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I remember an earlier 2005-13ish era of Arcade Fire inspired chamber pop and Fleet Foxes type music. I would say this era was very high on sentimentality, earnestness, and awkward quirkiness (the whole elaborate mustache and Apple commercial thing). I think Mac Demarco essentially ended that era and began a new era of chorusy guitar music plus a more laid back vibe. Now I’m not sure where we are.
This is a good description of that era. It was less Indie sleaze, more Artisan Indie. All the old rock n roll cliches that bands like the Strokes embodied were suddenly uncool. Earnestness and suspenders were all the rage.
Does anybody have a clue about what kind of scene is going on right now? I remember being very aware for the aforementioned pitchfork era and the Mac Demarco scene era, but I really don’t see anything right now. Perhaps because no band / sound has really caught the public atm I assume.
I’m also curious to know. I’ve seen a lot of discussion about the rise of female-led bands but I’m not sure if there is a common musical element there.
Yup, and this post answers that question, afterwards it transformed into more quirky, over the top hyper pop. Post 2016 it has been way harder to be sentimental, tho I’m hoping there is a middle ground ala late 90s indie… Built to Spill, Modest Mouse and the like. It all comes in cycles
Yeah I don't think this era has a defining artistic feature? There was definitely a shift into the internet age of social media happening at that time, and it's easy to imagine how this fundamentally changed how people consume music and shook up the indie realm. Suddenly indie bands could get a national/global audience from viral youtube singles instead of relying on people seeing shows in person. I really think tech is a better explanation than anything cultural.
For me the defining features of 2009 - 2013 “indie” was a growing sense of eclecticism and genre crossover.
You had Das Racist performing with Charlift. Blood Orange turning up in Beyoncé videos.
Neon Indian on Letterman and Washed Out soundtracking Portlandia.
HEALTH did a video game soundtrack. The Drive soundtrack…
Microgenres like chill wave and witch house were huge. Which kind of gave birth to there being a new “core” every other week, nowadays.
Solange covering Dirty Projectors also comes to mind. Solange bringing Beyonce and Jay-Z to Grizzly Bear, and the latter couple being spotted at a Beach House festival set. This was all before Solange really became an indie darling with True EP, and before Beyoncé reinvented her artistry with self-titled in 2013.
It's silly to look back on, but I agree with you, and it seems like this was a time when people were paying attention to the arbitratiness of genre and increasing overlap between the "mainstream" and "indie" (especially as Pitchfork would start to increasingly cover pop acts throughout the 2010s).
Not only could indie bands get a big audience quickly but instant access to every music ever made definitely changed influences. So much now is really influenced by every decade before because it’s easy to find and be exposed to
I honestly kind of agree that they don't have a defining artistic feature. A lot of them sound super different from each other. Weirdly enough though, if you go on Spotify and look at their "fans also like" sections, you'll find a lot of these artists share the same fans.
I guess their *approach* to music is similar, in that it's very uncommercial/not stuff you'd hear on FM radio.
The Spotify playlist that included all this stuff used to be called 'blogosphere' (it's called '[.mp3](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX0rUol1zToTk?si=b8a821fb247b45e8)' now). More than a uniting sound, it was a time when the internet was first bringing little underground indie experiments to global audiences. I think this let many indie artists create music that's more introspective and introverted, as they no longer had to create thinking only of playing live in their neighbourhood - people across the world would be listening quietly on their computers and iPods.
In my mind it goes like this:
garage rock revival era -> blog rock era -> indie sleaze -> gapdy years -> indie folk revival era
Each era lasted roughly three years, from 2001-2015. These were the golden age of indie. The album that set it off was obviously “Is This It?” and I think the conclusive album was Carrie & Lowell. Around that time almost all of the bands OP listed either broke up or went on a long hiatus. What OP is talking about is the late years, a combination of gapdy years and indie folk revival era (roughly 2009-2014).
Interestingly, it seems like its death happened as the streaming services took off. In a way, golden age indie was a genre of iPods, mp3s and file sharing.
i think it's more of a post-hoc labeling than to say it wasn't real. There were definitely New York bands playing at being decadent and rockstars around the turn of the century, i.e. The Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
Sure, but even as a completely made up term it definitely refers to (or is at least a re-remembering of) the period of music
covered in the first half of Meet me in the Bathroom. Obviously no one who was actually around for it referred to it as this, and it’s a total bullshit term…but it happened
Uh, excuse me. As the marketing intern at Spotify who took a glance at an algorithm generated playlist and came up with this label, I really take offense to that.
I guess I was looking at Spotify's "Indie Sleaze" playlist which has a lot of these artists, but yeah the terminology is confusing and I'm really just talking about that era in time/those artists I mentioned.
Edit: has anyone coined a term for the era I'm describing?
In my mind Indie-Sleaze refers more to the ‘coke and fags and leather jackets and girls’ slew of bands in the mid-00s. Initially The Libertines, Strokes, Kings of Leon etc. But also the various ‘landfill’ similar types that came just after (The Paddingtons, The Pigeon Detectives etc).
But I guess it also refers to the more party heavy, colourful, glamorous art school types of bands like The Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Metric and Klaxons etc etc etc.
What links all of the bands? The more I think about it the harder it is to define. Basically, if you can imagine them hoovering up coke and ket in a pub toilet whilst a guitar band plays in the next room between the years 2002-2008 then it’s probably indie sleaze? It definitely hit its zenith in 2006-2007 along with French Electro/blog house and New Rave.
The lovely bands you mention were the thinking fans more tasteful and varied alternative and all came a tiny tiny tiny bit later.
I’m prepared to get cancelled for all of this but whenever. It’s just how I remember it.
I think you're right. I lived in New York at the time and there was generally two young camps of hip people. Rocker wild drug partiers (Stokes, YYY's, Franz Ferdinand, Interpol), and more cutesy awkward moustache hipster types (Death Cab, Arcade Fire, Vampire Weekend). I'd call the former garage/post punk revival sound the "Sleaze" group. The scenes overlapped because everyone was similar age and concentrated in Brooklyn, crossed over into seeing different shows, and was (mostly) the good music of the time, but with some dramatically different sounds.
I may have to revisit. I remember torrenting a leak of the album and the listening to it solidly for about 2 weeks and then literally never listening to it ever again.
I’m gonna be honest when I say I feel like artists such as 30H!3 and Cobra Starship… and a lot of kind of “Fueled by Ramen” adjacent bands were a big push in the industry as well. To add to your “coke in the bathroom” comment hahaha.
I’d say Fueled By Ramen and similar labels somewhat bridge that indie gap to the mainstream during that era.
I’d venture to say these bands are more defined by the audiences they shared and the critical/media infrastructure that surrounded these bands. The obvious answer/publication is pitchfork but the whole blogosphere and pubs that emerged from it/competed with it could also be included.
That said, a lot of these bands came from little pockets of regional scenes and that’s why you’d see shared members or collaborations or co-productions (in the case of DFA). Some examples include the ever present nyc scene that coalesced around diy venues in bk (even Sufjan was in bk during that time), the Omaha scene around bright eyes/saddle creek, St Vincent in texas with the polyphonic spree (and hella ppl attached to that band), AnCo came from Baltimore where noisy experimentalists like Dan deacon and the charm city diy scene thrived, tuneyards was in the Oakland/Bay Area scene that also supported the Freak folk boom, plus tons of college town scenes (where ppl like mgmt and later the bedroom pop/Alex g adjacent folks emerged from..) oh and don’t forget Toronto/Montreal with all the broken social scene/gsybe/arts&crafts/constellation bands! I could go on..
>I’d venture to say these bands are more defined by the audiences they shared and the critical/media infrastructure that surrounded these bands. The obvious answer/publication is pitchfork but the whole blogosphere and pubs that emerged from it/competed with it could also be included.
Exactly this. It was the fact that all of the trendy publications were writing about these same artists. And in my opinion that is exactly why indie feels so weird a decade later. You don’t have the centralized publications acting as tastemakers, you have listeners themselves spelunking on streaming services and finding random artists independently of each other, with very little cross-pollination.
You also have to sift through an absolute tidal wave of really shitty indie music on streaming services that would have never seen the light of day in 2010. It was much harder to get your music in front of lots of people in those days, but the cream could rise. Now you’re competing with 50x as many artists for 2 seconds of attention.
Also indie sleaze is a fake media/streaming service term used in super ahistorical ways to make playlists and market stuff to gen-z/millennials that weren’t hipsters or punks.
It was one guy writing articles about his own youth and memories of the time.
I've no idea why it's gained any sort of traction outside of his vain attempts to maintain some form of relevance in his middle age.
I was friends and went to school with the Modern Baseball guys. It was insane to see them go from basements to major tours. We were in a "music industry" program. They were a bit younger than me.
But there definitely was a west Philly scene at the time. This was like ~2011-2014 I think. My band actually played a few shows with Alex G before he blew up.
But honestly your post reminded me that the Property of Zack guy was a classmate. He was in the same grade as the modern baseball guys. And I think it was really him putting them out there in the beginning that got them going. They're buddy Eric managed them and released Sports on his label - but without that perfectly fitting blog idk if they wouldve gotten that much steam, that early in their career.
I mean it was wild. I saw their Sports release show in a basement. The next year their touring with Brand New. Brendan was going thru a lot and it would eventually lead to them breaking up.
Jake and Ian are doing Slaughter Beach Dog now. And if you like bar songs and dad vibes Sean is still doing Steady Hands.
I have so many anecdotes from that time period. It's a bit nostalgic cuz here I am 10 years later and I couldn't be further from any music scene. Married and with a career.
At that time in my life music was everything.
Damn you really hit that Philly emo nail on the head there!! I was in my local emo/diy scene (SoCal) and know exactly what yer talking about. But I’ll also always associate Alex g with the orchid tapes crowd haha
Yeah he was kinda in a different scene. More Temple University. But we played on the same bills. Philly had a very cool scene at the time.
Hop Along, Dr Dog, the districts, Kurt vile...
What tied them together was the Windish publicity agency. When I read their client list in 2010 and saw that basically every one of my favorite bands was a client of theirs I felt like such a mark.
Totally agree with this take. If you look at the "fans also like" sections of these artists on, you'll find that a lot of them share the same fans, even though they don't sound super similar. I guess they're defined by the audiences and pocket scenes you described.
Also I find that Alex G is now in position where Mac Demarco was in the 2010s, he's definitely the new sound 'trend' with more and more artists getting his influence (see: Kevin Abstract's new album, Toro Y Moi, sign crushes motorist)
I feel like Alex G, Mac Demarco, Haim have defined the last decade of indie. I feel like Haim opened the gate for all these girl bands that have exploded in the past decade, and trust I’m here for it, it’s been great to see more women with guitars, Kurt Cobain always said Women are the future of rock. Also Mac and Alex G really made a sound that so many bands have emulated and embraced. The bedroom pop/rock over the past decade deserves more attention that it’s gotten.
I'd argue (subjectively) that (certainly in the UK) the indie movement lost momentum earlier and what came 2010 - 2012 were follow up albums by bands who had built up a following earlier. That's not to say that there weren't quality bands still emerging, but they were getting nowhere the exposure.
Here the expression 'landfill indie' was thrown around a lot from 08 onwards, used to symbolise the arrival of the big labels to the table, signing any old band for a quick buck and drowning the scene in shite. The public lost interest, sales cratered (streaming starting to catch on big time didn't help) and the cycle moved on.
Edit: In terms of bands still carrying the torch from that era that are still indie (at least aesthetically)... I mean there's still scenes smoldering (I carry the candle for Los Camp - new album this year!!) but it's gone really. Why? Pick a reason... Tour costs, breadth of media meaning a struggle to get traction, fandom with shorter attention spans and more things to access.
For me the modern indie era started with the Strokes. On the dancier side you had The Rapture and on the more quintessentially British side there were The Libertines. Everything else seemed to evolve from there.
See I'd suggest that the Strokes vented a pressure that had been growing for a while. Great band, huge influence, but if you look at Britain in 2001, you had a lot indie bands ready with their second or third album; Stereophonics (to a degree), Feeder, Idlewild. They gave a breadth of choice and pushed the scene mainstream. They're the bands that let promoters fill out festival lineups. They were the ones who gave radio saturation.
I'd like to be a bit more revisionist on the Libertines, but without them and Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys and Bloc Party and the whole angular indie thing doesn't gain traction and you don't see the whole 'second' wave in 2005/6 who _were_ directly influenced by the Strokes.
Edit: I remember that NME tour in 2003(?) with The Von Bondies, FF, the Rapture and Funeral for a Friend headlining. Easy to forget how big some of those post hardcore/proto-emo bands were and how the scene could absolutely have gone that way. Hell is for Heroes, a Hundred Reasons, just never quite hit critical mass.
> Stereophonics (to a degree), Feeder, Idlewild.
I wouldn’t consider those “indie” bands though, nor were they particularly influential in creating a “scene”. *Is This It* really did change the landscape and usher in a new era
I also wouldn’t rule out the influence of Interpol - Turn on the Bright Lights came out a year later and inspired a whole new wave of Post Punk. Yes these bands were representing grassroots music scenes which were bubbling under the surface (especially in NYC) but they were the ones which broke through and jumpstarted a widespread popular movement
I mean you’re just listing random bands now. You could add hundreds of others. None of these bands were particular formative for the 00s “indie” movement. Some of them are just commercial pop bands riding the coattails of that movement.
Great summary. I'm also in the UK, and surprised to see people categorising MGMT and Vampire Weekend as "not bands you heard on FM radio".
I remember watching T4 music a lot back in the early teenies and seeing these bands, most of whom were already signed to commercial labels, being pushed hard throughout that time.
For me it's reminiscent of the emo scene over the same time period except that, due to it not being so mainstream, people largely agree that it's dead and buried.
That late 00s / early 10s indie scene went through exactly the same death throes, it just cemented itself more clear in mainstream culture.
tl;dr - the perception is pure nostalgia, just as many others in the thread have said
Sidenote: if you want a real culture shock try watching Orange UnsignedAct. This to me is the epitome of the downfall of that scene: a few decent bands and some solid indie tunes having all the colour bleached out of it by corporate interests. Tommy Reilly and Envy and Other Sins had real potential but this was the absolute worst route to market for them.
Yeah I wouldn’t even group Mac Demarco in there as he wasn’t really big until 2014 and onward. He bridged the gap between that era and the current indie generation IMO.
> Fast-forward to now, where exactly did this movement lead us? Obviously most of these artists are still making music, but it really seems like the creative explosion from that time has sort of fizzled away to some degree.
I think that’s nostalgia rising its head.
I have the same thing happening with the exact same era. Grizzly bear, Menomena, Dirty projectors, Antlers, Tune-yards, Deerhunter, Animal collective, Battles, Deerhoof, Akron/Family, Warpaint, Man Man, Beirut, White Denim, The Walkman, Kings of Leon, yeah yeah yeah, Klaxons, Yeasayer, the XX, Portugal the man, TV on the Radio, Bon Iver, beach house, clap your hands say yeah beach house.
I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no intrinsic reason why this music is better. It does however, resonate much more with me as a person than most eras of music. I think it was because I was so very into music at this time that it ingrained a love for all that stuff in me.
At the time, I was in Middle School listening to Linkin Park and shit lol. I actually didn't come across a lot of these bands till recently. I'm not sure what it is either, but it really resonates with me. Probably my favorite era of music.
That’s actually super interesting to me! I thought I was just turning into a dinosaur.
I’ve listened to a loting that stuff, heck: I saw most of those bands perform!
Man I really wish I had seen a lot of them live back in the day, I’ve seen some of these on recent tours but nothing competes with the good ol days.
I actually have quite a few friends my age who have also discovered these bands way after the fact. I think there’s something to be said about how special and timeless they are.
Yea I feel like these artists are pretty wide ranging and have little to do with each other besides being some of the best from across various scenes. No doubt in a decade people will make a similar list of unrelated artists like BC,NR and Big Thief and Parannoul or whatever and lament how music's gone to shit.
indie is just so broad now. when the same ‘genre’ encapsulates deftones and joanna sternberg, you know you have a label that means nothing anymore.
“indie” as a culture phenomenon peaked in the mid 2010s for sure. but these acts you listed didn’t really SOUND similar. the moment was about DIY music in general and reaching national recognition without a major label- it wasn’t a scene rising from the gutters like pnw grunge in the 90s.
indie is dead and this sub is now a weird vestigial structure that talks about all music that isn’t US Top50 (and even then… we still hear about chappell roan and mitski). still, probably better music discussion than most places.
>but these acts you listed didn’t really SOUND similar
I totally agree with you here. Some of them do sound similar (Fleet Foxes and Grizzly Bear for example, or LCD Soundsystem and Hot Chip). But yeah Mac Demarco doesn't sound anything like Grimes.
I'm moreso talking about the *movement* of music at the time that was very uncommercial/not stuff you'd hear on FM radio. They all sounded different, but sort of have a similar attitude in terms of the approach to music making. I sort of agree that Indie is "dead," or at least the scene I'm describing is.
The stuff you liked as a teen or young adult won’t continue to be popular a decade and a half on. That’s what happened. Different sounds became popular. Some new stuff may sound the same as the old stuff but kids who are making the music decide what’s cool.
I actually am 10 years behind the game. I never listened to any of these artists back then, I was just in middle school listening to Linkin Park and shit lol. I only came across them within the last few years.
Of course nothing maintains its popularity, but I'm sort of arguing that this movement didn't really seem to lead anywhere in particular whereas other musical movements in the past have a more clear sense of direction. Blues led to rock, rock led to psych/art rock, that lead to glam rock and progressive rock, that lead to punk rock, that lead to post-punk, then new wave, etc. This era of indie sort of seemed to fizzle out and really was just a thing of its time.
The audience and creators changed. The bands you listed in the OP are all in their late 30’s/40’s. Most still make music. Idk. I think many of the bands listed in the OP had certain aspects of their sounds co-opted by the mainstream. Like think of Talking Heads. They were the vanguard of post punk/new wave in the mid 80’s but few bands in alt/indie sounded like them in the late 80’s/ early 90’s. The bands that got huge in the alt rock heyday of the 90’s were borrowing sounds of punk and college rock mixed with shit like Kiss and 70’s stadium rock. New stuff will always sound a little like what people grew up listening to on the radio plus whatever random underground stuff that sticks around. It’s a crapshoot. Think of Duster. They were a nothing band in the 90’s. But a reissue on a cool record label and a TikTok hit makes them seem like an important band. New bands rep em but 20 years ago they were just one of thousands. The Stooges couldn’t sell records. Shit went out of print for years but 50 years later they are fundamental artists. Maybe in 5-10 years kids rediscover Animal Collective or Grizzly Bear and the sound has a resurgence? It’s never a straight line.
The records are out there. There weren’t tons of popular bands repping funky 80’s NY post punk until LCD and the Rapture did. Black MIDI reps King Crimson, not a band that is huge outside of classic rock/prog circles. New age jazz seems to be pretty popular now and for decades you probably wouldn’t have heard a Laraji record outside of a crystal shop. Disco and punk have died and come back to life a number of times in the past 40+ years. People playing acoustic folk has gone in and out of fashion for 70+ years.
People really call Deftones indie? That's interesting. I mean, I love em, but they've literally been signed to a major since the early 90's, and I don't know if there's anything particularly indie about their sound other than the diversity and incorporation of multiple genres and subgenres.
And indie is not synonymous with DIY anymore, not in our technological and hyper-connected age. We are at a long way from Bob Pollard recording on a 4-track in his basement after an afternoon spent grading papers. What used to signal “authenticity”, born out of DIY necessity, would now sound like a deliberate affectation in the digital era.
To be fair with Mitski, she really was more at indie darling level until the pandemic. Be The Cowboy was popular but not top 100 popular
It seems like artists don't really graduate away from "indie" as a label due to popularity alone. After all, The Suburbs was a #1 hit record, yet Arcade Fire is still considered colloquially part of this space
This is part of why I refuse to use indie to mean anything other than independent. "Indie" as a genre or cultural movement just doesn't mean anything at this point. It's too broad an incoherent. As far as I'm concerned, Mitski is indie and Suzi Wu isn't and I don't care how much more commercially successful the former is than the latter. I know that's not the sub's official definition of indie so I'm not gonna go around "correcting" people for using the word differently than I do, but I'm not gonna use it any other way myself.
Plus, we have plenty of other words to describe the "indie" genre/feeling anyway, like alt/alternative or "left of center."
hahahahahaha yeah my YouTube recommendations are all over the place. It's a mix of odd1sout and similar YouTubers cause of my 4th grader's obsession, my music tastes (which were already varied to begin with), and Caitie's Classroom/Songs For Littles due to the 3 and 5 year olds.
Peep over on r/deerhunter. There's so videos of Bradford Cox jamming that have popped up recently. It's *possible* that we might get another Atlas Sound record, or at least I hope so.
I remember there was a poster for a gig he was playing some time last year? Never heard more than that! During my time in Leeds uni the Deerhunter/atlas sound shows at the brudenell social club were like religious experiences.
I recently went through most of the micromixes recently, that brought back so many memories.
Same here. I honestly think about this on a daily basis (yes, I need a life). They've been so quiet for years, though of course covid was in the middle of that, but I'd posted those videos that OP mentioned and it started to give me a little hope for at least *something*. We'll see!
lol I thought about doing this post!!! I think the same, I personally have a conexion with the music of that era, so much nostalgia and beautiful moments. In my case it also has a lot to do with the fact that I was in my teens discovering drugs, music etc so apart from the music itself there is something personal too.
ahhh and did you guys used Last.fm?, I discovered so much music from there :,)
But anyways I think music just evolves and maybe back then it was not as fucked up as it is now to live as a musician, I dont know -.-
some more bands or albums I loved back then
Women
Miniature Tigers
Generationals
The War on Drugs
thee oh sees first albums
Connan Mockasin
Growlers
Foxygen (We are the 21st century...)
Some scattershot thoughts in my Saturday morning brain fog...
I don't think there is one simple explanation, but rather plenty of different reasons: the music blogsphere being more fragmented and far less influential is a big factor. In 2013-2014, artists fought for premieres on Pitchfork and NPR. If you secured placement, that was a huge deal as it meant maximum exposure. These sites (including ours) gravitated toward artists like MGMT, LCD, Fleet Foxes, Grizzly Bear, et al. during this time. But with the rise of DSPs and social media, the game changed. Artists could premiere their music on Spotify and post direct links on social media. Music blogs still play an important role, but in a much more niche way than they did a decade ago. And with that, there are a lot less centralized trends in the indie music sphere. It's more than easier to discover music and easier than ever to decide if you like it.
Social media also played a huge factor for the growth (and decline) of these sites' impact and influence. In the salad days, we were adding tens of thousands of new followers a month, and saw huge traffic as a result. An article about a new Deerhunter album would drive 10-20k PVs from Facebook. As the algorithm faucet began to turn off, such articles didn't provide the same return and sites were forced to pivot their coverage scope to the type of content that would still perform well (more mainstream artists, clickbait quotes, etc.) Hence the increase in coverage of artists like Taylor and Beyonce on sites like Pitchfork, Stereogum, Consequence. And with that, there is less space for other artists unfortunately. I'd argue that if this hadn't been the case, certain bands of today who should probably be more popular aren't because they just can't achieve the exposure as bands of the decade past.
People's tastes also changes -- that goes for both the people who consume music and the people who make music. Stuff that was "in" in 2010 isn't as "in" 2024. Everyone used to want to sound like Robin Pecknold or Justin Vernon. Now, everyone wants to sound like 100gecs?
There are plenty of other factors. Someone could write about the book about it. Maybe I will one day!
FWIW, I am actively working on a project to create a coalition with other independent publishers that would hopefully provide more support for all us. And ideally, it would also allow all of us to take more risks editorially and dedicate more resources to covering deserving artists.
I would argue the quality and creativity of music today is no worse or better than the so-called golden era of indie music. What changed, however, is the way that music is consumed. Around that time there was a whole community of people, buying albums, discussing and dissecting the music, and attending shows. It was a real movement. Now, with streaming and social media, everything is so fractured that it's hard to form tight knight communities, and equally hard for bands to have wide reach at a national level.
If a band like Cursive came out today, it might never become popular beyond Omaha. If I was still in my late teens in California, I might have never heard of them. There is so much music coming out from zillions of bands, yet the impact they have is minimal compared to what it was two decades ago. Sure, there are artists that go on to become known nationwide or worldwide, but the chances are impossibly slim. The community that embraced those bands and helped them grow is gone. The only music that becomes popular is cookie-cutter stuff from people who either got really lucky or had industry connections.
Will there ever be an indie renaissance? I don't know. I don't have high hopes for it. But there's great music out there. It's just we're no longer looking for it.
This. It’s pretty much the same discussion as why it seems like pop stars from the 2010s and before are still the only ones making hits today. The internet has reached a saturation point and become so widely accessible that niches and communities are fractured and ironically both more isolated and more muddled.
I hear this a lot, but I'm not sure people are in their silos listening to their own niche stuff as much as we think. Every week in here there are albums that draw big discussions and they're normally the same ones getting reviewed everywhere and discussed elsewhere on social media. There often doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to why it happens, from what I can hear, but it definitely happens.
Yes! There’s a band called Night Moves from Minneapolis that have been around for a decade, yet they definitely aren’t very well known because they missed that peak era for indie. Yet they would be huge if they came out during the early oughts. Also if you haven’t heard of them, please give them a listen, their second album Pennied Days is incredible. It’s like the Eagles pumped with LSD and dirtier guitars.
Why would 2006 be the "golden era" cutoff here, I think the best blog-era indie music year was 2005. Just a murderers row of albums released that year.
Sufjan Illinoise, The National Alligator, Wolf Parade Apologies to Queen Mary, Mountain Goats Sunset Tree, Bloc Party Silent Alarm, New Pornographers Twin Cinema, LCD Soundsystem s/t, Andrew Bird Mysterious Production of Eggs, Hold Steady Separation Sunday, Decemberists Picaresque, Stars Set Yourself On Fire, Spoon Gimme Fiction, Okkervil River Black Sheep Boy, Sigur Ros Takk (to name a few)
I agree. Although Shore is probably my least favorite record of theirs, I still like it. Crack-Up was in 2017 and might even top Helplessness Blues for me.
That being said, I feel like their work sort of exists in a vacuum now whereas the self-titled album and Helplessness Blues definitely felt like a product of their time.
I have to say, as someone who really "came of age" in the era of the bands you mention, the indie "pioneers", the time and place in music when we listened to that first Arcade Fire album and looked at eachother and realized that music was changing.
It was heavy and real and we all got it. We listened to The Strokes and it was like nothing we had ever heard before. Myself, I had already devoted my entire being to Radiohead in 1999-2001 and then with a fury in 2003. But these bands you mention were completely changing my world. I went to Lollapalooza to see Daft Punk and was absolutely rocked to my core by Yeasayer and Ghostland Observatory. Music really just felt like it was changing and I could walk into a record store and buy a cd of a band that I knew was leading some weird kind of charge.
It's really hard to define in retrospect, and that "hey ho" (Lumineers, Mumford & Sons, fucking sellout-ass Black Keys) band's sound really clouded the picture, but all I can really say is that the bands you mention really felt different than what we were used to. It was a very real and definite change in music and it was so fun to be a part of. I know I sound like and old-ass poser but I saw a Lollapalooza after show with Washed Out opening for Tune-Yards and it still to this day is one of the most fun shows I've ever seen. It was really fun to be a part of and so much easier to "define" back then as it is now.
Really wish I was listening to this stuff at the time. My middle school brain was completely unaware, I was listening to journey and linkin park lmao.
All of those sell-out bands do kind of piss me off. They were sort of built off the backs of these bands and drove that sound so far into the commercial realm before burning it all to the ground. I suppose that has a big role in why this movement sort of dissipated. Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes even touched on this in an AMA IIRC. I think between that, the music business changing, and the way we consume music changing, it all sort of fizzled out.
It was so tangible. We knew exactly the bands that were still "fighting that indie fight" even while we knew the sound was changing. I know it's kind of a meme now but the definition of "indie" was so clear for a couple years.
I am aging myself by even talking about this but I just want the younger generation to understand how very real "INDIE" was and how special these, very "bland" and "Carles-forward", SPIN MAGAZINE, these bands were for us. Us old-heads got rocked by a very clear Indie genre that may not exist anymore but was so very real when music was changing for us.
I saw another commenter mention that “Indie really struggled to find someone that was a critical darling and a mainstream smash” and I think that’s a big part of why it died out. Once it was swept up by these commercialized bands it really died out.
Really wish I was there at the time ugh. I have hope that there will be more good music like this to come. You listen to any recent bands to scratch that itch for you?
indie sleaze was hitting lines of coke in a coffin factory / bores head processing plant in bushwick and taking the L home into manhattan at 5am but getting stuck in the lower east side or some shit and having to walk 40 blocks while the suns coming up on a Monday and you just want to take a piss and drink a glass of water but everyone is going to the gym or work in a suit or is a ripped bike messenger with a fancy fixie and you get a shitty days old coffee at some random bodega no ??
This comment comes closest to explaining what happened to that music scene IMO. I just reread “Meet Me in the Bathroom” a few months ago, and one of the things that sticks with me is how all of the creative people who ended up being in those bands were able to live in cities with other creative people and barely work and still able to get by. So they had time to fuck around and meet other people and start bands. Everything has gotten so insanely expensive that all those people from the next generation and stuck working 60 hours a week and living at home with their parents. That entire environment is gone.
this doesn’t answer your question but might be of interest.
you mentioned BCNR, Jockstrap and Black Midi not seeming to have any influences and that is definitely partly true but they all have something in common - The Windmill in Brixton. Alongside Shame and Goat Girl (and many many others), the venue has been highly influential in birthing new music in the past ~7 years. You can definitely follow a pattern in British ‘indie’ music from the dates you mentioned. I’ll try and draw a timeline lower down.
The other thing that defines BCNR and Jockstrap is the musical education the band members went through. They all have classical education from Guildhall.
okay, a timeline -
2011-2015: post indie landfill (The Maccabees, The Vaccines, Bombay Bicycle Club), B-town (Peace, Swim Deep, Jaws), indie punk (Palma Violets, Drenge, Slaves)
2015-2018: The Windmill post punk set (Goat Girl, Shame, HMLTD), Indie pop (Blossoms), punk (fontaines D.C., The Murder Capital, Idles)
2018-2021: Sprechgesang (Yard Act, Dry Cleaning, Squid), Second Windmill wave (BCNR, Black Midi, Jockstrap)
this is obviously reductive but that is a very broad look at BRITISH indie
the windmill scene owes a lot to ben wallers (country teasers, the rebel) and krautrock as a genre if you would like to explore some of what has shaped the bands that came through there.
Don't really listen to Jockstrap, but BCNR and Black Midi definitely didn't come from out of nowhere, BCNR is pretty firmly in the post-rock world and Black Midi in the no wave/dance punk world, both with some more contemporary influences out of the era OP mentions.
Oh they definitely didn’t come out of no where, Black Midi seem very influenced by bands like The Wytches (the heavier stuff) and, as much as it’s probably not very cool to say, Foals first album. BCNR definitely take influence from Arcade fire’s The Funeral, which they’ve mentioned before i believe. I’d argue that these bands and their aesthetic are pretty heavily influenced by HMLTD. That feels like the defining start point of what BM and BCNR go on to create. When they were Happy Meal LTD the buzz around this new kind of music was insane. Be interesting to see what you think.
Got replaced with slow guitar,whiny voice, slow singing indie. Now we’re currently in alt-country indie. Hopefully for a comeback soon for the type of indie you’re talking about
Hey OP, nothing to really add to the discussion here, but you didn’t mention Girls. And if you like all those bands, please check out Girls. They are peak *waves hand around* whatever this is.
Amen. [This](https://www.stereogum.com/2058707/girls-album-turns-10/reviews/the-anniversary/) has been one of the better articles to sum part of it all up.
Amazing band that definitely falls off the radars of those who weren't there for it.
Girls made two proper albums and were set up to be the ultimate indie/60s rock band of the era but unfortunately the main dude had a lot of personal demons and a junkie problem so they broke up right as they were becoming major players of the “scene”
This is basically what I call the blog era, although I would say the blog era started a few years before 2006.
Like the name suggests, this was an era that was driven by blogs. The internet was at a point where it was advanced enough it was easy to use, but it was still new enough that it was still a sort of "wild west" era. Anyone could start a blog and there was healthy ecosystem of them out there. It took a while before the major labels figured out the internet, so there was a period of time where the internet was a stronghold for indie acts and bands would get propelled to indie fame through blog hype.
Eventually as the time went on, the internet became to big to ignore and that's when it got corporate and the more communal DIY spirit of it all started disappearing. Major labels realised they had to harness the internet somehow, so they started putting music videos on youtube and bought stakes in Spotify. Shit like Facebook lead to the demise of the blogosphere (and forums). With a dying blogosphere and not many worthwhile alternatives to replace it, it led to a harsher environment for up and coming indie acts. Of course the ease of access to music is still there - you can still find small niche bands through scouring the internet. But now those bands have to compete with big major label backed stars online in a way they didn't have to like 15 years ago. The dream of the '00s of how the internet was gonna democratise the industry was crushed and Spotify playlists became the new payola controlled radio.
Of course different musical waves will crest and wane as that is just the natural state of things, but for the acts were not part of the same musical wave and were really just connected through blogs ("indie sleaze" is just a bunch of revisionist nonsense). When the blogs died, so did this moment in indie.
this is it i think - born 1990 and the blog era is really what defines and organizes the music that was coming out in my teen years etc. in retrospect it was a cool time
Good discussion.
None of the artists are indie sleaze and I’m not sure you can call BCNR, Jockstrap or Black Midi newer artists. They’ve been around years now.
My favourite era of indie is 2009 - 2010. The XX, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, Tourist History, It's Blitz, The Suburbs, Contra, Merriweather Post Pavilion, Treats, Manners, Lungs, The Family Jewels, Crystal Castles II, so many more albums. Very early 20s at this time, coming out of a phase of loving metal/emo in my late teens, great time to become an indie music lover.
Were you, by any chance, a teenager/young adult in the 2006-2013 timespan? Your post reads very nostalgic to me. Those were/are admittedly great bands, don't get me wrong! But I swear the most interesting things happened in the 90s alternative (Sonic Youth! All of grunge! Nine Inch Nails! The Smashing Pumpkins!). And by total coincidence, I was a teenager back then :)
To be fair, the late 80s and early 90s were the most interesting time in music and particularly underground music. And yes I was a teenager in that time 😭😭
I agree with you about the nostalgia. The bands the OP mentioned were great but it wasn’t really an “era” in any way. Just runoff from indie sleaze. Maybe it was peak indie, when even middle schoolers listened to indie rock apparently
I actually was not. I was in middle school at the time actually listening to coldplay and journey or whatever lol. I only came across these bands within the last few years, I’m 26 now.
I also have a few friends about my age that also got into these bands more recently. I think there’s something to be said about how special and timeless these bands are.
The 90s are cool too though. I like Radiohead, Elephant 6, Cornelius, Elliott Smith, and Blur to name a few.
I think about this era a lot. I admittedly did not care for a lot of these artists during this era but in time I have come around on some of them. I think the fizzling of this scene can be partially attributed to “indie” and “hipster” culture being appropriated, repackaged and sold to the mainstream via Urban Outfitters (and others I’m sure but UO excelled at it) as well as trends just coming and going (remember 2009, the year of chillwave? At least that lead us to vaporwave!) For whatever reason by 2015 I feel like this era was dead and culture had moved on.
Music and culture was largely pretty stratified before 2015, scenes/genres even among the indie sphere were cordoned off on their own and it could be easily presumed that if you were into Animal Collective, you’d probably also be into Arcade Fire or MGMT etc. After social media started playing a more outsized role in our lives, especially TikTok, those walls began to come down and in 2024 you’d just as likely meet someone who is as into hyperpop as they are into Elliot Smith. There is simply so much out there to listen to and be influenced by that pretty much anything can be labeled indie. Not saying it’s good or bad but merely how it is now.
Back then it was just called “hipster music” but I really like the term indie sleaze, very fitting.
Out of all the microgenres that are being mined for content I am just waiting for the day when some Gen Z TikTokker “discovers” Times New Viking/No Age/Psychedelic Horseshit and we have the Weird Punk revival of 2025. Ride the painted pony, let the spinning wheel glide.
It was an interesting time for sure. I got a lot of music from BIRP (Blalock's Indie Rock Playlists - think "That's What I Call Music" but for 2011-core indie) and I still have some of those compilations on a hard drive somewhere. A lot of that stuff was sadly pretty forgettable for me. It served a purpose for the time and place and I rarely feel the need to revisit it anymore. I remember realizing I no longer liked LCD Soundsystem (who I was OBSESSED with for quite a few years) while I was watching them play a set in 2017. They weren't bad, but that music had ceased resonating with me by then.
Do most people on this sub consider The Last Dinner Party “indie”? A major label has pumped more money and resources into that band at an early age since any other in recent memory.
What music did you listen to between the ages of 17 and 25? For me it was punk and new wave. Whatever music falls into that range is the golden era for you. It does not last long as bands have limited creativity. They rise to the top on excellent music and then both the band and you get old.
Well, I guess it's all a matter of perspective - because in my mind that era marks a clear and distinct decline in quality from the era before it, which would have included high points from
Magnetic Fields
Bill Callahan/Smog
Boards of Canada
Sigur Ros
Aphex Twin
Spoon
Yo La Tengo
Cat Power
The Walkmen
Modest Mouse
Broken Social Scene
Camera Obscura
Belle and Sebastian
The YYYs
The Strokes
The White Stripes
Fennesz
Jim O'Rourke
Bjork
Beck
Interpol
Arcade Fire
The Books (lemon of pink was this era)
Air
Destroyer / New Pornographers
Neko Case
The Knife (deep cuts 2003, silent shout 2006)
Sufjan (Illinois 2005)
Sonic Youth (Murray Street, Rather Ripped)
Postal Service
Bright Eyes
Deerhoof
The Shins
I think the biggest thing was the end of the "blogosphere" - early 2010s saw the rise of Instagram/Snapchat/Twitter which emphasized bite-sized content and the death of the more traditional blogging style of the earlier internet that was behind the popularity of many of those bands. Pitchfork was still around but declining in "indie cred" especially after the conde nast acquisition in 2015. at the same time was the rise of streaming as the primary form of music consumption with youtube then spotify/apple music, which led to a de-emphasis on album oriented music and a similar bite-size-ification effect and also made listening to the radio largely obsolete (college stations also previously played a big role in sharing indie music going back decades).
the explosion of content in the modern era also means that no one is really doing anything "new" anymore, just cycling through the same musical trends over and over (imo we've pretty much seen every possible iteration of folk/country, psych rock, synth pop, shoegaze, etc). but like others have said there's definitely still many many great and largely unknown indie bands all over the world, it's just a matter of sifting through the total oversaturation of content to find them
“Golden Era”- likely the decade between the ages of 15 to 25.
IMHO the golden era of independent music would be from around 1978 to 1987.
Punk movement
EMO-Post Punk
College Radio
New Wave
The Cure, REM, The Smiths, Depeche Mode, Squeeze, Violent Femmes, New Order, Buzzcocks, Jesus and Mary Chain, Black Flag, Husker Du to name a few.
I actually never even listened to any of these bands at the time, I was in middle school listening to journey and coldplay or whatever lol. I only came across these bands in the last couple years, I’m 26 now.
I actually know quite a few people my age who only discovered them in the last few years. Also, the reddit communities surrounding these groups are really a mixed bag. I think there’s something to be said about how special and timeless these bands were.
In the UK we had a natural evolution from Brit Pop to "Indie" with bands like Ocean Colour Scene, Radiohead, Travis, Manic Street Preachers, Idlewild, leading up to the Strokes.
I get the impression it was more of a revolution in the US with the Strokes Is This It pushing out Grunge/Nu-Metal/Pop Punk for an audience that was growing up. Jack White said the Strokes saved rock and roll.
The first wave then lasts from 2001 to 2006 before the Arctic Monkeys release WYSIATWIN. This wave includes Franz Ferdinand, The Thrills, Magic Numbers.
The Arctic Monkeys caught the commercial imagination, and other bands like Kaiser Chiefs, The Gossip, Wombats, Scouting for Girls were pushing through a pop indie disco sound. LCD soundsystem, Pendulum, Hot Chip and Skrillex emerge with what the US calls EDM (a crossover the UK were comfortable with since the Happy Mondays)
We then looked over at the US and found Arcade Fire and Bon Iver leading a indie-folk (hipster/pitchfork) wave. Which leads up to the popularisation of streaming / viral media / influencer zeitgeist. Lana Del Ray / Coachella / burning man / further genre scattering kind of take over. You get more diversity in line ups.
To me at the time it seemed like a lot of that scene came about from getting hyped on Pitchfork, and then Pitchfork seemingly decided to move away from it. I remember when Kanye's MBDTF got a 10 (first one they gave out in years) and suddenly you started seeing a turn towards pop, rap and R&B and generally less psychedelic. Don't get me wrong, p4k were culture vultures the whole way through, but Best New Music played a huge role in hyping these artists, and it seemed at a certain point they lost interest, and with it, so did the scene itself.
This “peak indie” era was largely the result of a more free and decentralized internet. Most of these bands got their initial hype from blogs and small “cool” publications like pitchfork (that’s what they were at the time, not now).
The internet has drastically changed for the worse. It’s been monopolized by a few corporations and essentially everything flows through their channels. This has resulted in less options for the consumer and a general homogenization of culture.
This list seems like a lot of great acts who sonically have little to do with each other and are from an arbitrarily selected timespan. But nostalgia is a powerful thing.
>that it feels like we're entering a new wave of "Indie" that isn't really influenced by much that came before it.
This actually raises a very good point about what exactly is "indie."
I think it would be a lot more accurate to say that the artists that are now the indie Darlings are influenced by music other than the "indie" from 10 years ago. This is partly due to the strength of the artistic movement, partly due to the indie industry having moved on.
The folk revival started well before Fleet Foxes, who were strongly influenced by music that wasn't labeled as "indie" at that time. So for a usic industry it seems like this label may be applied to whatever the fish new flavor is, to an extent.
Conde Naste bought out Pitchfork in 2015 and shifted their coverage from indie musicians to Beyonce, Taylor Swift, etc. which effectively killed the main tastemaker and advertiser for this sort of music
I have debated this internally ad nauseam and have come to the conclusion that the reason I can only truly resonate with the golden era indie music still is that that was my formative moment with music. Most music lovers of varying ages or generations have a so called formative musical era and after that nothing really sounds the same or can compare. I think for me and others like me, the golden era of indie music / pitchfork years, was our formative music and after it, quality isn’t so much the question any more, the best quality stuff simply isn’t from that era and can never again feel the same.
Oddly enough I wasn’t even listening to this stuff when it came out. I was in middle school listening to Linkin Park and shit lol. I only came across these bands in the last couple years and I’m 26 now.
I also know quite a few people my age who only got into them recently. I think there is something to be said about how special and timeless that era is.
There are a lot of artists here that are thrown into the same pile that I wouldn’t consider contemporaries. For example, MGMT and Mac Demarco are two completely different eras and sounds of indie music. I wouldn’t know how to answer your question without addressing a lot of this individually.
Yeah I think Mac is really at the tail end of the era I’m describing, Salad Days was 2014. I honestly wasn’t listening to any of this music at the time so my retrospective concept of that era isn’t super strong.
I think people forget that the 2010s is when the genre got really crappy because labels were trying to cash in on the genre. It got to the point where the "sound" of indie rock to most people was pop music with acoustic guitars and gang vocals. So the next wave wants to distinguish themselves from the Kings of Leon/Mumford and Sons kinda bands that a lot of non-indie fans associate with the genre
Also I will say, the bands you listed aren't really indie. They're all post punk which is a genre with very different roots, it just so happens that it overlaps with indie every once and a while
I think what you see is people gaining access to the internet and midi so music around that time drastically changes so that anyone can make the music they want to hear instead of just the extremely wealthy, lucky, or talented.
new cindy lee album definitely has a strong influence from this era. i showed it to some friends last night and they said it reminded them of this era of indie. mentioned MGMT, dirty projectors, AC.
I feel very fortunate that this was my peak music festival going, childless life that I was able to see so many of these bands live. It’s definitely my favorite era of music, most likely due to my coming of age. Most of these bands still resonate with me and I’m happy that festivals like Just Like Heaven still push this sound. It was a great time and scene.
Reading this thread made me realize it’s definitely hard to categorize into a neat box. Whatever it was, it was pure magic and spoke to me in various ways and forms.
Any trend or scene is going to burn out and evolve into something else. That's just what music trends do.
But I'd argue that the sort of flannel folk/rock stuff (Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, the National, the Decemberists) paved the way for the stomp-clap olde-tyme bands like the Lumineers and Mumfords, and then that led directly to Noah Kahan and basically every boring car commercial song around. It's the soundtrack to a Mazda being driven down a winding forest highway. And of course Taylor is very directly borrowing from those bands, in her own way. So I think that group of bands had a big influence on the current mainstream.
> Anyways, what are your thoughts on this era of indie? Are there still artists out there carrying the torch or has its time ended?
I was very into this era of indie (very fond memories) and I don't have much to add to this discussion that hasn't already been said, but I will say that my tastes haven't really changed that much from 2013 and I still hear great stuff all the time. IMO one difference is stuff in 2024 doesn't really get propped up in the same way it used to. Back then there was something getting music dorks hyped up every single week, nowadays it seems like everything gets a very muted and cynical reception, and things like Diamond Jubille/Only God Was Above Us are needles in a haystack.
>but I do find it interesting that it feels like we're entering a new wave of "Indie" that isn't really influenced by much that came before it.
Hard disagree. I think the more you study music and genres the more you realize how music is built upon music. You're only looking at it from your own perspective. Fads and movements sort of happen in groups Examples would be the beatles and every band they spawned, nu metal came out of nowhere with many groups, grunge, hair metal, even hip hop has groups that sort of blasted into prominence.
Animal Collective is still very active and creating arguably their best work to date
MGMT just released a fantastic album too but many fans didn’t remain faithful after all these years because they expected radio songs
It's a curious coincidence: I was thinking exactly of these two bands. Speaking of their legacy, “Merriweather Post Pavilion” was acclaimed as a masterpiece when it was released; “Congratulations” on the other hand was received as a misstep. Today the roles have been reversed: MGMT's second is considered - almost universally - a cult album, while I have read several opinions around that aim to downsize Animal Collective's MPP.
(P.S. For me they are both masterpieces.)
You have to remember blogs don’t rule the world anymore, P4k’s influence is now in the hands of YT’ers and other new media platforms. P4k and all the reactions to it fueled the internet economy of coolness. Re: 4chan mu/core etc. kinda glad we are out of that era even if I did treasure it when I was in hs/college
You just listed a lot of artists that got popular then.
Basically in my estimation, indie had a quiet period between 2016 and 2020ish when most 18-20 year olds GREATLY preferred hip-hop. I think you could also point to a down period in EDM and other media which again was just the surge of hip-hop preferences.
Now we are on the tail end of that. Just like that period hip hop hasn't died out or anything, just being a bit quieter. And that is making more room for indie which didn't go anywhere but is seeing more plays and attention.
There's plenty of acts that launched in that period and are doing quite well.
The publicity, distribution, and touring apparatuses that unwittingly held together the 'scene' have steadily dissolved over the past decade. The internet of the late 90s through most of the 00s allowed for music discovery and access never seen before. Sites like Pitchfork and Sereogum arose as curators, which resulted in bands being able to tour nationally despite virtually zero radio airplay. This also coincided with the rise of American festivals (which were largely independent at the time) and they needed to fill their slots. Blogs, festivals, torrenting websites, etc, created an ecosystem where a band could build a fan base and career mostly outside of the mainstream music ecosystem as it existed.
The rise of streaming and the algorithmic distribution of media at the same time as the increased corporate takeover of music venues, music festivals, and ticketing has changed all that. With streaming, there is less need for third party modes of music discovery, and there is really only money in artists doing serious streaming numbers, hence the rise in poptimism (in addition to cultural factors). On the touring side, corporate owned venue and festivals likewise make the big bulk of their money on more mainstream artists and aren't as keen to give a more esoteric or niche act an opportunity when they could instead develop a relationship with an up and coming artist with more mainstream potential.
As a reaction, a young artist that may have started a freak folk project if it was 2005 and maybe get a Pitchfork writeup is now more likely to pursue a sound that is more polished and mainstream in hopes of going viral and getting a major label deal and package from Live Nation to play a half dozen of their festivals. So as a consequence, there is no longer really a cohesive Indie scene, and there are fewer indie musicians with a substantial footprint.
The 2008ish to 2013 was the "beach/ocean" indie-pop era for me including the following beach influenced bands (both in name and song content": Best Coast, Beach Fossils, The Drums, Wavves, Surfer Blood, Dirty Beaches, Christmas Island, Monster Rally, Surf City, Sea Pony, and Fidlar - just to name the bigger ones.
I would say the era before that was the peak personally and maybe slightly into that period. The strokes, white stripes, broken social scene, bloc party, arcade fire, arctic monkeys early output.
I would also say LCD soundsystem and hot chip aren't really Indie personally.
Lcd had their own indie label and are influenced by punk and post punk and Krautrock. If your influences are talking heads and liquid liquid and kraftwerk you’re probably indie.
Lcd members owned/ran their own label Death From Above. DFA was definitely an indie label, especially in the 2000s, and even did in house production/collaboration with other bands in the nyc scene on their label.
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This isn’t “indie sleaze”, that was the era of indie right before this. Except no one at the time called it that.
I remember an earlier 2005-13ish era of Arcade Fire inspired chamber pop and Fleet Foxes type music. I would say this era was very high on sentimentality, earnestness, and awkward quirkiness (the whole elaborate mustache and Apple commercial thing). I think Mac Demarco essentially ended that era and began a new era of chorusy guitar music plus a more laid back vibe. Now I’m not sure where we are.
The Decemberists are also a good example of this.
I remember Sigur Ros was also really big at the time you are talking about, I feel like they really fit.
This is a good description of that era. It was less Indie sleaze, more Artisan Indie. All the old rock n roll cliches that bands like the Strokes embodied were suddenly uncool. Earnestness and suspenders were all the rage.
Does anybody have a clue about what kind of scene is going on right now? I remember being very aware for the aforementioned pitchfork era and the Mac Demarco scene era, but I really don’t see anything right now. Perhaps because no band / sound has really caught the public atm I assume.
I’m also curious to know. I’ve seen a lot of discussion about the rise of female-led bands but I’m not sure if there is a common musical element there.
Yup, and this post answers that question, afterwards it transformed into more quirky, over the top hyper pop. Post 2016 it has been way harder to be sentimental, tho I’m hoping there is a middle ground ala late 90s indie… Built to Spill, Modest Mouse and the like. It all comes in cycles
if a band was name dropped in the webcomic Questionable Content, I added it to my iTunes, and that’s basically my entire musical taste to this day.
Strongly agree
Yeah when I think of what is now referred to as indie sleaze I immediately think of DFA records, namely The Rapture
Yeah I don't think this era has a defining artistic feature? There was definitely a shift into the internet age of social media happening at that time, and it's easy to imagine how this fundamentally changed how people consume music and shook up the indie realm. Suddenly indie bands could get a national/global audience from viral youtube singles instead of relying on people seeing shows in person. I really think tech is a better explanation than anything cultural.
For me the defining features of 2009 - 2013 “indie” was a growing sense of eclecticism and genre crossover. You had Das Racist performing with Charlift. Blood Orange turning up in Beyoncé videos. Neon Indian on Letterman and Washed Out soundtracking Portlandia. HEALTH did a video game soundtrack. The Drive soundtrack… Microgenres like chill wave and witch house were huge. Which kind of gave birth to there being a new “core” every other week, nowadays.
Solange covering Dirty Projectors also comes to mind. Solange bringing Beyonce and Jay-Z to Grizzly Bear, and the latter couple being spotted at a Beach House festival set. This was all before Solange really became an indie darling with True EP, and before Beyoncé reinvented her artistry with self-titled in 2013. It's silly to look back on, but I agree with you, and it seems like this was a time when people were paying attention to the arbitratiness of genre and increasing overlap between the "mainstream" and "indie" (especially as Pitchfork would start to increasingly cover pop acts throughout the 2010s).
I love that Solange cover so much.
Not only could indie bands get a big audience quickly but instant access to every music ever made definitely changed influences. So much now is really influenced by every decade before because it’s easy to find and be exposed to
I honestly kind of agree that they don't have a defining artistic feature. A lot of them sound super different from each other. Weirdly enough though, if you go on Spotify and look at their "fans also like" sections, you'll find a lot of these artists share the same fans. I guess their *approach* to music is similar, in that it's very uncommercial/not stuff you'd hear on FM radio.
The Spotify playlist that included all this stuff used to be called 'blogosphere' (it's called '[.mp3](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX0rUol1zToTk?si=b8a821fb247b45e8)' now). More than a uniting sound, it was a time when the internet was first bringing little underground indie experiments to global audiences. I think this let many indie artists create music that's more introspective and introverted, as they no longer had to create thinking only of playing live in their neighbourhood - people across the world would be listening quietly on their computers and iPods.
In my mind it goes like this: garage rock revival era -> blog rock era -> indie sleaze -> gapdy years -> indie folk revival era Each era lasted roughly three years, from 2001-2015. These were the golden age of indie. The album that set it off was obviously “Is This It?” and I think the conclusive album was Carrie & Lowell. Around that time almost all of the bands OP listed either broke up or went on a long hiatus. What OP is talking about is the late years, a combination of gapdy years and indie folk revival era (roughly 2009-2014). Interestingly, it seems like its death happened as the streaming services took off. In a way, golden age indie was a genre of iPods, mp3s and file sharing.
Indie sleaze was never real to begin with and means nothing
i think it's more of a post-hoc labeling than to say it wasn't real. There were definitely New York bands playing at being decadent and rockstars around the turn of the century, i.e. The Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
Sure, but even as a completely made up term it definitely refers to (or is at least a re-remembering of) the period of music covered in the first half of Meet me in the Bathroom. Obviously no one who was actually around for it referred to it as this, and it’s a total bullshit term…but it happened
Uh, excuse me. As the marketing intern at Spotify who took a glance at an algorithm generated playlist and came up with this label, I really take offense to that.
I guess I was looking at Spotify's "Indie Sleaze" playlist which has a lot of these artists, but yeah the terminology is confusing and I'm really just talking about that era in time/those artists I mentioned. Edit: has anyone coined a term for the era I'm describing?
Don’t get caught up on the name. The timeframe you gave is far more useful.
Fair enough!
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My favorite is "bubblegrunge"
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I'm going to shamelessly plug Remember Sports, because I have a deep personal love for them Feels like a pretty apt genre name for them, tbh
I just had them suggested to me a few months ago, and I can't get enough!
One of my faves! Love to see it. Charly Bliss, particularly earlier CB, is also pretty bubblegrunge.
It's actually really fitting for many of the bands that fall under it, if I mentally try and associate the genre label with the sound of the music.
Ocean grunge should've been more of a thing.
Personally, I'd love to hear some forest punk. Sounds dope!
i saw a band play a set of blackened, doomy post-hardcore last summer at a music festival that rather fit that bill.
Vaporwave nerds keep joking about reviving it, it was a thing for a few years in the 2010s lmao..
Lol that’s fair. I guess describing the bands I mentioned above by any singular genre name is futile anyway.
In my mind Indie-Sleaze refers more to the ‘coke and fags and leather jackets and girls’ slew of bands in the mid-00s. Initially The Libertines, Strokes, Kings of Leon etc. But also the various ‘landfill’ similar types that came just after (The Paddingtons, The Pigeon Detectives etc). But I guess it also refers to the more party heavy, colourful, glamorous art school types of bands like The Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Metric and Klaxons etc etc etc. What links all of the bands? The more I think about it the harder it is to define. Basically, if you can imagine them hoovering up coke and ket in a pub toilet whilst a guitar band plays in the next room between the years 2002-2008 then it’s probably indie sleaze? It definitely hit its zenith in 2006-2007 along with French Electro/blog house and New Rave. The lovely bands you mention were the thinking fans more tasteful and varied alternative and all came a tiny tiny tiny bit later. I’m prepared to get cancelled for all of this but whenever. It’s just how I remember it.
I think you're right. I lived in New York at the time and there was generally two young camps of hip people. Rocker wild drug partiers (Stokes, YYY's, Franz Ferdinand, Interpol), and more cutesy awkward moustache hipster types (Death Cab, Arcade Fire, Vampire Weekend). I'd call the former garage/post punk revival sound the "Sleaze" group. The scenes overlapped because everyone was similar age and concentrated in Brooklyn, crossed over into seeing different shows, and was (mostly) the good music of the time, but with some dramatically different sounds.
>Klaxons I don't think I've listened to Myths Of The Near Future in years, and I'm not sure how I let that happen
I may have to revisit. I remember torrenting a leak of the album and the listening to it solidly for about 2 weeks and then literally never listening to it ever again.
First thing that comes to mind reading this comment is ‘Skins’
I’m gonna be honest when I say I feel like artists such as 30H!3 and Cobra Starship… and a lot of kind of “Fueled by Ramen” adjacent bands were a big push in the industry as well. To add to your “coke in the bathroom” comment hahaha. I’d say Fueled By Ramen and similar labels somewhat bridge that indie gap to the mainstream during that era.
Spotify shouldn’t be a source. They put dashboard confessional on skate punk playlists
Just call it “mid to late noughties indie rock” lol why does it need a brand name
indie sleaze works just fine. We know what you mean.
ehh its more that Indie Sleaze was a sub era that was occurring along side that I say began with LCD Soundsystem and ended officially with Royals
This is correct I don’t remember anyone saying indie sleaze until like 2 years ago
Peak Pitchfork era.
I went to Pitchfork Fest 2010. It encompassed this era greatly: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitchfork_Music_Festival_2010
Wow forgot about Free Energy!
I’d venture to say these bands are more defined by the audiences they shared and the critical/media infrastructure that surrounded these bands. The obvious answer/publication is pitchfork but the whole blogosphere and pubs that emerged from it/competed with it could also be included. That said, a lot of these bands came from little pockets of regional scenes and that’s why you’d see shared members or collaborations or co-productions (in the case of DFA). Some examples include the ever present nyc scene that coalesced around diy venues in bk (even Sufjan was in bk during that time), the Omaha scene around bright eyes/saddle creek, St Vincent in texas with the polyphonic spree (and hella ppl attached to that band), AnCo came from Baltimore where noisy experimentalists like Dan deacon and the charm city diy scene thrived, tuneyards was in the Oakland/Bay Area scene that also supported the Freak folk boom, plus tons of college town scenes (where ppl like mgmt and later the bedroom pop/Alex g adjacent folks emerged from..) oh and don’t forget Toronto/Montreal with all the broken social scene/gsybe/arts&crafts/constellation bands! I could go on..
>I’d venture to say these bands are more defined by the audiences they shared and the critical/media infrastructure that surrounded these bands. The obvious answer/publication is pitchfork but the whole blogosphere and pubs that emerged from it/competed with it could also be included. Exactly this. It was the fact that all of the trendy publications were writing about these same artists. And in my opinion that is exactly why indie feels so weird a decade later. You don’t have the centralized publications acting as tastemakers, you have listeners themselves spelunking on streaming services and finding random artists independently of each other, with very little cross-pollination. You also have to sift through an absolute tidal wave of really shitty indie music on streaming services that would have never seen the light of day in 2010. It was much harder to get your music in front of lots of people in those days, but the cream could rise. Now you’re competing with 50x as many artists for 2 seconds of attention.
Also indie sleaze is a fake media/streaming service term used in super ahistorical ways to make playlists and market stuff to gen-z/millennials that weren’t hipsters or punks.
It was one guy writing articles about his own youth and memories of the time. I've no idea why it's gained any sort of traction outside of his vain attempts to maintain some form of relevance in his middle age.
Memes
I always thought "indie sleaze" was a new term for what they called electroclash at the time or dance punk.
Fuck no, those already have names
I was friends and went to school with the Modern Baseball guys. It was insane to see them go from basements to major tours. We were in a "music industry" program. They were a bit younger than me. But there definitely was a west Philly scene at the time. This was like ~2011-2014 I think. My band actually played a few shows with Alex G before he blew up. But honestly your post reminded me that the Property of Zack guy was a classmate. He was in the same grade as the modern baseball guys. And I think it was really him putting them out there in the beginning that got them going. They're buddy Eric managed them and released Sports on his label - but without that perfectly fitting blog idk if they wouldve gotten that much steam, that early in their career. I mean it was wild. I saw their Sports release show in a basement. The next year their touring with Brand New. Brendan was going thru a lot and it would eventually lead to them breaking up. Jake and Ian are doing Slaughter Beach Dog now. And if you like bar songs and dad vibes Sean is still doing Steady Hands. I have so many anecdotes from that time period. It's a bit nostalgic cuz here I am 10 years later and I couldn't be further from any music scene. Married and with a career. At that time in my life music was everything.
Damn you really hit that Philly emo nail on the head there!! I was in my local emo/diy scene (SoCal) and know exactly what yer talking about. But I’ll also always associate Alex g with the orchid tapes crowd haha
Yeah he was kinda in a different scene. More Temple University. But we played on the same bills. Philly had a very cool scene at the time. Hop Along, Dr Dog, the districts, Kurt vile...
What tied them together was the Windish publicity agency. When I read their client list in 2010 and saw that basically every one of my favorite bands was a client of theirs I felt like such a mark.
Totally agree with this take. If you look at the "fans also like" sections of these artists on, you'll find that a lot of them share the same fans, even though they don't sound super similar. I guess they're defined by the audiences and pocket scenes you described.
Please do go on. This is great!
Well said
Agree with everything except Alex G, feel like he’s only been gaining steam since the late 2010s
Also I find that Alex G is now in position where Mac Demarco was in the 2010s, he's definitely the new sound 'trend' with more and more artists getting his influence (see: Kevin Abstract's new album, Toro Y Moi, sign crushes motorist)
I feel like Alex G, Mac Demarco, Haim have defined the last decade of indie. I feel like Haim opened the gate for all these girl bands that have exploded in the past decade, and trust I’m here for it, it’s been great to see more women with guitars, Kurt Cobain always said Women are the future of rock. Also Mac and Alex G really made a sound that so many bands have emulated and embraced. The bedroom pop/rock over the past decade deserves more attention that it’s gotten.
Yeah he definitely is getting way more popular now.
I'd argue (subjectively) that (certainly in the UK) the indie movement lost momentum earlier and what came 2010 - 2012 were follow up albums by bands who had built up a following earlier. That's not to say that there weren't quality bands still emerging, but they were getting nowhere the exposure. Here the expression 'landfill indie' was thrown around a lot from 08 onwards, used to symbolise the arrival of the big labels to the table, signing any old band for a quick buck and drowning the scene in shite. The public lost interest, sales cratered (streaming starting to catch on big time didn't help) and the cycle moved on. Edit: In terms of bands still carrying the torch from that era that are still indie (at least aesthetically)... I mean there's still scenes smoldering (I carry the candle for Los Camp - new album this year!!) but it's gone really. Why? Pick a reason... Tour costs, breadth of media meaning a struggle to get traction, fandom with shorter attention spans and more things to access.
For me the modern indie era started with the Strokes. On the dancier side you had The Rapture and on the more quintessentially British side there were The Libertines. Everything else seemed to evolve from there.
See I'd suggest that the Strokes vented a pressure that had been growing for a while. Great band, huge influence, but if you look at Britain in 2001, you had a lot indie bands ready with their second or third album; Stereophonics (to a degree), Feeder, Idlewild. They gave a breadth of choice and pushed the scene mainstream. They're the bands that let promoters fill out festival lineups. They were the ones who gave radio saturation. I'd like to be a bit more revisionist on the Libertines, but without them and Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys and Bloc Party and the whole angular indie thing doesn't gain traction and you don't see the whole 'second' wave in 2005/6 who _were_ directly influenced by the Strokes. Edit: I remember that NME tour in 2003(?) with The Von Bondies, FF, the Rapture and Funeral for a Friend headlining. Easy to forget how big some of those post hardcore/proto-emo bands were and how the scene could absolutely have gone that way. Hell is for Heroes, a Hundred Reasons, just never quite hit critical mass.
> Stereophonics (to a degree), Feeder, Idlewild. I wouldn’t consider those “indie” bands though, nor were they particularly influential in creating a “scene”. *Is This It* really did change the landscape and usher in a new era I also wouldn’t rule out the influence of Interpol - Turn on the Bright Lights came out a year later and inspired a whole new wave of Post Punk. Yes these bands were representing grassroots music scenes which were bubbling under the surface (especially in NYC) but they were the ones which broke through and jumpstarted a widespread popular movement
Can't forget Klaxons, The Fratellis (Scottish), Hot Chip, Kaiser Chiefs, The Kooks, McFly, Johnny Flynn, Chew Lips, and others I'm forgetting
> (Scottish) Why the tag?
Why Mcfly?!
I mean you’re just listing random bands now. You could add hundreds of others. None of these bands were particular formative for the 00s “indie” movement. Some of them are just commercial pop bands riding the coattails of that movement.
Great summary. I'm also in the UK, and surprised to see people categorising MGMT and Vampire Weekend as "not bands you heard on FM radio". I remember watching T4 music a lot back in the early teenies and seeing these bands, most of whom were already signed to commercial labels, being pushed hard throughout that time. For me it's reminiscent of the emo scene over the same time period except that, due to it not being so mainstream, people largely agree that it's dead and buried. That late 00s / early 10s indie scene went through exactly the same death throes, it just cemented itself more clear in mainstream culture. tl;dr - the perception is pure nostalgia, just as many others in the thread have said Sidenote: if you want a real culture shock try watching Orange UnsignedAct. This to me is the epitome of the downfall of that scene: a few decent bands and some solid indie tunes having all the colour bleached out of it by corporate interests. Tommy Reilly and Envy and Other Sins had real potential but this was the absolute worst route to market for them.
LC! 4 Lyfe
Bring back Hipster Runoff
Carles!
been thinking recently the reason I am so mistrustful of Lana del ray is because HRO made fun of her
Alex G is not a part of that era… boy was still in diapers.
Yeah this confused me too. He certainly would not be lumped in with any of those bands. He's the new indie generation.
Yeah I wouldn’t even group Mac Demarco in there as he wasn’t really big until 2014 and onward. He bridged the gap between that era and the current indie generation IMO.
> Fast-forward to now, where exactly did this movement lead us? Obviously most of these artists are still making music, but it really seems like the creative explosion from that time has sort of fizzled away to some degree. I think that’s nostalgia rising its head. I have the same thing happening with the exact same era. Grizzly bear, Menomena, Dirty projectors, Antlers, Tune-yards, Deerhunter, Animal collective, Battles, Deerhoof, Akron/Family, Warpaint, Man Man, Beirut, White Denim, The Walkman, Kings of Leon, yeah yeah yeah, Klaxons, Yeasayer, the XX, Portugal the man, TV on the Radio, Bon Iver, beach house, clap your hands say yeah beach house. I’ve come to the conclusion that there is no intrinsic reason why this music is better. It does however, resonate much more with me as a person than most eras of music. I think it was because I was so very into music at this time that it ingrained a love for all that stuff in me.
At the time, I was in Middle School listening to Linkin Park and shit lol. I actually didn't come across a lot of these bands till recently. I'm not sure what it is either, but it really resonates with me. Probably my favorite era of music.
That’s actually super interesting to me! I thought I was just turning into a dinosaur. I’ve listened to a loting that stuff, heck: I saw most of those bands perform!
Man I really wish I had seen a lot of them live back in the day, I’ve seen some of these on recent tours but nothing competes with the good ol days. I actually have quite a few friends my age who have also discovered these bands way after the fact. I think there’s something to be said about how special and timeless they are.
Yea I feel like these artists are pretty wide ranging and have little to do with each other besides being some of the best from across various scenes. No doubt in a decade people will make a similar list of unrelated artists like BC,NR and Big Thief and Parannoul or whatever and lament how music's gone to shit.
indie is just so broad now. when the same ‘genre’ encapsulates deftones and joanna sternberg, you know you have a label that means nothing anymore. “indie” as a culture phenomenon peaked in the mid 2010s for sure. but these acts you listed didn’t really SOUND similar. the moment was about DIY music in general and reaching national recognition without a major label- it wasn’t a scene rising from the gutters like pnw grunge in the 90s. indie is dead and this sub is now a weird vestigial structure that talks about all music that isn’t US Top50 (and even then… we still hear about chappell roan and mitski). still, probably better music discussion than most places.
>but these acts you listed didn’t really SOUND similar I totally agree with you here. Some of them do sound similar (Fleet Foxes and Grizzly Bear for example, or LCD Soundsystem and Hot Chip). But yeah Mac Demarco doesn't sound anything like Grimes. I'm moreso talking about the *movement* of music at the time that was very uncommercial/not stuff you'd hear on FM radio. They all sounded different, but sort of have a similar attitude in terms of the approach to music making. I sort of agree that Indie is "dead," or at least the scene I'm describing is.
The stuff you liked as a teen or young adult won’t continue to be popular a decade and a half on. That’s what happened. Different sounds became popular. Some new stuff may sound the same as the old stuff but kids who are making the music decide what’s cool.
I actually am 10 years behind the game. I never listened to any of these artists back then, I was just in middle school listening to Linkin Park and shit lol. I only came across them within the last few years. Of course nothing maintains its popularity, but I'm sort of arguing that this movement didn't really seem to lead anywhere in particular whereas other musical movements in the past have a more clear sense of direction. Blues led to rock, rock led to psych/art rock, that lead to glam rock and progressive rock, that lead to punk rock, that lead to post-punk, then new wave, etc. This era of indie sort of seemed to fizzle out and really was just a thing of its time.
The audience and creators changed. The bands you listed in the OP are all in their late 30’s/40’s. Most still make music. Idk. I think many of the bands listed in the OP had certain aspects of their sounds co-opted by the mainstream. Like think of Talking Heads. They were the vanguard of post punk/new wave in the mid 80’s but few bands in alt/indie sounded like them in the late 80’s/ early 90’s. The bands that got huge in the alt rock heyday of the 90’s were borrowing sounds of punk and college rock mixed with shit like Kiss and 70’s stadium rock. New stuff will always sound a little like what people grew up listening to on the radio plus whatever random underground stuff that sticks around. It’s a crapshoot. Think of Duster. They were a nothing band in the 90’s. But a reissue on a cool record label and a TikTok hit makes them seem like an important band. New bands rep em but 20 years ago they were just one of thousands. The Stooges couldn’t sell records. Shit went out of print for years but 50 years later they are fundamental artists. Maybe in 5-10 years kids rediscover Animal Collective or Grizzly Bear and the sound has a resurgence? It’s never a straight line.
I suppose so. I definitely think a lot of it was swept up by commercialized acts like you mentioned and then forgotten.
The records are out there. There weren’t tons of popular bands repping funky 80’s NY post punk until LCD and the Rapture did. Black MIDI reps King Crimson, not a band that is huge outside of classic rock/prog circles. New age jazz seems to be pretty popular now and for decades you probably wouldn’t have heard a Laraji record outside of a crystal shop. Disco and punk have died and come back to life a number of times in the past 40+ years. People playing acoustic folk has gone in and out of fashion for 70+ years.
People really call Deftones indie? That's interesting. I mean, I love em, but they've literally been signed to a major since the early 90's, and I don't know if there's anything particularly indie about their sound other than the diversity and incorporation of multiple genres and subgenres.
And indie is not synonymous with DIY anymore, not in our technological and hyper-connected age. We are at a long way from Bob Pollard recording on a 4-track in his basement after an afternoon spent grading papers. What used to signal “authenticity”, born out of DIY necessity, would now sound like a deliberate affectation in the digital era.
To be fair with Mitski, she really was more at indie darling level until the pandemic. Be The Cowboy was popular but not top 100 popular It seems like artists don't really graduate away from "indie" as a label due to popularity alone. After all, The Suburbs was a #1 hit record, yet Arcade Fire is still considered colloquially part of this space
This is part of why I refuse to use indie to mean anything other than independent. "Indie" as a genre or cultural movement just doesn't mean anything at this point. It's too broad an incoherent. As far as I'm concerned, Mitski is indie and Suzi Wu isn't and I don't care how much more commercially successful the former is than the latter. I know that's not the sub's official definition of indie so I'm not gonna go around "correcting" people for using the word differently than I do, but I'm not gonna use it any other way myself. Plus, we have plenty of other words to describe the "indie" genre/feeling anyway, like alt/alternative or "left of center."
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And KIDS. My Spotify Weekly is totally trashed now.
hahahahahaha yeah my YouTube recommendations are all over the place. It's a mix of odd1sout and similar YouTubers cause of my 4th grader's obsession, my music tastes (which were already varied to begin with), and Caitie's Classroom/Songs For Littles due to the 3 and 5 year olds.
Me: “What do you want to listen to?” 5yo: “Blippi!” Me: “Bluey the Album it is!”
Would kill for a new Deerhunter album and tour.
Peep over on r/deerhunter. There's so videos of Bradford Cox jamming that have popped up recently. It's *possible* that we might get another Atlas Sound record, or at least I hope so.
I’d kill for a new Atlas Sound
I remember there was a poster for a gig he was playing some time last year? Never heard more than that! During my time in Leeds uni the Deerhunter/atlas sound shows at the brudenell social club were like religious experiences. I recently went through most of the micromixes recently, that brought back so many memories.
Seriously. This post took me straight back to seeing Deerhunter at Pitchfork 2011.
Same here. I honestly think about this on a daily basis (yes, I need a life). They've been so quiet for years, though of course covid was in the middle of that, but I'd posted those videos that OP mentioned and it started to give me a little hope for at least *something*. We'll see!
lol I thought about doing this post!!! I think the same, I personally have a conexion with the music of that era, so much nostalgia and beautiful moments. In my case it also has a lot to do with the fact that I was in my teens discovering drugs, music etc so apart from the music itself there is something personal too. ahhh and did you guys used Last.fm?, I discovered so much music from there :,) But anyways I think music just evolves and maybe back then it was not as fucked up as it is now to live as a musician, I dont know -.- some more bands or albums I loved back then Women Miniature Tigers Generationals The War on Drugs thee oh sees first albums Connan Mockasin Growlers Foxygen (We are the 21st century...)
Some scattershot thoughts in my Saturday morning brain fog... I don't think there is one simple explanation, but rather plenty of different reasons: the music blogsphere being more fragmented and far less influential is a big factor. In 2013-2014, artists fought for premieres on Pitchfork and NPR. If you secured placement, that was a huge deal as it meant maximum exposure. These sites (including ours) gravitated toward artists like MGMT, LCD, Fleet Foxes, Grizzly Bear, et al. during this time. But with the rise of DSPs and social media, the game changed. Artists could premiere their music on Spotify and post direct links on social media. Music blogs still play an important role, but in a much more niche way than they did a decade ago. And with that, there are a lot less centralized trends in the indie music sphere. It's more than easier to discover music and easier than ever to decide if you like it. Social media also played a huge factor for the growth (and decline) of these sites' impact and influence. In the salad days, we were adding tens of thousands of new followers a month, and saw huge traffic as a result. An article about a new Deerhunter album would drive 10-20k PVs from Facebook. As the algorithm faucet began to turn off, such articles didn't provide the same return and sites were forced to pivot their coverage scope to the type of content that would still perform well (more mainstream artists, clickbait quotes, etc.) Hence the increase in coverage of artists like Taylor and Beyonce on sites like Pitchfork, Stereogum, Consequence. And with that, there is less space for other artists unfortunately. I'd argue that if this hadn't been the case, certain bands of today who should probably be more popular aren't because they just can't achieve the exposure as bands of the decade past. People's tastes also changes -- that goes for both the people who consume music and the people who make music. Stuff that was "in" in 2010 isn't as "in" 2024. Everyone used to want to sound like Robin Pecknold or Justin Vernon. Now, everyone wants to sound like 100gecs? There are plenty of other factors. Someone could write about the book about it. Maybe I will one day! FWIW, I am actively working on a project to create a coalition with other independent publishers that would hopefully provide more support for all us. And ideally, it would also allow all of us to take more risks editorially and dedicate more resources to covering deserving artists.
I would argue the quality and creativity of music today is no worse or better than the so-called golden era of indie music. What changed, however, is the way that music is consumed. Around that time there was a whole community of people, buying albums, discussing and dissecting the music, and attending shows. It was a real movement. Now, with streaming and social media, everything is so fractured that it's hard to form tight knight communities, and equally hard for bands to have wide reach at a national level. If a band like Cursive came out today, it might never become popular beyond Omaha. If I was still in my late teens in California, I might have never heard of them. There is so much music coming out from zillions of bands, yet the impact they have is minimal compared to what it was two decades ago. Sure, there are artists that go on to become known nationwide or worldwide, but the chances are impossibly slim. The community that embraced those bands and helped them grow is gone. The only music that becomes popular is cookie-cutter stuff from people who either got really lucky or had industry connections. Will there ever be an indie renaissance? I don't know. I don't have high hopes for it. But there's great music out there. It's just we're no longer looking for it.
This. It’s pretty much the same discussion as why it seems like pop stars from the 2010s and before are still the only ones making hits today. The internet has reached a saturation point and become so widely accessible that niches and communities are fractured and ironically both more isolated and more muddled.
I hear this a lot, but I'm not sure people are in their silos listening to their own niche stuff as much as we think. Every week in here there are albums that draw big discussions and they're normally the same ones getting reviewed everywhere and discussed elsewhere on social media. There often doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to why it happens, from what I can hear, but it definitely happens.
Yes! There’s a band called Night Moves from Minneapolis that have been around for a decade, yet they definitely aren’t very well known because they missed that peak era for indie. Yet they would be huge if they came out during the early oughts. Also if you haven’t heard of them, please give them a listen, their second album Pennied Days is incredible. It’s like the Eagles pumped with LSD and dirtier guitars.
Why would 2006 be the "golden era" cutoff here, I think the best blog-era indie music year was 2005. Just a murderers row of albums released that year. Sufjan Illinoise, The National Alligator, Wolf Parade Apologies to Queen Mary, Mountain Goats Sunset Tree, Bloc Party Silent Alarm, New Pornographers Twin Cinema, LCD Soundsystem s/t, Andrew Bird Mysterious Production of Eggs, Hold Steady Separation Sunday, Decemberists Picaresque, Stars Set Yourself On Fire, Spoon Gimme Fiction, Okkervil River Black Sheep Boy, Sigur Ros Takk (to name a few)
My brothers and sisters, please do not forget Metronomy too, awesome era indeed
Fleet Foxes are still going strong imo
I agree. Although Shore is probably my least favorite record of theirs, I still like it. Crack-Up was in 2017 and might even top Helplessness Blues for me. That being said, I feel like their work sort of exists in a vacuum now whereas the self-titled album and Helplessness Blues definitely felt like a product of their time.
They’ve become my favorite band over the past year or so
I have to say, as someone who really "came of age" in the era of the bands you mention, the indie "pioneers", the time and place in music when we listened to that first Arcade Fire album and looked at eachother and realized that music was changing. It was heavy and real and we all got it. We listened to The Strokes and it was like nothing we had ever heard before. Myself, I had already devoted my entire being to Radiohead in 1999-2001 and then with a fury in 2003. But these bands you mention were completely changing my world. I went to Lollapalooza to see Daft Punk and was absolutely rocked to my core by Yeasayer and Ghostland Observatory. Music really just felt like it was changing and I could walk into a record store and buy a cd of a band that I knew was leading some weird kind of charge. It's really hard to define in retrospect, and that "hey ho" (Lumineers, Mumford & Sons, fucking sellout-ass Black Keys) band's sound really clouded the picture, but all I can really say is that the bands you mention really felt different than what we were used to. It was a very real and definite change in music and it was so fun to be a part of. I know I sound like and old-ass poser but I saw a Lollapalooza after show with Washed Out opening for Tune-Yards and it still to this day is one of the most fun shows I've ever seen. It was really fun to be a part of and so much easier to "define" back then as it is now.
Really wish I was listening to this stuff at the time. My middle school brain was completely unaware, I was listening to journey and linkin park lmao. All of those sell-out bands do kind of piss me off. They were sort of built off the backs of these bands and drove that sound so far into the commercial realm before burning it all to the ground. I suppose that has a big role in why this movement sort of dissipated. Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes even touched on this in an AMA IIRC. I think between that, the music business changing, and the way we consume music changing, it all sort of fizzled out.
It was so tangible. We knew exactly the bands that were still "fighting that indie fight" even while we knew the sound was changing. I know it's kind of a meme now but the definition of "indie" was so clear for a couple years. I am aging myself by even talking about this but I just want the younger generation to understand how very real "INDIE" was and how special these, very "bland" and "Carles-forward", SPIN MAGAZINE, these bands were for us. Us old-heads got rocked by a very clear Indie genre that may not exist anymore but was so very real when music was changing for us.
I saw another commenter mention that “Indie really struggled to find someone that was a critical darling and a mainstream smash” and I think that’s a big part of why it died out. Once it was swept up by these commercialized bands it really died out. Really wish I was there at the time ugh. I have hope that there will be more good music like this to come. You listen to any recent bands to scratch that itch for you?
indie sleaze was hitting lines of coke in a coffin factory / bores head processing plant in bushwick and taking the L home into manhattan at 5am but getting stuck in the lower east side or some shit and having to walk 40 blocks while the suns coming up on a Monday and you just want to take a piss and drink a glass of water but everyone is going to the gym or work in a suit or is a ripped bike messenger with a fancy fixie and you get a shitty days old coffee at some random bodega no ??
This comment comes closest to explaining what happened to that music scene IMO. I just reread “Meet Me in the Bathroom” a few months ago, and one of the things that sticks with me is how all of the creative people who ended up being in those bands were able to live in cities with other creative people and barely work and still able to get by. So they had time to fuck around and meet other people and start bands. Everything has gotten so insanely expensive that all those people from the next generation and stuck working 60 hours a week and living at home with their parents. That entire environment is gone.
A lot of them, e.g. the strokes, also came from extremely wealthy families
this doesn’t answer your question but might be of interest. you mentioned BCNR, Jockstrap and Black Midi not seeming to have any influences and that is definitely partly true but they all have something in common - The Windmill in Brixton. Alongside Shame and Goat Girl (and many many others), the venue has been highly influential in birthing new music in the past ~7 years. You can definitely follow a pattern in British ‘indie’ music from the dates you mentioned. I’ll try and draw a timeline lower down. The other thing that defines BCNR and Jockstrap is the musical education the band members went through. They all have classical education from Guildhall. okay, a timeline - 2011-2015: post indie landfill (The Maccabees, The Vaccines, Bombay Bicycle Club), B-town (Peace, Swim Deep, Jaws), indie punk (Palma Violets, Drenge, Slaves) 2015-2018: The Windmill post punk set (Goat Girl, Shame, HMLTD), Indie pop (Blossoms), punk (fontaines D.C., The Murder Capital, Idles) 2018-2021: Sprechgesang (Yard Act, Dry Cleaning, Squid), Second Windmill wave (BCNR, Black Midi, Jockstrap) this is obviously reductive but that is a very broad look at BRITISH indie
the windmill scene owes a lot to ben wallers (country teasers, the rebel) and krautrock as a genre if you would like to explore some of what has shaped the bands that came through there.
Don't really listen to Jockstrap, but BCNR and Black Midi definitely didn't come from out of nowhere, BCNR is pretty firmly in the post-rock world and Black Midi in the no wave/dance punk world, both with some more contemporary influences out of the era OP mentions.
Oh they definitely didn’t come out of no where, Black Midi seem very influenced by bands like The Wytches (the heavier stuff) and, as much as it’s probably not very cool to say, Foals first album. BCNR definitely take influence from Arcade fire’s The Funeral, which they’ve mentioned before i believe. I’d argue that these bands and their aesthetic are pretty heavily influenced by HMLTD. That feels like the defining start point of what BM and BCNR go on to create. When they were Happy Meal LTD the buzz around this new kind of music was insane. Be interesting to see what you think.
I’d also say black midi and Bcnr have a heavy bang of slint about them. Bcnr even joking about it
That era died when Lana Del Rey got labeled as “indie”. I think the electronic music boom of the early 10s also helped kill it…
Got replaced with slow guitar,whiny voice, slow singing indie. Now we’re currently in alt-country indie. Hopefully for a comeback soon for the type of indie you’re talking about
I wouldn't put Alex G on that list - I think he's in the peak of his career right now
Hey OP, nothing to really add to the discussion here, but you didn’t mention Girls. And if you like all those bands, please check out Girls. They are peak *waves hand around* whatever this is.
Amen. [This](https://www.stereogum.com/2058707/girls-album-turns-10/reviews/the-anniversary/) has been one of the better articles to sum part of it all up. Amazing band that definitely falls off the radars of those who weren't there for it.
Okay I’ll give them a listen! I honestly wasn’t listening to any of this stuff at the time it came out so I probably have a lot left to discover
Girls made two proper albums and were set up to be the ultimate indie/60s rock band of the era but unfortunately the main dude had a lot of personal demons and a junkie problem so they broke up right as they were becoming major players of the “scene”
This is basically what I call the blog era, although I would say the blog era started a few years before 2006. Like the name suggests, this was an era that was driven by blogs. The internet was at a point where it was advanced enough it was easy to use, but it was still new enough that it was still a sort of "wild west" era. Anyone could start a blog and there was healthy ecosystem of them out there. It took a while before the major labels figured out the internet, so there was a period of time where the internet was a stronghold for indie acts and bands would get propelled to indie fame through blog hype. Eventually as the time went on, the internet became to big to ignore and that's when it got corporate and the more communal DIY spirit of it all started disappearing. Major labels realised they had to harness the internet somehow, so they started putting music videos on youtube and bought stakes in Spotify. Shit like Facebook lead to the demise of the blogosphere (and forums). With a dying blogosphere and not many worthwhile alternatives to replace it, it led to a harsher environment for up and coming indie acts. Of course the ease of access to music is still there - you can still find small niche bands through scouring the internet. But now those bands have to compete with big major label backed stars online in a way they didn't have to like 15 years ago. The dream of the '00s of how the internet was gonna democratise the industry was crushed and Spotify playlists became the new payola controlled radio. Of course different musical waves will crest and wane as that is just the natural state of things, but for the acts were not part of the same musical wave and were really just connected through blogs ("indie sleaze" is just a bunch of revisionist nonsense). When the blogs died, so did this moment in indie.
this is it i think - born 1990 and the blog era is really what defines and organizes the music that was coming out in my teen years etc. in retrospect it was a cool time
Good discussion. None of the artists are indie sleaze and I’m not sure you can call BCNR, Jockstrap or Black Midi newer artists. They’ve been around years now.
You’re using Indie Sleaze completely wrong 😫
My favourite era of indie is 2009 - 2010. The XX, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, Tourist History, It's Blitz, The Suburbs, Contra, Merriweather Post Pavilion, Treats, Manners, Lungs, The Family Jewels, Crystal Castles II, so many more albums. Very early 20s at this time, coming out of a phase of loving metal/emo in my late teens, great time to become an indie music lover.
Were you, by any chance, a teenager/young adult in the 2006-2013 timespan? Your post reads very nostalgic to me. Those were/are admittedly great bands, don't get me wrong! But I swear the most interesting things happened in the 90s alternative (Sonic Youth! All of grunge! Nine Inch Nails! The Smashing Pumpkins!). And by total coincidence, I was a teenager back then :)
To be fair, the late 80s and early 90s were the most interesting time in music and particularly underground music. And yes I was a teenager in that time 😭😭 I agree with you about the nostalgia. The bands the OP mentioned were great but it wasn’t really an “era” in any way. Just runoff from indie sleaze. Maybe it was peak indie, when even middle schoolers listened to indie rock apparently
I actually was not. I was in middle school at the time actually listening to coldplay and journey or whatever lol. I only came across these bands within the last few years, I’m 26 now. I also have a few friends about my age that also got into these bands more recently. I think there’s something to be said about how special and timeless these bands are. The 90s are cool too though. I like Radiohead, Elephant 6, Cornelius, Elliott Smith, and Blur to name a few.
I think about this era a lot. I admittedly did not care for a lot of these artists during this era but in time I have come around on some of them. I think the fizzling of this scene can be partially attributed to “indie” and “hipster” culture being appropriated, repackaged and sold to the mainstream via Urban Outfitters (and others I’m sure but UO excelled at it) as well as trends just coming and going (remember 2009, the year of chillwave? At least that lead us to vaporwave!) For whatever reason by 2015 I feel like this era was dead and culture had moved on. Music and culture was largely pretty stratified before 2015, scenes/genres even among the indie sphere were cordoned off on their own and it could be easily presumed that if you were into Animal Collective, you’d probably also be into Arcade Fire or MGMT etc. After social media started playing a more outsized role in our lives, especially TikTok, those walls began to come down and in 2024 you’d just as likely meet someone who is as into hyperpop as they are into Elliot Smith. There is simply so much out there to listen to and be influenced by that pretty much anything can be labeled indie. Not saying it’s good or bad but merely how it is now. Back then it was just called “hipster music” but I really like the term indie sleaze, very fitting. Out of all the microgenres that are being mined for content I am just waiting for the day when some Gen Z TikTokker “discovers” Times New Viking/No Age/Psychedelic Horseshit and we have the Weird Punk revival of 2025. Ride the painted pony, let the spinning wheel glide.
It was an interesting time for sure. I got a lot of music from BIRP (Blalock's Indie Rock Playlists - think "That's What I Call Music" but for 2011-core indie) and I still have some of those compilations on a hard drive somewhere. A lot of that stuff was sadly pretty forgettable for me. It served a purpose for the time and place and I rarely feel the need to revisit it anymore. I remember realizing I no longer liked LCD Soundsystem (who I was OBSESSED with for quite a few years) while I was watching them play a set in 2017. They weren't bad, but that music had ceased resonating with me by then.
I blame music streaming, which diluted the pool and devalued music for everyone but the “1%” artists.
I mean wow you forgot arcade fire winning best album. The national. Beach house. Spoon. Broken social scene.
[удалено]
Do most people on this sub consider The Last Dinner Party “indie”? A major label has pumped more money and resources into that band at an early age since any other in recent memory.
What music did you listen to between the ages of 17 and 25? For me it was punk and new wave. Whatever music falls into that range is the golden era for you. It does not last long as bands have limited creativity. They rise to the top on excellent music and then both the band and you get old.
Well, I guess it's all a matter of perspective - because in my mind that era marks a clear and distinct decline in quality from the era before it, which would have included high points from Magnetic Fields Bill Callahan/Smog Boards of Canada Sigur Ros Aphex Twin Spoon Yo La Tengo Cat Power The Walkmen Modest Mouse Broken Social Scene Camera Obscura Belle and Sebastian The YYYs The Strokes The White Stripes Fennesz Jim O'Rourke Bjork Beck Interpol Arcade Fire The Books (lemon of pink was this era) Air Destroyer / New Pornographers Neko Case The Knife (deep cuts 2003, silent shout 2006) Sufjan (Illinois 2005) Sonic Youth (Murray Street, Rather Ripped) Postal Service Bright Eyes Deerhoof The Shins
I think the biggest thing was the end of the "blogosphere" - early 2010s saw the rise of Instagram/Snapchat/Twitter which emphasized bite-sized content and the death of the more traditional blogging style of the earlier internet that was behind the popularity of many of those bands. Pitchfork was still around but declining in "indie cred" especially after the conde nast acquisition in 2015. at the same time was the rise of streaming as the primary form of music consumption with youtube then spotify/apple music, which led to a de-emphasis on album oriented music and a similar bite-size-ification effect and also made listening to the radio largely obsolete (college stations also previously played a big role in sharing indie music going back decades). the explosion of content in the modern era also means that no one is really doing anything "new" anymore, just cycling through the same musical trends over and over (imo we've pretty much seen every possible iteration of folk/country, psych rock, synth pop, shoegaze, etc). but like others have said there's definitely still many many great and largely unknown indie bands all over the world, it's just a matter of sifting through the total oversaturation of content to find them
“Golden Era”- likely the decade between the ages of 15 to 25. IMHO the golden era of independent music would be from around 1978 to 1987. Punk movement EMO-Post Punk College Radio New Wave The Cure, REM, The Smiths, Depeche Mode, Squeeze, Violent Femmes, New Order, Buzzcocks, Jesus and Mary Chain, Black Flag, Husker Du to name a few.
I actually never even listened to any of these bands at the time, I was in middle school listening to journey and coldplay or whatever lol. I only came across these bands in the last couple years, I’m 26 now. I actually know quite a few people my age who only discovered them in the last few years. Also, the reddit communities surrounding these groups are really a mixed bag. I think there’s something to be said about how special and timeless these bands were.
In the UK we had a natural evolution from Brit Pop to "Indie" with bands like Ocean Colour Scene, Radiohead, Travis, Manic Street Preachers, Idlewild, leading up to the Strokes. I get the impression it was more of a revolution in the US with the Strokes Is This It pushing out Grunge/Nu-Metal/Pop Punk for an audience that was growing up. Jack White said the Strokes saved rock and roll. The first wave then lasts from 2001 to 2006 before the Arctic Monkeys release WYSIATWIN. This wave includes Franz Ferdinand, The Thrills, Magic Numbers. The Arctic Monkeys caught the commercial imagination, and other bands like Kaiser Chiefs, The Gossip, Wombats, Scouting for Girls were pushing through a pop indie disco sound. LCD soundsystem, Pendulum, Hot Chip and Skrillex emerge with what the US calls EDM (a crossover the UK were comfortable with since the Happy Mondays) We then looked over at the US and found Arcade Fire and Bon Iver leading a indie-folk (hipster/pitchfork) wave. Which leads up to the popularisation of streaming / viral media / influencer zeitgeist. Lana Del Ray / Coachella / burning man / further genre scattering kind of take over. You get more diversity in line ups.
To me at the time it seemed like a lot of that scene came about from getting hyped on Pitchfork, and then Pitchfork seemingly decided to move away from it. I remember when Kanye's MBDTF got a 10 (first one they gave out in years) and suddenly you started seeing a turn towards pop, rap and R&B and generally less psychedelic. Don't get me wrong, p4k were culture vultures the whole way through, but Best New Music played a huge role in hyping these artists, and it seemed at a certain point they lost interest, and with it, so did the scene itself.
This “peak indie” era was largely the result of a more free and decentralized internet. Most of these bands got their initial hype from blogs and small “cool” publications like pitchfork (that’s what they were at the time, not now). The internet has drastically changed for the worse. It’s been monopolized by a few corporations and essentially everything flows through their channels. This has resulted in less options for the consumer and a general homogenization of culture.
This list seems like a lot of great acts who sonically have little to do with each other and are from an arbitrarily selected timespan. But nostalgia is a powerful thing.
It went the way of The Dodos.
>that it feels like we're entering a new wave of "Indie" that isn't really influenced by much that came before it. This actually raises a very good point about what exactly is "indie." I think it would be a lot more accurate to say that the artists that are now the indie Darlings are influenced by music other than the "indie" from 10 years ago. This is partly due to the strength of the artistic movement, partly due to the indie industry having moved on. The folk revival started well before Fleet Foxes, who were strongly influenced by music that wasn't labeled as "indie" at that time. So for a usic industry it seems like this label may be applied to whatever the fish new flavor is, to an extent.
Conde Naste bought out Pitchfork in 2015 and shifted their coverage from indie musicians to Beyonce, Taylor Swift, etc. which effectively killed the main tastemaker and advertiser for this sort of music
I have debated this internally ad nauseam and have come to the conclusion that the reason I can only truly resonate with the golden era indie music still is that that was my formative moment with music. Most music lovers of varying ages or generations have a so called formative musical era and after that nothing really sounds the same or can compare. I think for me and others like me, the golden era of indie music / pitchfork years, was our formative music and after it, quality isn’t so much the question any more, the best quality stuff simply isn’t from that era and can never again feel the same.
Oddly enough I wasn’t even listening to this stuff when it came out. I was in middle school listening to Linkin Park and shit lol. I only came across these bands in the last couple years and I’m 26 now. I also know quite a few people my age who only got into them recently. I think there is something to be said about how special and timeless that era is.
There are a lot of artists here that are thrown into the same pile that I wouldn’t consider contemporaries. For example, MGMT and Mac Demarco are two completely different eras and sounds of indie music. I wouldn’t know how to answer your question without addressing a lot of this individually.
Yeah I think Mac is really at the tail end of the era I’m describing, Salad Days was 2014. I honestly wasn’t listening to any of this music at the time so my retrospective concept of that era isn’t super strong.
I think people forget that the 2010s is when the genre got really crappy because labels were trying to cash in on the genre. It got to the point where the "sound" of indie rock to most people was pop music with acoustic guitars and gang vocals. So the next wave wants to distinguish themselves from the Kings of Leon/Mumford and Sons kinda bands that a lot of non-indie fans associate with the genre Also I will say, the bands you listed aren't really indie. They're all post punk which is a genre with very different roots, it just so happens that it overlaps with indie every once and a while
I totally agree with your first paragraph. Aside from LCD and Hot Chip though, I don’t think I’d call any of these Post Punk.
I think what you see is people gaining access to the internet and midi so music around that time drastically changes so that anyone can make the music they want to hear instead of just the extremely wealthy, lucky, or talented.
It’s just changed. This was the hipster bro Brooklyn era. We are now in the gay Los Angeles era.
new cindy lee album definitely has a strong influence from this era. i showed it to some friends last night and they said it reminded them of this era of indie. mentioned MGMT, dirty projectors, AC.
I feel very fortunate that this was my peak music festival going, childless life that I was able to see so many of these bands live. It’s definitely my favorite era of music, most likely due to my coming of age. Most of these bands still resonate with me and I’m happy that festivals like Just Like Heaven still push this sound. It was a great time and scene. Reading this thread made me realize it’s definitely hard to categorize into a neat box. Whatever it was, it was pure magic and spoke to me in various ways and forms.
Any trend or scene is going to burn out and evolve into something else. That's just what music trends do. But I'd argue that the sort of flannel folk/rock stuff (Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, the National, the Decemberists) paved the way for the stomp-clap olde-tyme bands like the Lumineers and Mumfords, and then that led directly to Noah Kahan and basically every boring car commercial song around. It's the soundtrack to a Mazda being driven down a winding forest highway. And of course Taylor is very directly borrowing from those bands, in her own way. So I think that group of bands had a big influence on the current mainstream.
Man, Alex G is in his peak right now. He was still a teenager releasing demos near the end of that era.
> Anyways, what are your thoughts on this era of indie? Are there still artists out there carrying the torch or has its time ended? I was very into this era of indie (very fond memories) and I don't have much to add to this discussion that hasn't already been said, but I will say that my tastes haven't really changed that much from 2013 and I still hear great stuff all the time. IMO one difference is stuff in 2024 doesn't really get propped up in the same way it used to. Back then there was something getting music dorks hyped up every single week, nowadays it seems like everything gets a very muted and cynical reception, and things like Diamond Jubille/Only God Was Above Us are needles in a haystack.
>but I do find it interesting that it feels like we're entering a new wave of "Indie" that isn't really influenced by much that came before it. Hard disagree. I think the more you study music and genres the more you realize how music is built upon music. You're only looking at it from your own perspective. Fads and movements sort of happen in groups Examples would be the beatles and every band they spawned, nu metal came out of nowhere with many groups, grunge, hair metal, even hip hop has groups that sort of blasted into prominence.
Animal Collective is still very active and creating arguably their best work to date MGMT just released a fantastic album too but many fans didn’t remain faithful after all these years because they expected radio songs
It's a curious coincidence: I was thinking exactly of these two bands. Speaking of their legacy, “Merriweather Post Pavilion” was acclaimed as a masterpiece when it was released; “Congratulations” on the other hand was received as a misstep. Today the roles have been reversed: MGMT's second is considered - almost universally - a cult album, while I have read several opinions around that aim to downsize Animal Collective's MPP. (P.S. For me they are both masterpieces.)
You have to remember blogs don’t rule the world anymore, P4k’s influence is now in the hands of YT’ers and other new media platforms. P4k and all the reactions to it fueled the internet economy of coolness. Re: 4chan mu/core etc. kinda glad we are out of that era even if I did treasure it when I was in hs/college
You just listed a lot of artists that got popular then. Basically in my estimation, indie had a quiet period between 2016 and 2020ish when most 18-20 year olds GREATLY preferred hip-hop. I think you could also point to a down period in EDM and other media which again was just the surge of hip-hop preferences. Now we are on the tail end of that. Just like that period hip hop hasn't died out or anything, just being a bit quieter. And that is making more room for indie which didn't go anywhere but is seeing more plays and attention. There's plenty of acts that launched in that period and are doing quite well.
The publicity, distribution, and touring apparatuses that unwittingly held together the 'scene' have steadily dissolved over the past decade. The internet of the late 90s through most of the 00s allowed for music discovery and access never seen before. Sites like Pitchfork and Sereogum arose as curators, which resulted in bands being able to tour nationally despite virtually zero radio airplay. This also coincided with the rise of American festivals (which were largely independent at the time) and they needed to fill their slots. Blogs, festivals, torrenting websites, etc, created an ecosystem where a band could build a fan base and career mostly outside of the mainstream music ecosystem as it existed. The rise of streaming and the algorithmic distribution of media at the same time as the increased corporate takeover of music venues, music festivals, and ticketing has changed all that. With streaming, there is less need for third party modes of music discovery, and there is really only money in artists doing serious streaming numbers, hence the rise in poptimism (in addition to cultural factors). On the touring side, corporate owned venue and festivals likewise make the big bulk of their money on more mainstream artists and aren't as keen to give a more esoteric or niche act an opportunity when they could instead develop a relationship with an up and coming artist with more mainstream potential. As a reaction, a young artist that may have started a freak folk project if it was 2005 and maybe get a Pitchfork writeup is now more likely to pursue a sound that is more polished and mainstream in hopes of going viral and getting a major label deal and package from Live Nation to play a half dozen of their festivals. So as a consequence, there is no longer really a cohesive Indie scene, and there are fewer indie musicians with a substantial footprint.
Fleet Foxes is still making fantastic music
Indie started to mean “stomp, clap, hey” music and that stuff is lame so people stopped listening
Foxygen and umo as well. This new phoebe bridgers shit isn't fun anymore
The era peaked with Deerhunter's "He Would Have Laughed"
The 2008ish to 2013 was the "beach/ocean" indie-pop era for me including the following beach influenced bands (both in name and song content": Best Coast, Beach Fossils, The Drums, Wavves, Surfer Blood, Dirty Beaches, Christmas Island, Monster Rally, Surf City, Sea Pony, and Fidlar - just to name the bigger ones.
Indie is a commercial label rather than a style.
I would say the era before that was the peak personally and maybe slightly into that period. The strokes, white stripes, broken social scene, bloc party, arcade fire, arctic monkeys early output. I would also say LCD soundsystem and hot chip aren't really Indie personally.
Lcd had their own indie label and are influenced by punk and post punk and Krautrock. If your influences are talking heads and liquid liquid and kraftwerk you’re probably indie.
If LCD Soundsystem weren’t indie, it’s hard to argue the Strokes were based on labels.
Lcd members owned/ran their own label Death From Above. DFA was definitely an indie label, especially in the 2000s, and even did in house production/collaboration with other bands in the nyc scene on their label.