My memories of being a 16-year-old are mired by the familiar tropes of adolescence: navigating the dynamic of secondary school cliques, complaining to my mum that she didn’t understand me and trying to find someone vaguely open to the idea of having sex. The latter, of course, was an unsuccessful project. Like most people though, the one consistency throughout those teen years was music – on my Walkman, then my iPod and discovered through mix CDs, dodgy P2P services and the pages of NME’s still band-breaking Radar section.

That was ten years ago, and back then music in the United Kingdom existed in a state of flux. The promise of grime had arrived and then sunburned itself into commercial submission on the decaying beaches of Ayia Napa; nu-rave had already started to fade away, dehydrated and coming down from its brief MDMA high; and the UK’s garage rock revolution gasped from somewhere beneath a mountain of landfill indie. But among the deterioration of these scenes, something new emerged: a rich and animated debut album from Oxford band Foals called Antidotes.

Combining methodically knotted melodies with amphetamine pace, the band presented a singular aesthetic – one halfway between the sound of the post-punk revival, the scent of a hot-boxed garden shed and, in their lightest moments, a transcendental tone tailored to fit 6AM comedowns and those last precious moments of euphoria. Americans didn't quite get Antidotes (Pitchfork gave the album a 5.9), but then again they didn't need to. The album coalesced with a specific moment in British culture – the Skins Generation – and allowed the band a stepping stone to the headline act they are today. Ten years later it’s a relic, yet also peerless and unique. So how exactly did they get there?

For a start, Foals' arrival was perfectly timed, coming just as there was a need for a group that bridged the cultural gap between guitar bands, punk and dance music. This meant they were celebrated by BTEC music students who could make mathematical sense of the odd time signature in a track like “Two Steps Twice”, but also that they became a soundtrack for soon-to-be hedonistic teenagers. The tales of the band touring house parties – outrageously reimagined during the ten-minute Skins: Secret Party episode, which was customarily crammed with seemingly free pills and booze and included a filmed performance of pre-album track “Hummer” – became legendary. It also helped that the beginnings of Foals journey were as DIY as you could get, easily placing them into the adventurousness of youth culture – as people like you and I.