This was supposed to be the year indie rock came back. Or at least that’s what the release calendar suggested.
In 2017, a number of acts that defined the mid-to-late-2000s indie-rock boom I came up in—Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, Grizzly Bear, Spoon, Dirty Projectors, Broken Social Scene, Feist, the National, Fleet Foxes, and Wolf Parade—released their first new albums in years. Nearly half of them, in fact, were making their debuts on major labels—historically a sign of moving to the next level in a band’s career. With folks like LCD, BSS, and Wolf Parade emerging from lengthy self-imposed hiatuses, there was a sense of surreal nostalgia for an era that, from one angle, doesn’t feel so long ago. And the two of these albums I found the most compelling, LCD’s American Dream and the National’s Sleep Well Beast, reckoned with the crawl toward death in this fucked-up world—a middle-aged reality check if there ever was one.
Generational divides can be difficult to suss out in real time, but watching these bands come back with respectable but not career-best albums, some of the differences between the indie of then and the indie of now came into focus. I believe that musicians can make brilliant art past their fourth or sixth or 13th records, but I had to admit that these acts weren’t at the epicenter of exciting listening in 2017, even if there were strong songs showing growth on almost all their albums. Arcade Fire, the band that arguably defined an indie generation through sheer ambition, was the only real disaster; they sounded miserable in their cynicism on Everything Now. But if I had trouble connecting to some of these records, I found the hope they once stirred in me in the next generation. From the means of creation, distribution, and promotion, to the prevailing sounds, scenes, and power structures, the idea of indie rock is evolving once again.
In indie-label stars that are distinctly of this decade—Perfume Genius, Moses Sumney, and King Krule, who all had a big 2017—I hear idiosyncratic, experimental music that pulls from many corners. Sometimes there are guitars, sometimes not, but I wouldn’t hesitate to call the music they’re making “indie rock” in light of the wide, weird path illuminated by the last generation. Their forebears bent pop into new shapes with post-genre approaches; they showed that majestic woodwinds or glittering glockenspiel can add a lot to a rock song; they reminded listeners that electronic music and angular riffs have had something to say to each other since the late 1970s.
And as for indie rock that sounds more traditional in structure, with a focus on distorted guitars and a certain kind of angst, it’s still here, and there’s something of a correction underway. Women are now at the forefront, injecting DIY rock of the past with fresh perspectives and a fierceness often hinting at the fight it took to get there.
From the Smiths’ wry poetry to Elliott Smith’s aching murmurs, indie rock has long been defined, in part, by introspection (as well as abstraction), which makes it uniquely tied to identity. One-to-one identification is not the only way to relate to others, of course—good art transcends that, and sometimes relatability doesn’t need to bethe defining aesthetic. But if you’ve been listening to music built on personal experience and largely created by straight, white men for years, seeing more and more women, queer folks, and people of color at the forefront of the genre only broadens its scope. Little by little, the scene feels more open.
With its undercurrent of liberal progressivism and its underground spirit, indie rock has never been off-limits to women, at least straight-passing white ones. But indie’s leading ladies have often been positioned as “the girl band,” as if their existence in male-dominated scenes were a novelty. This kind of gender essentialism can come from well-meaning sources, too, and be handled with more nuance than “woman is a genre.” Earlier this year, in a feature package that felt like a long time coming, The New York Timesdeclared that “Rock’s Not Dead, It’s Ruled by Women.” Even a publication as broad as the Times could say it plainly: “Indie rock, especially, has undergone an identity crisis this decade. Often, male-fronted indie bands have begun to feel rote or even parodic, as if they’ve run out of ideas or exhausted the passion to develop new ones.”
The eight women who participated in the Times’ roundtable seemed to derive some amount of pride from being visible, though they also expressed frustration at how quickly their presence became politicized. Sheer Mag’s Christina Halladay, whose hell-bent scowl is easily the most powerful part of her band’s infectious 2017 LP of ’70s-style hard rock, spoke of the years it took to start playing in bands, in large part because she didn’t see herself represented. Vagabon’s Lætitia Tamko, who lived in Cameroon until she was a teenager, said that it wasn’t until she saw a male acquaintance’s band—at her first concert, at age 21—that she had a I can do that moment, despite having played guitar since high school. Her 2017 debut, Infinite Worlds (Father/Daughter Records), sounds comfortingly familiar in its moments of hollowed-out rawness, but Tamko’s shouts about making your own space in the world quietly shook me in a new way. They felt necessary this year.
What underscores these comments from Halladay and Tamko is a sense that the structure of the scene created an intimidating obstacle they had to overcome. That feeling continues to drive the internal struggles of othered people in not just the music sphere, but pretty much anywhere they’ve historically been made to feel that they do not belong, either explicitly or implicitly. But the last decade has seen the rise of technology that allows you to write, record, produce, distribute, and promote your own music from your bedroom, starting from the minute you watch a YouTube tutorial on the five beginner guitar chords “you need to know.” The barrier to entry has never been more conducive to proving your own worst fears wrong by simply doing it yourself.
Even if you’re interested in making a record with a full-band sound, you no longer have to be part of a band or work with a producer to achieve it. And while having a singular creative figure at the fore isn’t really that different from how many bands have a primary songwriter, the freedom to go it alone encourages a new kind of auteur approach, which can be helpful as far as empowering songwriters who, in another era, might have felt alienated by rock’s straight, white boys’ club. Artists don’t have to resolve not to rock the boat in a band of dudes—they can build their own damn boat and sail to an island where people get them.
Jay Som’s Everybody Works is a great example of this self-produced and performed approach. Released by Polyvinyl back in March, the second LP from Bay Area singer-songwriter Melina Duterte balances dream-pop whispers and a dark fog of distorted guitars with slinky R&B. Identity plays a small supporting role, too, but Duterte leaves room for the listener; in the first line of the record, she coos, “I like the way your lipstick stains the corner of my smile.” From there, depending on your own perspective, you might listen to the record and imagine her singing about women, but the specific perspective isn’t necessarily the point.
This year, Jay Som wasn’t the only promising singer-songwriter whose sophomore album perfected that tricky balance between polished ambition and lo-fi charm. Soft Sounds From Another Planet (Dead Oceans), from Japanese Breakfast (aka Michelle Zauner), is a rare combination of funny, meditative, and blunt as hell, all set to bubbling beats, girl-group pop, and wistful electric-guitar strumming. Big Thief’s Capacity (Saddle Creek) lives and dies at the deft hands of Adrianne Lenker, whose vivid familial storytelling and honeyed vocals set her folk-rock band apart from the pack. And although Julien Baker’s Turn Off the Lights (Matador) is as much a piano album as it is a showcase of her transfixing guitar meanderings, the record revolves around the kind of stark emotional trauma that appeals to listeners who weaned themselves on emo.
Arguably this decade’s master of channeling the emo vulnerability of her youth into punk-flecked indie rock has been the Alabama-bred singer-songwriter Katie Crutchfield, who records as Waxahatchee. Her fourth album, this year’s Out in the Storm (Merge), includes two of her best songs ever: “Never Been Wrong” and “8 Ball.” In the first, which immediately blows open the record’s front door, I hear something so real, and so personal: the art of beating a stubborn, arrogant man at his own emotional game. The interplay between the guitars and the vocals is masterful, the way Crutchfield teeters at the brink of anger with her riffs before she cuts them off and swerves back towards quieter verses, only for frustrations to keep bubbling over in the chorus. What a clever way to mimic how it feels to navigate these situations, as a woman, especially this line: “I will unravel when no one sees what I see.”
Maybe I see something in this song that a man would not. Value systems do change when different people define them. This was also something I could not stop thinking about this year, particularly as NPR Music offered up Turning the Tables, a new canon of music made by women and non-binary folks, as voted on by women and non-binary folks. At a live event for the project back in July, I heard many of the women involved in its creation discuss how they decided what was worthy of inclusion. One quality they landed on, which is not valued enough in traditional (i.e. largely male-compiled) canons of popular music, was the kind of joy typically associated with mainstream pop.
After spending the summer listening exclusively to Turning the Table’s list of 150 albums (plus 72 more by women), The New York Times’ Wesley Morris came to this conclusion: “The culture has tended to prefer and confer approval on what sounds masculine, and what sounds masculine is rock’n’roll. Rock’s cultural primacy has been on the decline for more than a decade, but we still privilege its cool, its primal urges. Bravado has a gravitational pull. Feminine atmospherics—femininity itself—confounds, annoys, exasperates us.”
I hear feminine atmospherics in two of my favorite albums of the year, which happen to be made by men: Perfume Genius’ No Shape and Moses Sumney’s Aromanticism. I consider both to be indie rock in the broadest sense, though matters of identity and style have complicated any specific categorization.
Sumney self-trained his stunning falsetto by emulating the vocal runs of R&B/pop singers like Beyoncé, Usher, and Justin Timberlake, and indeed the bold soulfulness of his voice elevates his chamber-folk songs to a dramatic level. Aromanticism’s airless bottom, “Doomed,” reaches into the depths of loneliness with its vocals, pulling out a long piece of rippling silk and draping it across the dark sky. But because Sumney is black, his work has been considered by many to be R&B, when that is but one component of his sound. It’s worth noting that Sumney is signed to Jagjaguwar, the revered indie folk and rock label that’s home to Bon Iver, Angel Olsen, and Sharon Van Etten. “If someone goes looking for a folk artist or an experimental artist and doesn’t see these black artists, that’s a dollar taken from their pocket,” Sumney told Pitchfork earlier in the year, in a frank characterization of why genre terminology matters. Seeing Sumney recently open for Animal Collective, a band that once expanded what indie rock could sound like, it was clear to me that there is some freak-folk DNA shared between them. But Sumney is far more elegant and cinematic, gorgeously scaling his songs with harps, horns, and strings.
Indie’s last generation had no shortage of beautiful vocal textures to match its gilded orchestral arrangements, from Sufjan Stevens’ handsewn scales to Grizzly Bear’s jewel-toned harmonies to the almighty “Whoa-Oh.” But what we’re hearing now, with a wider range in the mix, takes the music to arresting new places—a thrilling development for those who, like me, turn their ears to vocals first. The breadth of sounds that the voices of Moses Sumney and Perfume Genius’ Mike Hadreas accommodate is stunning, shapeless.
On his fourth album No Shape (Matador), Hadreas floats through waves of intensity in every direction: gleaming hope, squirming lust, ~real love~, clever resistance from gay-fearing agendas, and the darkest nights of the soul. It is the first indie rock album in forever that I can imagine grinding to, thanks in large part to its sexy and richly atmospheric soundscapes. Hadreas and his collaborators evoke, at times, Sade, Kate Bush, Portishead, the “Law & Order” theme song, Prince guitar solos, classical violin, and moody mid-century jazz—but the album still comes across as remarkably cohesive. No Shape doesn’t mean no direction, and it is Hadreas’ voice that guides the path to transcendence.
At a Perfume Genius show in Brooklyn back in May, when Hadreas shimmied so hard, his top half shook away from the black corset he was wearing, the crowd erupted with screams. “No family is safe when I sashay,” he sang as he strutted across the stage. Three years ago when Hadreas released “Queen,” from which this line comes, it felt important to me. Our country was just a year away from passing gay marriage in the Supreme Court, but Hadreas still seemed like an outlier to the larger indie machine of trends. It turns out he was ahead of them, both in sound and in sentiment.
Toward the end of the last decade, as “hipster” seemed an applicable description for just about anything, the image of an indie rock fan became almost a parody in larger culture: beard, black plastic glasses, flannel shirt, air of pretentiousness about whatever guitar band was blowing up the blogs. It would be unfair erasure to say this was exclusively who was playing in these bands or attending these shows (myself included), but it was a culture living in the shadow of—and at times in conflict with—what “indie” had come to nebulously represent. Still, the crowds I was in looked somewhat homogeneous, whether it was Arcade Fire’s stump shows for Obama’s first election or the National touring behind Boxer or Broken Social Scene conquering Lollapalooza.
When I go to shows for newer indie artists now, it feels a little different. It is, at once, a continuum of the last generation and a clean slate. I see more women, and queer people, and black and brown and Asian folks. There’s lots of kids who fall in between the cracks of it all, just like the music they’re coming to hear.
Originally posted on PITCHFORK.COM
