mwah-muwah-muwah” of the grown-ups on “Peanuts,” an unintelligible murmur happening somewhere offscreen.

The songs on the album seem to come from the mind of a child, and the action inside these songs feels both mundane and fantastical; when you are 8 years old and your neighborhood block is your entire world, you find that it’s filled with ghosts. Aeroplane is a place of nameless sensations and frightening desires, where historical imagery is scrambled, and lines between past, present, and future are porous. It doesn’t try to make sense of anything and has no answers; it’s an album of memories and associations, how skin feels against the grass and what passes through your mind the first time you realize your own powerlessness. It puts ultimate faith in raw feelings, the kind that consume you without logic or sense. The energy emitted by the tension between those who love Aeroplane and those who are repelled by it, like the center of a rope in a tug-of-war on the verge of snapping, is a major source of its power. Because In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is above all a portrayal of innocence, to love it is to imagine forces that want to extinguish it.