So far as rock stardom goes, Grizzly Bear was by no means an apparent candidate. A Brooklyn-based band that fashioned in 2002, it specialised in subtlety—delicate riffs, choir-like singing, meandering melodies. Some musicians ask their crowds to “make some noise”; within the new e book Such Nice Heights: The Full Historical past of the Indie Rock Explosion, the music journalist Chris DeVille remembers seeing Grizzly Bear’s lead singer reward an viewers for being “so quiet and attentive.”
But by 2009, Grizzly Bear was a scorching ticket. The band’s album Veckatimest debuted within the prime 10 of the Billboard Sizzling 200—and would ultimately promote 1.1 million copies worldwide, buoyed by its single “Two Weeks” showing in a Tremendous Bowl industrial for Volkswagen. When Jay-Z and Beyoncé attended one of many band’s concert events, it appeared an indication that the tectonic plates of tradition had been shifting. Grizzly Bear was indie; Jay-Z and Beyoncé represented what indie was supposedly unbiased from: the mainstream. However the separation between the 2 worlds was changing into blurrier every single day. Reacting to observers who’d been stunned to see him on the present, Jay-Z informed MTV Information, “What the indie rock motion is doing proper now could be very inspiring.”
The phrase indie rock originated within the late ’70s to discuss with area of interest, punk-influenced bands—Buzzcocks, Hüsker Dü, R.E.M.—that obtained their begin distributing their very own data and reserving their very own reveals. However in the course of the 2000s, it got here to discuss with all kinds of artwork and product united by a imprecise desire for scruffiness over polish. Indie included songs on the Billboard Sizzling 100, similar to Modest Mouse’s “Float On.” It encompassed the music on The O.C., a present watched by thousands and thousands. It was a shopper financial system that made classic clothes and microbrewed beer into company endeavors (pour one out for American Attire). And ultimately, the time period appeared to lose any that means. Twenty-first-century indie formed the identities of many Millennials, but it surely’s now usually talked about with pitying nostalgia—because the bygone fashion of hipsters with handlebar mustaches pretending to be countercultural whereas making easy-listening music for lodge lobbies.
DeVille’s e book is a meticulous recounting of that twee and heady period. A author and editor for the stalwart music weblog Stereogum, DeVille catalogs indie’s permutations with the keenness of a baseball-card collector, astutely sorting small developments amid bigger developments. (For instance: I’d by no means earlier than thought-about how the provision of Wi-Fi web drove demand for coffee-shop-friendly music.) However as to what indie meant—whether or not it was understood finest as an inventive renaissance, a advertising and marketing fad, a by-product of technological change—he affords a shrug: “A number of interpretations are legitimate.” The e book additionally has a little bit of an elegiac really feel, suggesting that no matter indie was, it’s definitively over. But in some ways, indie nonetheless lives—and represents an idealistic strategy to artwork and tradition that’s properly price preserving.
The e book opens with a memory from DeVille’s adolescence within the late ’90s. Whereas the women at his highschool listened to MTV stars like Britney Spears, the boys adopted nu steel bands similar to Korn—although DeVille by no means absolutely related with that music’s rageful essence. Ultimately, he obtained into the artier angst of Deftones, which led him to Radiohead, which led him to full-blown music geekdom. “For me, indie wasn’t about DIY ethics, avant-garde disruption, or any sort of radical worldview,” he writes. “It was about albums I may spin incessantly and arrange into lists rather than a character, songs I may burn onto combine CDs for my family and friends to indicate off my good style, and bands that doubled as a secret handshake with individuals cooler than me.”
His trajectory mirrors my very own journey from Incubus-loving tween to Shins-loving teen, however I discovered the reason of his personal motives somewhat miserable. Smug posturing and insularity had been definitely a part of the subculture, however so—not less than we informed ourselves—was severe musical appreciation. Mainstream musical choices of the time tended towards the overly macho or overly female, overly loud or overly slick—however indie appeared to worth complexity and smarts. Albums similar to Modest Mouse’s The Moon & Antarctica and Wilco’s Yankee Lodge Foxtrot didn’t seem to be they had been created to carry out an identification or please a constituency; they had been, as a substitute, exploring summary musical and lyrical concepts.
In fact, believing you’re too delicate and genuine to care about identification classes is an identification itself—as indie’s transformation right into a lifestyle-branding buzzword would come to reveal. Lots of the scene’s distinguished artists had been white and male, and the scene was brimming with naivete and privilege (making bizarre music for no cash is lots simpler when you’ve gotten a belief fund, as some artists did). However there’s a motive that, as DeVille fastidiously tracks, the time period indie advanced past the white-dudes-with-guitars stereotype to embody a wide range of rappers, R&B singers, and even low-wattage pop divas. Indie is, at base, an aesthetic sensibility: a perception about what music is for. It stakes out a zone between the avant-garde notion of music as pure sound and the pop notion of music as pure pleasure. Indie says it’s good to listen to somebody do one thing completely different.
What helped early-2000s indie blow up was the brand new approach music was in a position to journey. The web—listening platforms similar to Napster and iTunes, emergent media similar to music blogs—gave a scattered constellation of scrappy bands new attain. Indie’s predecessor scenes, similar to ’90s grunge or ’70s post-punk, had been all rooted in real-life neighborhood venues the place bands, listeners, and journalists mingled. Indie’s bands arose from particular native situations too. However we followers, largely, obtained invested nearly. Youngsters scattered everywhere in the world had been listening deeply and solitarily in headphones—and swapping songs and opinions about these songs on-line.
Maybe that is additionally why, regardless of the connotations of the phrase indie, followers didn’t are inclined to accuse their faves of promoting out after they obtained in style. When music is a purely aesthetic endeavor, severed from any specific materials or geographical context, what does it matter if Pink Bull is sponsoring a tour? Actually, when my beloved Modest Mouse began to achieve mainstream traction, I don’t recall feeling defensive of the band’s purity. I wasn’t a follower who’d seen the band gigging in bars for years; I’d simply found it in some on-line listicle. I appreciated the music it made, and I used to be glad I’d have extra individuals to speak about it with.
Being the primary mass musical motion to flourish on-line additionally explains 2000s indie’s comparatively dangerless aura. Earlier books chronicling rock scenes, similar to Michael Azerrad’s Our Band May Be Your Life or Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s Please Kill Me, had been filled with juicy anecdotes set in tour buses and rock golf equipment. Indie bands, little doubt, have loads of these kinds of tales to share. However DeVille has no dishy scoops to impart. Such Nice Heights tells the story of indie because it was skilled by its shoppers: largely by way of a succession of Pitchfork opinions. The publication—based in 1996 and well-known for the decimal-point precision with which it charges albums—is talked about greater than 100 instances within the e book, elevating the query of whether or not the story of indie is absolutely the story of 1 web site’s affect.
Pitchfork has lengthy gotten a foul rap for snottiness and tortured writing, but it surely’s an vital establishment for a motive. By the early 2000s, Rolling Stone appeared overly preoccupied with Boomer artists of fading vitality; Spin, whereas containing punchy criticism, was a shiny shopper journal inflected by celeb and style. Pitchfork, against this, had a close to monastic devotion to speaking about music as music. In 2024, the location’s founder, Ryan Schreiber, informed The New York Occasions that he wished to create one thing “that was very robust from a essential standpoint,” and that was guided by a query: “Who’s making music that’s actually modern and progressive?”
The credibility of that description is properly supported by Pitchfork’s historical past of trashing once-praised bands each time their new work sounded repetitive or unadventurous. And the location actually does have a report of championing albums that had an evolutionary influence on the way in which music sounds. Within the early 2000s, a vein of innovation was being mined by artists twisting people traditions into new shapes (Sufjan Stevens’s whimsical orchestration, Animal Collective’s ghostly harmonizing, Joanna Newsom’s harp epics). Different bands, similar to Arcade Hearth and the Postal Service, had been turning away from the disaffection that characterised Gen X rock to precise bighearted emotions in bespoke methods.
In fact, not all—and even most—indie bands had been groundbreaking. DeVille traces the knockoff impact that occurred over time, like when the unpredictable pop experimentalists of MGMT had been succeeded—and commercially eclipsed—by bands with blander takes on their concepts (Capital Cities, Foster the Individuals, Empire of the Solar). Because the homespun sounds of early-2000s indie rock turned mall-soundtrack fare, tastemakers took a brand new curiosity in rap, R&B, pop, and digital music. This flip stays controversial—no matter’s fallacious with tradition at the moment, you’ll find somebody tracing the issue again to the rise of so-called poptimism, the assumption that mainstream entertainers had been worthy of essential appraisal, not instinctive disdain. DeVille suggests—fairly pretty—that indie’s poptimist flip was sneaky snobbery, reactions in opposition to the recognition of teams like Mumford & Sons. However the underlying fact is that, by the mid-2010s, lots of “actually modern and progressive” music wasn’t originating from bands. It was coming from genre-agnostic web natives wielding software program and a mic, like Frank Ocean.
The actual motive that indie began to die, or not less than felt as if it did, is Spotify. As streaming supplanted downloads and album gross sales, it automated music discovery. As a substitute of studying Pitchfork or asking a record-store clerk for suggestions, increasingly more individuals started to let algorithms counsel their subsequent obsession. This had a wide range of penalties. One is that it’s turn into more durable than ever for difficult music—music that you have to hear to a couple instances with the intention to love—to achieve a foothold. The status related to doing one thing completely different has began to fade.
Streaming, with its paltry pay charges, additionally made dwelling off small and passionate fan bases more durable for artists to maintain. However the economics of indie had been at all times tenuous. DeVille notes that the scene’s increase synced up with the transient few years when iTunes downloads drove music consumption—thereby permitting small labels to enlarge margins by focusing much less on bodily merchandise. Company patronage, pushed by the hype surrounding indie, additionally rained paydays on off-beat artists. However in a 2012 New York journal characteristic, Grizzly Bear revealed that—for all the band’s outward success—its members weren’t even making a middle-class revenue. The band’s music remained too outré to get performed on industrial radio stations, which had been nonetheless vital drivers of mainstream success. A decade later, the band’s lead singer, Ed Droste, launched a brand new profession as a therapist.
Nonetheless, Jay-Z’s quote about Grizzly Bear proved prophetic: Pop actually did take inspiration from indie. Beyoncé’s rapturously acclaimed 2013 self-titled album was moody, adventuresome, dripping with hipster rhetoric: “Soul not on the market,” she sang. “In all probability gained’t make no cash off this, oh properly.” Indie veterans similar to Jack Antonoff, Aaron Dessner, and Dan Nigro turned era-defining pop producers by serving to Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, and different celebrities make introspective, quirky, rock-adjacent anthems. Pop didn’t hand over the prerogative to broad attraction. However indie’s values—valorizing genuine self-expression and sonic exploration—most likely did form the needs of a technology of listeners.
As for indie music itself, it’s nonetheless right here. It simply went again to being what it was within the first place: a distinct segment, an underground, a stressed inventive philosophy. Each day, Pitchfork nonetheless champions some artist—in rock or rap or some completely new style—whom I haven’t heard of and who challenges my ears. Music nerds are, for instance, presently digging into weirdos similar to Geese (a Gen Z band whose songs have a polyrhythmic, semi-comic depth) and Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band (think about Jimmy Buffett doing eight-minute, science-fiction-inflected sermons). On Wednesday, Pitchfork even spotlighted a baffling hip-hop offshoot that refers to itself as … “indie rock.” The music of the margins is just not prone to discover the attain it did for a couple of fleeting years of the 2000s. However nice issues, indie insists, are made for their very own sake.
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