After the shows he played with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the band’s elfin guitarist Nick Zinner would walk into the middle of the stage and lift a camera to his face. In the raw vacuum that appears when a band has left the stage, the air still tinged with fuzzing reverb, a shutter click would go unheard and a crowd would be captured.

Some of these photographs, ones from 2002 to 2004, from Nottingham to Tokyo and all across the US, are collected in I Hope You Are All Happy Now, Zinner’s 2005 photography book. They work a little like Where’s Wally illustrations, in that to flick through them is to see slight variations on a similar scene: one of many faces, in different states of flush, in a dark space. But to linger is to find other things: the hairstyles of the moment (swept-across and bluntly cut fringes; pin badges and bare shoulders; plenty of eyeliner, heavily smudged); the growing familiarity with Zinner’s practice, an unscrupulous photographer aiming his lens between the legs of front woman Karen O. A double-page spread is dedicated to a shot taken in Manchester in 2004, where the crowd seem piled atop of one another to reach for Zinner’s camera.

It was around this time that I first saw the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, at Kentish Town forum. I wore a 1980s leotard that had belonged to my mum and painted a 2cm-thick line across my eyes in sky blue. At the end of the show, Zinner walked on stage and lift his camera, and I felt like he caught the whole thing.

Like a lot of awkward girls who grew up in the Noughties, I clung to Karen O (for Orzolek) and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs as if they were a life raft dragging me into a subculture from the bland frustration of my village adolescence. I cut my hair like she did: at a ragged angle, and then in a neat one-length bowl cut. When they invited fans to contribute art for cover of their third album, I sent something in. In a recent interview with The New Yorker, Orzolek said that she didn’t think of her audience as “consumers” of the band’s work, but “as sensitive people who need music to keep them going”. At 15, I would have identified deeply with that.

The group made many songs but one became their most famous, the one they would fold into the end of a set, knowing many people had come to hear it play. Maps, a shimmering, tender love song released in the maelstrom of the band’s ascent in 2003. They performed it during the MTV Movie Awards, a booking that feels bizarre now, but its origin story was grottier: Orzolek was in Zinner’s New York loft when she heard a drum machine tap out the patter that became a skeleton. She was in love, and missing her boyfriend - a musician on tour - and together she and Zinner wrote and recorded it on a four-track. Four years ago someone uploaded that original demo to YouTube. It sounds rough, but hardly different from the finished thing. “It’s one of the great mysteries of being alive for me,” Orzolek later said, “being able to write a song like “Maps.”

I wonder if they knew that they had made something that would take on thousands of other’s stories: the brokenhearted, the committed, the unrequited. That it would become woven into indie lore - I watched the White Stripes cover Maps in the dusk of Reading Festival in 2004 - and then pop history, when Beyoncé picked up the lyric and built it into Hold Up. I met the man I married at a 2005-themed party, which I’d gone to with a t-shirt in my handbag in case people had committed to the theme. It was one of my teenage favourites: white, with the lyrics to Maps scrawled across it in black. I didn’t wear it in the end, but the next morning I woke up and found it curled up in a ball, like an animal.

Last weekend, we stood in a barn in North Yorkshire and listened as that high, keening guitar note rang out. We had snuck up the stairs to a mezzanine above the dance floor, and I watched the groom spin his bride as Orzolek’s voice let out that first gasping “wait”. It’s not an easy song to dance to, Maps. The rhythms are complex, both slow and fast at the same time. But it is an irresistible singalong. I started to sing, quietly, then heard others doing the same: they don’t love you like I love you. The couple invited others to join them, and we watched as two became many, swirling and holding and touching one another, maybe thinking of the love stories they’d told themselves when this song was new, and we were all younger. Here was another love story. Here was another crowd; this time, like Zinner, I was looking on, and taking it in from a distance.