The year 2007 was, in many ways, both the last hurrah of one way of living and the dawn of another. It was absolute chaos in some of the world's richest countries. Celebrities went off the rails en masse , foot and mouth disease was all over the place, the US housing bubble burst and triggered the worst financial crash since the great depression. Also: Apple released the first iPhone, Twitter began to take the heck off after its launch a year prior, and Facebook usurped Myspace as the social media platform of choice. It was the beginning of my future and, playing in the background, was MGMT's Oracular Spectacular.

It helped, of course, if it came out when you were a teenager. Oracular Spectacular is defiantly bound up in an expression of youth that was particularly poignant for kids hitting puberty in the reckless Skins era of snogging, Class B drugs and intense confusion. It captured the feeling of a generation of people thinking, both optimistic and terrified, about their place in an unknowable future. The whole album encapsulates that splurge of euphoria and freedom and depression and restriction that comes with the transition from childhood to adulthood.

It's almost ironic that Oracular Spectacular was released in such close proximity to the iPhone, because its success came in part from embodying a caricatured sense of the future . Its frequent nods to 70s prog rock and psychedelia make the album sound like a vintage, sci-fi version of the future. The music toes a fine line between being actually 'futuristic' (I guess a better word might be, simply, 'new'), and an anachronistic, retro version of the futuristic: the latter represented by the electric guitar, and the former by the synth. This retro edge made you feel like you were the future, as you would reading 1984 or watching Back To The Future. But the future you're in isn't a hard-edged, metallic, dystopian future – it's warm and bubbly like a jacuzzi, and it makes you feel nice feelings.

MGMT were part of a very real new musical movement towards an alt-rock/synth-pop fusion that began to infiltrate the mainstream. Released in the same year as Arcade Fire's Neon Bible, Yeasayer's debut Wait for the Summer and Klaxons Myths of the Near Future, Oracular Spectacular combines an abstract, euphoric sense of nostalgia for things that hadn't necessarily happened with very real thoughts and feelings about being young, being human, and, basically, the existence of spacetime. You didn't have to be into music to be stimulated or moved by it – it was still pop, but this time it had a soul.

The Skins phase wasn't the sort of Skins phase that one might now diagnose any teenager with, when they get a bit squiffy on Echo Falls before the sixth form party. This was the actual Skins era, with the first series released that same year, and your whole school feeling like they had something to relate to and/or be jealous of. There was no contouring, or glittery French plait cornrows rebranded as "boxer braids" because a Kardashian Columbused them, or Instagram filters – just some cans in the park, bongs made from two-litre Coke bottles, and the regrettable prevalence of leggings. Or maybe just your GCSE revision cards and an overpowering awareness of time passing.

Either way, "Kids" was a cultural anthem that made you feel like you were in Bristol necking pingers with Chris even if you were sat on your parents' sofa doing homework. Its "duh duh duh duh duuh duh-duh duh, duh duuuuh, duuuuuuuuuuh" hook was shout-sung over the speakers at every party – a call to arms like none we'd heard before (well, since "Chelsea Dagger" a year earlier). It was delightfully immature, like a child in primary school indignantly prodding a miniature keyboard not quite in time to an exhausted teacher's djembe. With its incessant driving beat, repetitive and aggressive synth melody and banging riffs, "Kids" propelled us through adolescence and added a burst of rebellion to any given situation – the playground screams in the background mimicking our own turbulent emotions, the track itself a continuous shriek of both excitement and frustration.