It’s kind of funny to me that someone would need to introduce Neutral Milk Hotel to someone on the internet. “In The Aeroplane Over The Sea” is like the quintessential album for online-music nerds around 2010, probably most notably on pitchfork and on 4chans /mu/ board (pretty sure the album art is still their banner) (although now looking up the youtuber you mentioned, i guess you already know all of that).

It’s an absolutely wonderful album, can’t say I’ve listened to it a lot over the last few years, but one that I’ve returned to again and again, there’s just something so sweet and youthful about it, it’s existential but without a worry, serious and emotional, but still light-footed. The very simple chord progressions, unique instrumentation and somewhat experimental stylings really work wonderfully together.

There are very few lines of lyrics I find more poignant than the end of the title track:

And when we meet on a cloud I’ll be laughing out loud I’ll be laughing with everyone I see Can’t believe how strange it is to be anything at all

If you are interested I can only recommend you read up on the history of the band and especially on the Elephant 6 collective the band spawned from and exploring the work of the other bands from the collective. There’s often times not a lot of overlap in terms of sound, but I feel it’s very enlightening to see where they came from, what their inspirations were and in how many different ways they manifested themselves (also I wish I was part of a cool art collective).