Discovering new music can be thrilling, but sometimes we just want to listen to songs we’ve heard a million times before. Like returning to a book you’ve already read, there’s something uniquely pleasurable about a classic throwback anthem – whether it’s the party banger that sums up your first year of university or the mopey acoustic track you played on repeat in your teenage bedroom (driving your parents and siblings mad in the process).

That’s the thinking behind a new feature on Spotify, which reckons it can pull together all the songs you loved back in the day into one personalised, automated playlist.

Dubbed Your Time Capsule, the feature uses Spotify’s algorithms to analyse the music you’re currently listening to. This data is then cross-referenced with your age and location, allowing Spotify to suggest songs it’s pretty damn sure you will have had on your cassette player/Walkman/iPod Nano as a teen.

As with any automated service that relies on algorithms, Your Time Capsule doesn’t get it right every single time. One Stylist staffer was delighted to see 2002 emo-pop anthem Swing, Swing by The All-American Rejects on her playlist, but said that she’d never even heard of Phil Collins’ Strangers Like Me (which turned out to be a song from the 1999 Tarzan soundtrack, a film she’s never seen).

People are obsessed with Spotify’s new nostalgic playlist feature