The First Time

I wasn't supposed to listen to it there.

The album had just dropped and I couldn't wait, not even long enough to get home. I was listening to it as a background sound, half-distracted, half-present. Not how you're supposed to hear something you've been waiting for. Not how I wanted to experience it. But I was too impatient. It was the first time I had ever listened to a new album this way, sharing something close to me with family.

I knew, even before pressing play, that first single I'd had on repeat two months prior was already telling me I was going to love what was coming. But I couldn't give it what it deserved.

Not there, not like that.

A few hours later, I put it on alone, headphones on and volume up. I listened to it and danced, through my dishes, my cleaning, my bedtime routine. Even in bed, ready to sleep, I was still blasting the album and trying to learn the lyrics. I couldn't stop listening. It made me happy in a way I'd never imagined an album could. I wanted to share it and I sent voice messages at midnight to my friends expressing how happy I was about hearing his music.

I was already thinking about the next morning. About pressing play again, from the beginning. That thought alone made me euphoric.

It was the first time a new album from a favourite artist had moved me so completely. And somewhere in the middle of all that dancing, I started wondering why and how, and what happens.

What I didn't know at the time was that it was a constructed anticipation. Not mine. A first single. Then silence. Then a tracklist, just titles, no music. A cover, a world tour for the album without revealing it. A release date circled on a calendar. It's a sequence. Designed to create exactly what I felt.

Which raises a question I'm still sitting with: does understanding the mechanism make the feeling less real? It doesn't. The joy was real and worth it.

So I went looking. Just to understand what it was, not to prove it wrong.

Anticipating music activates the same reward circuit in the brain as basic needs. Chocolate. Cocaine. Amphetamines.

The pleasure of listening is warm, immediate. It arrives and then it ends. The anticipation is different, it's restless. You want something you don't have yet. It almost aches.

Anticipation and listening are not the same thing in the brain either. The brain releases dopamine in two distinct waves when we listen to music we love. The first wave happens during the anticipation of an emotionally intense passage, the second one when it arrives. Two separate anatomical pathways. Two separate floods of dopamine.

So I wasn't just excited. My brain was chemically rewarding me for wanting something I didn't have yet.

But the anticipation didn't end when the album started. It just changed scale. Every time a new track began, there was that split second of not knowing. A familiar voice, a universe I already loved, but this song, I had never heard it. That tension between the known and the unknown is where the brain is buzzing.

I was impatient through the whole thing. Not because I wasn't enjoying it. Because I wanted more of it before it was gone.

There's something else at play here. It wasn't just any album. It was this artist. His album.

I've been listening to him for about five years. And suddenly I couldn't stop. I went deeper and deeper, and at some point he became my favourite artist. The one with no skips. The one I've listened to on repeat for months. The one whose voice I could recognise from the first few seconds. The one I knew, before a single note of this album played, that I was going to love.

That certainty is not just emotional. It's neurological. When you've spent years with an artist, your brain doesn't just enjoy the music. It learns. The intensity of this response is not the same for everyone. I've always known I was somewhere on the higher end of that. Wired differently, just more loudly.

Which is also why the disappointment can be so devastating when it doesn't deliver. When a predicted reward doesn't arrive, dopamine doesn't just stay flat. It drops.

The bigger the expectation, the bigger the fall.

This is why fans react so strongly when a favourite artist changes direction. It's a brain that built a very precise prediction, based on years of listening, years of feeling, and memories, and they received something it didn't anticipate. The disappointment is chemical, the emotion is real. The intensity of the joy and the intensity of the disappointment come from the same place.

There's a moment when the happiness becomes too big to keep to yourself.

The dancing was mine. Personal and private, alone in my room, moving to music no one else could hear. That was my own way of holding it, enjoying it, discovering it. But at some point even that wasn't enough. I needed to tell someone, close friends and family. Not because I wanted them to feel the same thing. I knew they wouldn't. Most of them won't ever listen to the full album. Some of them had no idea the album had even dropped that day. And that's okay.

That's what sharing happiness is, I think. It's not about validation. It's not about converting anyone.

Sharing a positive experience with someone you love doesn't just feel good. It reactivates the experience neurologically. You don't just remember the joy. You relive it. You get hit by another wave of dopamine, triggered by the act of telling someone.

The dopamine hit didn't stop when the album ended. The dancing and the voice notes at midnight kept going, and it started all over again the day after. My brain was looking for new ways to feel it or extend it. Just a few minutes longer.

I didn't know any of this that night. I still know that the joy I felt that night was real. And I still feel it. I was just dancing. I still dance to it. All of it was genuine.

And I think when you understand why something moves you, it doesn't move you less. It moves you differently.

P.S. The album is Kiss all the time, Disco occasionally by Harry Styles. The one that made me understand what this publication was for.