My book SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion came out one year ago today. Thank you to everyone who has read it, listened to it, checked it out from the library, reviewed it, invited me to talk about it, and otherwise made it a smashing success. I’ve officially “earned out,” meaning my publisher recouped the advance they paid me and I will now earn royalties on every copy sold. As a professional music blogger, this is a big deal for me. Also a big deal, sentimentally and materially: inspiring a thinkpiece in The Atlantic, going on so many of my favorite podcasts, cracking Rolling Stone’s list of the best music books of 2025, and the warm response to so much of the bonus content I’ve published here.

Speaking of bonus content: With the anniversary hitting today, it seemed right to assemble the most ambitious SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS B-side yet. It’s time for Part 1 of the State of Indie Address.

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS is about how indie rock changed the mainstream and the mainstream changed indie rock in the 21st century. (Original subtitle: How Indie Rock Went Pop.) The idea was to trace the evolution of “indie” as a genre and a broader cultural entity in the early 21st century, which aligned with my coming of age, my years as a young writer at a weekly newspaper, and my career as an editor at the indie-focused music blog Stereogum. I started by exploring how indie rock arose and what it entailed in the ‘80s and ‘90s, then traced its post-Y2K evolution through umpteen trends and microgenres, intersecting with developments in media, tech, fashion, business, Hollywood, politics, and more. I’d explain it further, but in lieu of me rambling here, you ought to just buy it and read it.

In interviews about the book, I keep encountering variations on this question: What is the state of indie now? It’s a complicated subject, especially because one of the main takeaways from the book is that nobody knows what indie means anymore, if they ever did. Indie was a business model, then a genre, then a marketing demographic. It has been a way of life derived from conviction and practical necessity, and it has been a buzzword leveraged to sell jeans. In its manifold splendor, “indie” used to connote a certain shared sensibility, but that sensibility has been challenged, evolved, and co-opted so many times that the term has taken on many disparate meanings depending on who you’re talking to. Even on a strictly musical level, the term has been stretched way too thin.

To give you a sense of where the book left off, I wrote the last chapter, “Love It If We Made It,” in the fall of 2024. It was originally supposed to be two chapters: one about social media, streaming, and big tech’s impact on indie music in the 2010s, and one about the further blurring of the lines between pop and indie as we reached the COVID era. Per my editor’s suggestion, I ended up cramming it all into one mega-finale. Here are some of the subjects that came up:

• Spotify’s influence on aesthetics, economics, and music discovery

• Social media replacing comment sections, controlling publishers’ fate with their algorithms, and contributing to the increasingly sanitized feel of the internet

• A new generation of guitar bands rising up in the 2010s, at a moment when rock was far from trendy within the indie media sphere

• Women moving to the forefront of indie rock in the 2010s, coinciding with the return of guitars

• Jack Antonoff’s central role in blurring pop and indie into a tasteful yet sometimes flavorless middle ground

• Antonoff collaborators like Clairo, Lorde, St. Vincent, and the 1975 thriving in that in-between space

• TikTok prioritizing persona over mega-hits in the minting of new pop stars and creating intense parasocial fan bases around indie-rooted cult favorites like Mitski and Phoebe Bridgers

• Young pop phenoms like Olivia Rodrigo and Gracie Abrams pulling influence from indie and alternative artists

• Taylor Swift spending several years in the prestige indie universe of the National and Bon Iver

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS is about indie’s convergence with the mainstream, so I skipped over a lot of more esoteric, abrasive, or pointedly non-mainstream indie music because it fell outside my focus. When I conceived of the book, I always knew I wanted to end it around folklore, the album Swift made with Antonoff and the National’s Aaron Dessner during the early months of the pandemic. The biggest artist in the world put out the bestselling album of the year—a major-label release that spun off hit singles, won Album Of The Year at the Grammys, and dominated pop culture for months on end—and people routinely referred to it as her “indie” album. I like folklore a lot, but if that kind of all-consuming behemoth is indie, the word has truly lost its meaning.

Still, even if indie remains a slippery concept, I think it’s a worthwhile exercise to assess the state of indie now. Though we can’t seem to agree what indie means, a lot of us are invested in its continued vitality. Maybe you care about independent music as a sustainable practice apart from the corporate machine. Maybe indie, as you understand it, has yielded some of your favorite music of all time. Maybe the culture surrounding indie music has shaped your personal identity and provided you with a sense of community. If indie means something to you, if the thought of it withering away concerns you, then you’d do well to get a grip on how it’s doing and where it’s going.

When I wrote my column The Week In Pop at Stereogum from 2014-2021, one of my favorite annual rituals was writing a State Of Pop Address, surveying the mainstream landscape in an attempt to figure out how pop music and the music business were evolving. I want to try something similar with indie music, but whereas my last two book chapters got combined into one, what was supposed to be one post here will instead be divided up.

My initial goal with this piece was to explore the various definitions of “indie” music today and sketch out a rough portrait of the trends that have been dominating within what remains of the Big Indie sphere. But before I dig into the current sound and trajectory of indie, it feels necessary to survey the conditions that are informing the artists’ approach. So here in Part 1 I’ll outline what today’s independent musicians are facing, and in Part 2 I’ll delve into the substance of indie music now.

Part 1: The State of the Biz

First, because it impacts the trajectory of the music, let’s consider the state of independent music as an industry. For artists, it’s rough out there. So much of the infrastructure they used to depend on has crumbled, which has altered the challenge of building a sustainable audience and led to a financial crisis for all but the top 1 percent of artists. As in society at large, the middle class is disappearing as the gap between the uber-wealthy and everyone else increases. According to the Organization for Recorded Culture and Arts (ORCA), a think tank supported by basically all of the biggest labels in indie music, “While economic growth across the music industry is impressive, the benefits of that growth are concentrated at the top, and there are now many more mouths to feed across the music ecosystem than a decade ago.”

Back in the ‘90s, when CD sales were surging, artists on independent labels were in a better position to make a living off of healthy album sales. As crystallized in Steve Albini’s famous zine essay “The Problem With Music,” one reason some in the underground avoided major labels was because of their famously exploitative contracts. Certain independent labels did shady business too—including SST and Homestead, two of the most important indie rock labels of the ‘80s—and independents in general had a smaller reach than majors. It’s not like you could just walk into a recording career, but the idea of making a living by selling your music wasn’t crazy.

Or as puts it, making a living while selling your music wasn’t crazy. Ayers is the US head of Beggars Group—a family of leading indie labels including 4AD, Matador, Rough Trade, XL, and Young—and just wrapped up his term as chair of American Association of Independent Music (A2IM). In the ’90s and 2000s, he was the drummer for a series of rock bands trying to become the next big thing out of Seattle. He says one big difference back then is that even musicians who struggled to break through could pay their bills via low-paying side jobs because the cost of living was so much lower.

“There’s a narrative out there that it used to be easy and now it’s not,” Ayers told me. “It’s never (in my lifetime) been easy. I was in ‘90s bands who pressed 1,000 CDs (which felt expensive at the time!), played shows for 10 people and sold zero. That was the norm in my world. But it was easier to support that lifestyle with an $8 per hour job. The world is too expensive now and more people than ever are making music. Those two factors don’t work well together.”

CD sales surged toward their all-time peak in 2000, yet the bottom was about to fall out of the record business. By that point, Napster had opened up an infinite flow of free music, introducing technology that would severely cut into album sales for years to come. Although iTunes eventually allowed artists to sell their wares without manufacturing overhead, providing listeners a legitimate way to acquire MP3s, it was a Band-Aid for the gaping wounds created by file-sharing. By 2010, Brian Eno declared that people who had earned a living off recorded music were lucky beneficiaries of fleeting circumstances, comparing records to the whale blubber that was used for fuel in the 1840s before gas came along.

Around the time of Eno’s proclamation, the recording industry was zeroing in on a solution for its cratering revenue: streaming. Spotify, Apple Music, and other streaming services really did save the music industry in the sense that they made the business of recorded music profitable again for the giant corporations at its core. “Demand is booming for hits new and old and music companies now generate more predictable, recurring revenue streams than at any time in history,” Warner Music Group’s Robert Kyncl wrote in a letter to shareholders this year. Per the RIAA’s year-end report, the recording industry generated a record $11.5 billion in revenue in 2025, more than half of that via paid streaming.

According to MIDiA Research, independents—artists and labels operating outside the three major label groups Universal, Sony, and Warner—account for 38 percent of that revenue, up from 28 percent about a decade ago. The increase is “encouraging” for artists, argues Daniel Brooks at the music promotion company Chartlex: “The independent ecosystem now has the scale to build careers at a meaningful tier without major label investment. The flip side is that the competition is no longer ‘indie vs majors’; it is indie vs other indies in a now-crowded mid-tier.”

It’s questionable, though, whether independent music as we’ve traditionally understood it is actually gaining a bigger share of the pie. MIDiA’s suggestion that indies represent a growing chunk of the record business does not square with data published by A2IM, who reported a decade ago that in 2016, independent record labels accounted for 38.4 percent of the global market share. , founder of mega-indie Jagjaguwar and co-leader of Secretly Group (Secretly Canadian, Jagjaguwar, Dead Oceans, and Numero Group, plus a 50 percent stake in Merge) suspects the shape of the indie sphere is also changing in ways that might further alter our understanding of that market share.

I asked Van Arman whether MIDiA’s data suggests indie labels are thriving, and if so, whether that extends to their artists. “So much of the indie-sector revenue is now coming from DIY distributors, i.e. artists self-releasing as well as spammers and, to some extent, fraudsters,” he told me. “The collective market share of what you would deem an ‘old school’ indie label has diminished significantly. So, in a sense, traditional indie labels and those middle-class artists that customarily align with such labels are not thriving.” For what it’s worth, according to Billboard’s Indie Power Players feature, the share of industry revenue going to indies went all the way up to 44 percent in Q1 of this year, but it’s tough to say how much of that represents traditional indie labels vs. DIY strivers vs. opportunists clogging the servers with AI music.

Van Arman points out another factor affecting the artists attempting to launch new careers or promote new releases: Streaming has facilitated a growing demand for older music (“catalog”) at the expense of the new. As Warner’s Kyncl put it, “27% of US streaming consumption in 2024 [came] from new releases versus 45% 10 years ago, [so] music companies no longer rely…on the success of new releases.” ORCA’s Patrick Clifton concluded that major labels are throwing more of their efforts into catalog at the expense of developing new artists: “Older music became the norm because it’s good business for DSPs and for their partners who own that music.”

What everyone agrees on is that there is so much more competition for people’s ears now, including slop that’s being shoveled online at a disconcerting rate. Luminate estimates that 106,000 new songs are uploaded to Spotify every day. The French streaming service Deezer reports that about a third of the new songs that hit its servers each day are fully AI-generated, a phenomenon that has been taking hold across all streamers. Some of that AI music is even more malicious than you might think. We’ve been seeing fraudsters upload counterfeit tracks to DSPs under the names of established artists for years. AI makes that scam easier to perpetrate, and even lesser known acts are at risk of being exploited. The Rochester band Bad Bloom recently reported that AI had generated a bunch of fake songs under their name and a fake merch shop, sparking a comments section full of similar horror stories.

It’s easy to see how the corporations that have been so enthusiastic about AI could take advantage of this outpouring of AI chum at artists’ expense. As documented at length by Mood Machine author Liz Pelly, Spotify was already happy to fill its recommended playlists with “ghost” artists who negotiate a lower royalty rate to provide the equivalent of Muzak. Now they can just as easily crowd out legitimate recording artists with AI music, though they recently pledged to label AI-generated personas and exclude their music from editorial and algorithmic recommendations. (They haven’t said what they’ll do about AI-generated music released by human artists like Fenix Flexin.)

Even before AI came along, the streaming economy was set up to benefit only the most popular artists in the world. Spotify pays out a paltry $0.0003 to $0.0005 per track stream, meaning an unsigned artist needs their songs to be streamed 2,500 times to equal one $10 digital album sale. Think about your own collection of physical albums; how many of them have you listened to all the way through 250 times? The math reflects a devaluing of music. On top of that, as of 2024, Spotify pays no royalties on tracks with less than 1,000 streams. The policy is ostensibly about rooting out fraud, but as Damon & Naomi/Galaxie 500’s points out, in practice it’s a reverse Robin Hood situation: “reducing payments to those who already receive less, in order to boost payments for those who already receive more, increasing the divide between haves and have-nots.”

Some in the music industry are fighting to raise streaming rates. The labor union United Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW), which counts Krukowski as a co-founder, teamed with Rep. Rashida Tlaib on the Living Wage for Musicians Act, which would guarantee a minimum payout of one cent per stream, “an amount calculated specifically to provide a working class artist a living wage from streaming.” In a Guardian op-ed, Krukowski wrote that the platforms have had their chance to develop a fair payment system and have failed, therefore “Congress needs to step in and make streaming work also for those who create the music that we all – I mean, all of us, musicians and listeners – need.”

Van Arman told me that while he’s aligned with these goals, he doesn’t believe streaming reform will accomplish as much as finding a way to guide listeners toward platforms like Bandcamp, Cantilever, and Substack rather than impersonal DSPs. “What seems to be needed is not tweaking streaming models around the edges, or going user-centric vs. pro-rata, or anything like that (all of which is just moving chairs around on the deck of the Titanic), but rather a shift in how consumers value music,” he says. “I am not sure it will be enough, but I think the best thing we can do is to encourage modes of consuming and buying music that are more quality-oriented, less algorithmically curated, where fans are making meaningful connections with human creators.”

It’s true that compared to streaming, selling records and merchandise remains far more beneficial to a musician’s bottom line. That’s a big reason artists have rallied around Bandcamp Friday, the monthly event in which the online storefront and social network Bandcamp forgoes its cut of sales on its platform, which reportedly drove $19 million in profits for artists last year. Ayers says It’s a boon to all independent musicians but is especially crucial for those operating on a smaller scale beneath the scale of Secretly and Beggars.

“For the records I release on my own small label, Valley of Search, it has more impact—doing $500 or $1,000 in one day means a lot,” he says. “I think that was the intention: to give smaller labels and artists a noticeable bump.” Bandcamp Friday has worked well enough that it’s become a fixture of the modern independent music economy. The first Friday of the month always brings a flurry of notifications to my inbox: new music releases, new merch items, and messages reminding fans that today would be a great day to support your favorite artists with your wallet.

Most likely, they’re hoping you buy their records. Vinyl comes with significant overhead costs, and most artists can’t afford to press eight variants of their album like Taylor Swift. But Swift’s cult of personality is instructive; even on a micro scale, if you can develop a devoted following, merch has become a lucrative business. Fans will buy your album in multiple formats: LP, CD, cassette. Some will buy it as a collector’s item and not even listen to it. (Maybe that’s the assumption labels are making, considering how shoddy the vinyl editions of major releases are becoming.) They’ll buy your T-shirts, hoodies, and jackets. They’ll buy your branded postcards, keychains, votive candles, rolling papers, tarot cards… the list goes on. Merch has always been a pillar of fandom, and in the streaming era, it matters more than ever.

So how do you build that dedicated fan base? Even if you’re consistently releasing new music, how will it find its way to listeners? On the streaming platforms, you’re at the whim of the algorithm. Radio offers a fraction of its former reach, and what remains of the industry is mostly under corporate control (though as we saw with Angine de Poitrine’s star-making KEXP session, support from the right station can still make a difference). Say you manage to go viral on TikTok; there’s no guarantee that everyone using a 15-second snippet of your song in their meme video will translate to a streaming surge. Just as stills and GIFs from famous movies and TV shows sometimes take on a new life as memes that overshadows their source material, a lot of the people who become familiar with your viral snippet might not even know who you are, much less lock in as a permanent part of your fandom.

Still, a young person today is way more likely to discover music in any of those ways than by reading an album review. Historically, I’ve found out about so many amazing artists via music journalism. But publications that have helped countless bands build their careers keep dying off, largely due to clueless corporate owners and a tech industry that has long been actively hostile to online publishing (moving the focus from the web to apps, establishing online ad monopolies, de-prioritizing links on social networks, replacing functional search results that drive traffic to publishers with hallucinatory AI summaries…) If it’s not in a video, I’m not sure any kids are seeing it.

As a result, the number of outlets publishing music journalism has dwindled, and the ones that remain are mostly working with skeleton crews. Anyone who follows music journalism could not have missed the widespread mourning over Live Nation-owned Veeps recently laying off the staffs of BrooklynVegan, Alternative Press, Revolver, and Goldmine. Before that, in early 2025 there was an even louder outcry when Condé Nast drastically reduced the staff of Pitchfork—which, though not still flexing its agenda-setting power of yore, remains one of the few publications with enough juice to launch an unknown artist to fame or drive pop stans bonkers over review scores. At Stereogum, we were putting up record traffic two years ago, but Google’s rollout of AI search wrecked our stats and put us in a precarious place.

Smaller staffs, slashed freelance budgets, and an overall decrease in editorial output means fewer contributors can bring their tastes and perspectives to these publications, which means many more deserving artists will slip through the cracks. Even if you can afford a fancy publicist, good luck penetrating the nightmare inboxes of the few of us still doing this as a day job. In this environment, tossed-off blurbs are like water droplets in the desert. The acclaimed musician told me he got 40 or 50 reviews for his first album on Sony in 2014 compared to three or four for his recent release on Nonesuch. (Those aren’t indie labels, but you get the point.) I told him that when doing research for album reviews, I often can’t find one new interview with the artist I’m writing about.

Sure, the indie sphere is still minting new stars (e.g. Geese), and artists on indie labels can still make a splash on the charts (e.g. Phoebe Bridgers). But those kinds of breakouts are growing rarer, in part because in a world where algorithmic news feeds dominate and centralized hubs like websites and print publications have withered, the whole system is more stratified and siloed. The media pipeline that used to turn buzz bands into stars mostly doesn’t exist anymore, and as revealed, what remains of that pipeline appears to be subject to manipulation via savvy/deceptive marketing campaigns creating the illusion of grassroots support.

This landscape is one reason so many artists feel like they have to create social media content. In the absence of a star-making apparatus, they try to build one themselves: recording videos for TikTok and Instagram, shitposting on Twitter/X and Bluesky, writing diaries and analyses on Substack, launching video podcasts and Twitch streams. They do whatever they can to up their follower counts, build brand loyalty, and hopefully become enough of a known quantity to get invited on a social-native video series like Track Star or SubwayTakes. Sometimes it seems like you have to spend so much time becoming a parasocial multimedia content engine that there’s no time left to actually make music—and ultimately, putting so much time and energy into these platforms benefits the platforms more than it benefits you.

The other way to get attention, as always, is playing shows. Relentless touring is a time-honored method for developing an audience, and nowadays it’s more than just a way to get the word out about your music. As a result of the recording industry’s decay, musicians who once toured to fuel their album sales now essentially give their recorded music away to promote their live shows. That’s how the Hold Steady’s Franz Nicolay described it in his testimony before Congress last month. He estimates that only 10 percent of his personal income comprises recording royalties, with performances and non-musical merch such as T-shirts accounting for the rest. “We aren’t in the recording business; we’re in the performance business,” Nicolay told lawmakers.

But touring ain’t what it used to be, either. COVID resulted in the closure of countless beloved indie venues. Gas and food are pricier than ever. Artists like Jack Antonoff, Jeff Rosenstock, and Tomberlin have publicly criticized venues for taking a cut of performers’ merch profits each night. The Ticketmaster/Live Nation monopoly exerts control over numerous markets and sticks the consumer with outrageous fees, which, as Nicolay pointed out on Capitol Hill, strains the relationship between artists and fans, many of whom are also feeling the squeeze financially.

Early this year, Rolling Stone’s Simon Vozick-Levinson published a feature headlined “Is The Touring Business Broken For Indie Acts?” in which Florence Shaw from Dry Cleaning, one of the buzziest bands in indie rock, concluded that touring “was definitely much, much, much more doable just a few years ago. Things have got nasty. It’s not even about making a profit. It’s about actually being able to do it at all.” In a tour diary published at Stereogum and Substack, veteran UK-based band broke down their tour expenses line by line, explaining how difficult it’s becoming to earn a living on the road.

All these circumstances make a full-time career in the music industry feel increasingly unrealistic. That’s the conclusion former Pitchfork editor Jill Mapes drew in a widely circulated article for Hearing Things, the worker-owned publication she launched with some fellow former Pitchfork coworkers after being impacted by mass layoffs. Lamenting the recent gutting of BrooklynVegan, an essential independent music resource, Mapes suggested a dawning reality in which creatives must become their own patrons, funding their creative work with unglamorous day jobs and side hustles. Some readers responded that they’ve always done it that way, and as Ayers pointed out, it’s increasingly impossible to get by no matter how many jobs you’re holding down. But Mapes’ point was that even for many who’ve “lived the dream” of working in the music biz full-time, the window seems to be closing. The entire independent music ecosystem is on the verge of becoming a passion project.

For some of us, that’s a tough pill to swallow, but it doesn’t have to be a bad thing. In fact, I suspect it may be one factor helping indie music to develop its own distinct character again after years of cozying up to the mainstream. In Part 2 of this series, I’ll explore the various understandings of “indie” in a musical sense these days, and I’ll explain how the current landscape has impacted the trajectory of the genre. Stay tuned.

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SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is out now on St. Martin’s Press. Buy it!

“look, i’m not humorless so i can get behind jokes looking back on the hipster era just as much as the next girl who spent too much money at american apparel. But people have GOT to stop associating that scene with stomp clap lumineers shit. it’s inaccurate!”

So posted the writer and prolific tweeter Ashley Reese last week on the app now known as X. Predictably, this take set off a #discourse. People could not resist chiming in, myself included. Many of us did so because we agreed with Reese. Others disagreed or, because it’s the internet, engaged in entirely different arguments due to a willful misreading of her message or lack of basic reading comprehension.

Reese’s point was simple: It’s ahistorical to say hipsters listened to early 2010s stomp-clap folk-rock like the Lumineers and Mumford & Sons, so please stop making that false association. As the above graphic illustrates, some people do align hipsters with stomp-clap. It’s a category error. It shows a misunderstanding of what hipsters were. The hipsters of 2012 took a substantially different posture toward popular music than the hipsters of 2002, but even mainstream-friendly late-stage hipsters turned up their noses at stomp-clap. At the peak of their popularity, these bands were the antithesis of hip.

To this you might say: Who cares? It is admittedly not a high-stakes matter, but it’s one that matters to me. I care because I want to see history presented accurately, not distorted, and because this subject relates to one close to my heart: the evolution of indie rock and the broader hipster music canon. I don’t know what Reese was reacting to specifically when she fired off her fateful tweet, but I’ve seen this mistaken association a lot, this designation of hipster anathema as the height of hipsterdom. It usually comes from people outside the hipster bubble. It makes me think the general public has a poor understanding of the way hipster tastes and attitudes evolved in the 2010s. One reason I wrote my book was to clear up those misconceptions.

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is about how indie rock changed the mainstream and the mainstream changed indie rock in the 21st century. When I started out, my goal was to write the definitive history of How Indie Rock Went Pop. Inevitably, that pursuit involved an examination of the hipster, a somewhat slippery archetype that infiltrated 2000s pop culture in tandem with the even slipperier genre known as indie. There’s been a fair amount of scholarship on hipsters, most famously Mark Greif’s 2010 New York article “What Was The Hipster?” Greif’s conclusion had an impact on my thinking: “The hipster is that person… who in fact aligns himself both with rebel subculture and the dominant class, and thus opens up a poisonous conduit between the two.”

The metamorphosis of indie as both a genre and a concept is inextricable from the evolution of the hipster as a cultural entity. The two terms are not entirely congruent. You could be into indie rock and not be a hipster (because you rejected the elitist, performative, trend-chasing aspects of hipsterdom). You could be a hipster and not be into indie rock (because you were instead an aficionado of underground rap, extreme metal, Japanese city pop, or all of the above). But the cultural proximity between hipsters and indie was undeniable. Understanding the evolution of hipster attitudes is key to understanding the concurrent changes in indie because those attitudes directly impacted those changes.

“Indie rock” has always been a somewhat vague descriptor, but it was a lot easier to define around the time Sebadoh released “Gimme Indie Rock” in 1991. In the ‘80s, the Our Band Could Be Your Life era, “indie” wasn’t a ubiquitous term yet, but retroactively, we can assign it to an independent business model and a loosely defined genre that thrived within that model. Indie rock denoted a scrappy, inventive subset of bands native to the world of zines and college radio, often too lo-fi, imprecise, or otherwise off-kilter to appeal to a mass audience. In the post-Nirvana moment when so many underground bands signed to major labels, the definition of “indie” got blurrier, and it has continued to blur up to the present day, to the point that even Taylor Swift’s world-conquering Folklore was described as her “indie” album.

In sketching out that arc, my book weaves together a lot of different threads involving technology, media, fashion, etc., considering factors like MySpace, The O.C., Pitchfork, American Apparel, and even the advent of coffee shop WiFi. In terms of the music itself, it surveys several distinct subgenres and scenes that ended up grouped together under the “indie” umbrella. I present a bird’s-eye view of a sprawling history, with no singular factor driving the narrative. But one constant throughout is the hipster revulsion toward the tasteless masses—that early-adopter compulsion to discard whatever has been co-opted by the mainstream and stake out new unclaimed territory ahead of the curve.

We’ve all seen this happen over and over again in the music world. It’s commonly understood that as underground trends bubble up into the popular consciousness, smoothed-out and/or hollowed-out iterations of those trends emerge, often disconnected from the scenes and cultures that birthed them. By this point, the hipsters are on to the next thing. In the first chapter of SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS, borrowing an example from the great Nitsuh Abebe, I recall how the indie music world reacted when grunge went mainstream and subsequently morphed into post-grunge, nu-metal, and butt-rock: by swerving away from all that aggression, toward the soft, quirky, dreamy, and whimsical. (Think Elephant 6, Elliott Smith, Belle And Sebastian, the Flaming Lips...)

That late ‘90s moment is relevant to this discussion. Within last week’s flurry of tweets, the savvy journalist Emilie Friedlander made a salient observation. While acknowledging that the term hipster originated with black revolutionaries in the 1940s, Friedlander pointed out that the pioneers of modern hipsterdom were not millennials but Gen-Xers in the late ‘90s and early 2000s “who defined themselves based on liking film or music that was either too obscure or too ‘difficult’/weird for mass or even middlebrow consumption.” These hipsters “did not care for big name indie bands, or stopped caring about them the moment they became famous,” she wrote. “They liked shit like obscure 70s psych records, ethiopian jazz, ryuichi sakamoto, ‘outsider artists,’ noise music, etc.”

This ethos is where we get the trope of the hipster as the snob who treats knowledge of obscure music as a means for accumulating cool points, who might answer your question about their favorite bands by replying, “You wouldn’t know them.” This mentality often arose from a timeless sense of alienation, a disgust with the lowest-common-denominator crap enjoyed by the average Joe. There was a noble component: a desire to reject consumerism, distance themselves from corporate bloat, subscribe to Adbusters, pursue social activism, and live in a better way. And it sometimes provided its adherents with a sense of superiority, albeit one constantly endangered by the prospect of encountering someone who’d one-upped you in this game. James Murphy brilliantly parodied this subculture on “Losing My Edge” — and ironically, LCD Soundsystem contributed greatly to the indie-goes-pop breakthrough I tracked in the book.

As the 2000s rolled on, a number of factors endangered the old-school hipster way of thinking. File-sharing and online publishing radically increased the accessibility of music and information, lowering the bar for eclectic expertise. Vice, American Apparel, and Terry Richardson brought a hedonistic, fashion-conscious sensibility to hipsterdom, grabbing the baton from Steve Albini’s edgelord provocations but running counter to his ethical DIY approach. Pitchfork and the blogs in its orbit channeled the hipster quest for new esoteric discoveries into a daily race to uncover the hot new band, a process of rapid anointing and discarding that dovetailed with the digital era’s devaluing of music.

The O.C., Garden State, and a slew of similar projects in their wake created a pipeline for user-friendly indie bands to connect with a vast new audience outside the grimy club circuit, and they strengthened the public’s association between hipsters and the poppiest of the indie bands. As hipster fashion sense became to the 2000s what hippies had been to the ‘60s (note that Friedlander’s authentic hipster era ends around the time the public discovered trucker hats), Urban Outfitters allowed you to buy a facsimile of a thrift-store wardrobe directly off the rack. An explosion of hipster dance music led to a flurry of parties soundtracked by blown-out remixes downloaded directly from music blogs, a frontier where cross-pollination between genres went into overdrive.

Crucially, poptimism was also popping off (speaking of subjects people love to discuss with faux-expertise). In the 2000s, a growing number of critics, artists, and fans rallied around the belief that many tenets of music snobbery—our culture’s longstanding intrinsic biases about what makes music good, substantial, important—were tangled up with prejudices like sexism, racism, and homophobia. Contrary to some interpretations, poptimists did not argue that if music is popular it must be good (or at least that’s not how Kelefa Sanneh explained it in poptimism’s most sacred text). They simply believed all music deserved a fair shake, that there are gems to be discovered within genres traditionally dismissed as fluff, and that there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure.

The cost of records used to be a barrier toward exploring new genres outside your wheelhouse. But as music got free, there was little reason for hipsters not to put mega-hits on their iPods alongside their favored obscurities. The MP3s were flowing, and the cloistered world of alleged good taste was starting to feel constrictive. Still, there was a transgressive quality to flouting the old taboos. In the context of hipster tradition, professing your love for so-called teeny bopper music was arguably more outrageous than checking for Merzbow. Theoretically, at least, it was a betrayal of historical indie ideals. I remember feeling scandalized and delighted when Pitchfork named Justin Timberlake’s “My Love” the No. 1 song of 2006, as if we were all getting away with something.

Following indie music throughout the 2000s, I came to understand poptimism as a progressive ideology and opposition to it as evidence of a stodgy musical conservatism. I distinctly remember Pitchfork’s Chris Dahlen pushing back against that framing in a 2005 column. “It is currently deeply uncool to judge music by how it’s made or who really made it—or to expect that the performer nominally attached to the song wrote it, or played on it, or even sang a single note that wasn’t fixed by a computer,” Dahlen wrote, summing up the emerging line of thought. “If you think that a performer with a career and proven talents, like say Bruce Springsteen, isn’t playing the same game as, say, Ashlee Simpson—who’s still shorthand for ‘phony’—then you’re stunted by prejudices that impair your ability to love music.”

Poptimism undoubtedly had progressive roots. It was intertwined with critical theory and the ideologies sometimes now summed up as “woke,” set on challenging old, entrenched power dynamics. Though poptimism recognized the legitimacy of a lot of music that had been historically disrespected, it was working to dismantle a longstanding critical bias toward earnest white guys with guitars. So although the concept led to lots of critical rehabilitation, it rarely bolstered the kinds of earnest white guys with guitars who never had much critical respect to begin with, including the post-DMB sphere of fratty singer-songwriter types like John Mayer, Jason Mraz, or any Nashville troubadour with big Christian coffeehouse energy. At a time when hipsters were racing to embrace the mainstream, this was a class of performer they could all still agree to mock. Eventually, indie rock’s glow-up led to some artists who felt like they belonged in that same bucket with Mayer and Mraz: namely the stomp-clap bands.

The rising profile of hipsters and indie rock had a gentrifying effect. It’s not like noisy, gritty, anti-commercial indie ceased to exist. That stuff was flourishing in the late 2000s. But as more people with no connection to the underground discovered this music, more approachable versions of indie rock emerged to appeal to an increasingly normie audience. It was already happening in 2005 when Dahlen wrote his poptimism-skeptical column, which played out as a defense of “adult alternative music” like “Norah Jones, Gillian Welch, and Madeleine Peyroux; the Arcade Fire, Death Cab For Cutie, and Rufus Wainwright,” a list that notably mixed some indie brand names in alongside your parents’ favorite jazz-pop CD. This was Starbucks music. KCRW music. Grey’s Anatomy music. To hipsters, such easy-listening coffee-shop indie represented the opposite of the cutting edge. It was basic, bland, and—sin of all sins—bourgeois.

It was impossible to miss that gentrification process playing out in the realm of indie-folk. I traced the progression in Chapter 7 of SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS (excerpted here). In the mid-2000s, freak-folk was one of the defining hipster trends, a loose configuration of rustic neo-hippie types living alternative lifestyles and making truly outré folk music. By the late 2000s, more sonically clean-cut (but visually still quite hairy) versions of indie-folk were beginning to explode in popularity. Woodsy beardos like Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes were critical sensations, but they were also easily digestible for mass audiences.

O.G. hipsters would have abandoned ship, but by now we’d reached the Obama-era hipster, the millennial hipster, who Friedlander called “a commoditized version of the early 2000s subculture that was much more about wanting the thing you like to become popular.” These were the people dancing to Crystal Castles and MGMT at Bonnaroo, buying Best Coast and Wavves vinyl at Urban Outfitters, vaping to Beach House and Tame Impala while scrolling through early versions of Instagram, and ultimately getting way into Carly Rae Jepsen. The concept of the hipster itself had been gentrified too.

Yet this generation of hipsters were still always keeping an eye out for the next big thing, and they had a Spidey-sense for which faux-hipsterish music had become the province of the painfully uncool. Even these late-stage mainstream-loving hipsters were averse to being lumped in with a less enlightened populace. They were still defining themselves against whatever they perceived as unhip. So when “Skinny Love” and “White Winter Hymnal” and “Home” inevitably led to “Little Talks” and “Ho Hey” and, uh, “Home,” hipsters reacted strongly against stomp-clap’s rising tide. You could see how the suspenders, beard oil, and mason jars aesthetic had arisen from the old-timey garb of indie bands like Arcade Fire, the Decemberists, and Iron & Wine, and how much the music had in common with Pitchfork’s favorite folkies. But some kind of millennial-cringe rubicon had been crossed.

Pitchfork, still the barometer for hipster thought in those days, dropped a rather hostile 2.1 on Mumford & Sons’ debut in 2010, with critic Stephen Deusner declaring “this West London quartet really does sound more like a business than a band, supplying value-added products at discount prices.” In a piece decrying Mumford and the Lumineers in 2012, I noted their fan bases’ overlap with Dave Matthews, who had always stood far outside my understanding of cool-kid music. By early 2013, my Stereogum colleague Tom Breihan felt compelled to write an essay defending Mumford & Sons because the hipster consensus against them was so strong. “Critics (and, perhaps more importantly, those fans who profess to have critical taste-levels) tend to regard Mumford as, essentially, dogshit,” he wrote, “even as shinier populists like Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga and Adele enjoy general-consensus critical acceptance and sometimes love.”

The massive success of stomp-clap left many people outside hipster circles with the impression that these bands were the new face of hipsterdom. And indeed, many of the bands hipsters liked in the early 2010s were just as bourgeois and radio-friendly as any bowler-hat stomp-clap band. But to hipsters, the stomp-clappers felt like a caricature of the past decade of indie, one that maybe even retroactively tainted the source material. Thus, in the early 2010s hipsters raced as far away from earnest acoustic music as they could. They had plenty of other exciting options, gravitating instead toward a bumper crop of new blog-cultivated rap and R&B talents, a rising wave of Tumblr-beloved alt-pop stars, and electronic experimentalists from labels like Tri Angle and Software. Meanwhile, big-name indie bands with even a whiff of stomp-clap resemblance swiftly retreated from those parts of their sound—think of Arcade Fire pivoting to dance-rock on 2013’s Reflektor or Bon Iver taking years off and returning as electronic experimentalists on 2016’s 22, A Million.

By that point, the hipster subculture had more or less died out, replaced by a burgeoning Trump-era social progressivism that left no room for ironic distance (or even self-awareness sometimes). Stomp-clap might have coincided with the death of hipster culture; maybe it was even the final nail in the coffin. But arguably the last thing hipsters ever did before going extinct was to resoundingly reject that shit. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is out now via St. Martin’s Press. If you liked this post, you would definitely like the book.

I was grateful to be a guest on two new podcast episodes released last week. DC Rock History had me on to discuss one of the most important albums of my life, the Dismemberment Plan’s Emergency & I. And Soundtrack Your Life invited me to talk about the Drive soundtrack, one of the most influential releases of the early 2010s.

Both albums are relevant to the arc of my book, SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion, which is about how indie rock changed the mainstream and the mainstream changed indie rock in the 21st century. (Original subtitle: How Indie Rock Went Pop.) I wrote about the Dismemberment Plan in the book, and I’ve gone long on E&I and Change before via my day job at Stereogum. The very first freelance pitch I ever got accepted there was actually a D-Plan listicle way back in 2012. I’m sure I’ll write about the Plan again someday, but I wanted to take this opportunity to zoom in on the Drive soundtrack because it strikes me as a missing element in SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS.

It was certainly a fixture of the Stereogum landscape. When I joined the staff in 2013, one of the tropes the commenters liked to point out was that we referenced Yeezus seemingly every third post. Such was the spirit of the times. But I swear we must have mentioned the Drive soundtrack second-most. We were posting about Chromatics and all the associated Italians Do It Better acts constantly. All the other artists on the tracklist remained active, too. More importantly, every day publicists were distributing some new heavily stylized neon synth track from people who wished they could be Anthony Gonzalez.

Ever since the ‘90s ended, the ‘80s have never stopped coming back. That’s certainly been true regarding underground music trends, which have seen seemingly every corner of the decade excavated and reclaimed, nostalgia proliferating for the esteemed and disreputable alike. In the early 2000s, subgenres like electroclash and disco-punk flourished—a rowdy revisitation of the post-punk and new wave era—while Daft Punk’s Discovery brought plastic pop artifice and hair-metal bombast to electronic dance music. Later in the decade we saw blurry chillwave and pristine yacht-rock influence working its way into indie music, plus an explosion of electro spearheaded by a new generation of synth-powered pop divas.

In 2010, Retromania author Simon Reynolds famously declared the 2000s a sort of mirror ‘80s in accordance with the longstanding 20-year nostalgia cycle. It had been true in the music world and in pop culture more broadly; this New York Times trend piece from April 2001 points to fashion, film, and even the George W. Bush presidency as earmarks of a return to the Reagan era. If it had been written a year later, it could have mentioned Grand Theft Auto: Vice City too. By 2010, it was time to start bringing back the ‘90s, a revival that kicked off around the time of the first Yuck album and continues to this day. But the return of the ‘90s didn’t mean the end of ‘80s nostalgia.

In several senses, the ‘80s only expanded as time went on. As the 2000s careened into the 2010s, Reagan-era maximalism made its way back into pop, rap, and EDM, with stars like Kanye West and Lady Gaga going bigger, sleeker, and more ostentatious. In the middle of the decade we had direct callbacks to the ‘80s with “Uptown Funk,” “Shut Up And Dance,” “Can’t Feel My Face,” 1989, and the synth-prog soundtrack to Stranger Things. The latter was part of a neverending onslaught of TV shows designed to analyze and/or nostalgize the waning years of the Cold War, from The Americans to The Goldbergs. The fashion trends kept kept recirculating every few years, too. By 2016, America even elected Donald Trump, a living embodiment of superficial ‘80s excess, to the presidency. As Jen Chaney pointed out that year, the ‘80s revival refused to die.

Chaney posited that as we gained more distance from the ‘80s, our endless remembrance morphed from The Wedding Singer-style mockery of the fashion into a more worshipful and searching examination of the decade. It could be that, from the pop-star archetype forged by Madonna and Michael Jackson to the cinematic blockbusters of Steven Spielberg, the ‘80s birthed so much of modern pop culture as we now know it that society keeps digging back into those days to understand how we got here. Perhaps the larger-than-life quality of so much ‘80s pop culture lends itself especially well to escapism, especially in a high-tech present that feels more like a dystopia. Or maybe, for younger Gen X-ers and elder millennials like me, the ‘80s simply represent childhood innocence, and we’ll forever be romanticizing our formative years the same way the boomers did with the post-war era.

In the world of indie music, the persistence of ‘80s nostalgia manifested in several ways in the 2010s. Indie artists in those years cozied up to the pop mainstream to an unprecedented extent, which often meant endorsing and emulating the likes of Beyoncé and Taylor Swift as they escalated their excess. On a more general level, there was no shortage of post-Postal Service indie bands trading their guitars for synthesizers during the Obama administration, as the populist wing of indie rock evolved into sleek car commercial music. Inevitably, this led to some parallels with the new wave years, as former rock musicians like the members of Chvrches went all-in on synth-pop. But sometimes the throwbacks were more overtly retro, as artists strove to create a dreamier, more fantastical kind of ‘80s nostalgia.

This is where Drive comes in. Arriving in 2011, the same year as M83’s double-disc opus Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, the soundtrack to Nicolas Winding Refn’s neo-noir action drama helped to crystallize a hyper-stylized, hyperreal ‘80s of our collective imagination—earnest, bombastic, retrofuturistic, and streaked with neon. Though it shared an escapist impulse with chillwave, the style being pursued here was too bright, bold, and ambitious to be lumped in with lo-fi soft-rock pastiche by mumbling bedroom auteurs. So much of what became known as chillwave was designed to evoke grainy old VHS tapes, translating hazily recalled childhood moments into the sonic equivalent of a warm blanket. But the Drive aesthetic was less about memories, more about IMAX-scale dreams.

There were no scare quotes around this music. It could certainly be understood as an affectation, but in practice, it never came off like a bit. It was not chintzy, ironic, or even all that campy. And though it was coldly precise and not the least bit swinging, this wasn’t robot rock either. It was animated by a powerful human warmth, a swooning awe that seemed to spill over from hearts filled up to the brim. It often existed in the same cultural space as the chipper millennial-optimist pop, but there was nothing twee or precious about it. It was hi-fi melodrama designed to take your breath away, and at its best, that’s exactly what it accomplished.

I’ve been referring to the Drive soundtrack as if it were a monolith, but there are actually two distinct, complementary disciplines at work in the film. The official score, composed by Cliff Martinez, is only tangentially related to the dreamy widescreen synth-pop people most often associate with the movie. Instead, it’s a procession of computerized instrumentals fit for ‘80s action movies. Sometimes Martinez provides a floating ambient drone, hypnotic and full of yearning. Other times his work urgently percolates while remaining stridently minimal, as if your pulse is racing and you’re holding your breath. You can imagine this music soundtracking tense moments in an artsy blockbuster back in 1984, when Martinez was drumming for the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Seeking a backdrop for the underworld adventures of Ryan Gosling’s nameless, elusive stunt driver/getaway driver, Refn fed Martinez with references, including the mechanistic sounds of electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk. “[Driver] is half man, half machine,” the director told SPIN. “But the machinery, his car, is an antique. Late ’70s bands like Kraftwerk inspired my idea of making a movie where the score was electronic, but at an infant stage — crude in its technology, yet extremely poetic.” His affection for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre added a more ominous tone. “The score to Texas was very minimal, but unremittingly dark and menacing,” Martinez said in the SPIN feature. “We wanted to put a horror tone into a film that isn’t horror.”

Martinez did great work on Drive, but he was not the original choice to compose the score. Initially, Gosling and Refn recruited Johnny Jewel, who had scored Refn’s previous movie Bronson in 2008. As a co-founder of the record label Italians Do It Better and a member of bands like Chromatics and Glass Candy, Jewel had played a crucial role in the merger between rock, pop, and club music in underground music. Blurring punk and glam with synth-pop and Italo disco, he cultivated a stylish, smoldering aesthetic that never stopped feeling like high art no matter how much sleaze coursed through it, like a blog-era Velvet Underground fueled by cocaine instead of heroin.

Chromatics had started out in Portland’s punk scene playing skronking, deconstructed post-hardcore, with founder Adam Miller joined by members of Blood Brothers and the Gossip. Their 2003 debut Chrome Rats vs. Basement Rutz is a far cry from the noir-ish electronic pop that would become their signature. By 2007, Miller was the only original member left, and the band’s sound had changed completely. With Jewel in the fold, along with singer Ruth Radelet and drummer Nat Walker, the band released Night Drive, a masterpiece of atmospherics and pop craftsmanship that incorporated elements of Italo disco, dream-pop, and what would come to be known as synthwave.

Synthwave pulled inspiration from movie soundtracks by the likes of Vangelis (especially his Blade Runner score) and Tangerine Dream, as well as ‘80s video games and TV shows like Miami Vice. The more sleek and synthetic it sounded, the better. The whole subgenre was a direct consequence of the cultural shift from laughing at the ‘80s to worshiping it. Eventually, there emerged a synthwave offshoot called outrun, named for 1986 racing arcade game Out Run—a perfect name for a style that would not exist without chase scenes. There were artists like Lazerhawk making synthwave before Drive came along, but the movie’s most significant legacy is the way it pumped rocket fuel into the synthwave craze, to the point that a global superstar like the Weeknd appropriated the sound for one of the biggest hits in pop music history.

Though he was eventually dropped as Drive’s composer in favor of Martinez, Johnny Jewel would put his imprint on the movie through needle drops. Chromatics’ tensely pulsing Night Drive track “Tick Of The Clock” soundtracked the movie’s opening scene. Desire, Jewel’s project with Montreal native Megan Louise, lent the dreamy synth love song “Under Your Spell” to an idyllic, mirage-like scene. Two other ‘80s throwbacks in the movie could have easily been Jewel creations: College and Electric Youth’s wistful synth-pop anthem “A Real Hero” and Kavinsky and Lovefoxxx’s phenomenal “Nightcall,” which overlaid scenes of a glittering LA during the movie’s opening title sequence. “Co-written by Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, it’s a brooding-then-pretty piece of Europop, fully introducing the weird tonal balance Drive strikes,” my Stereogum colleague Ryan Leas once wrote.

Refn chose to let these pop songs play out fully within Drive rather than reduce them to excerpts. He did so under the influence of John Hughes, the populist romantic behind ‘80s coming-of-age movies like The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles. “He never played just a clip,” Refn told SPIN. “It almost becomes a musical in that sense.” Hughes’ movie soundtracks were crucial to the collectively imagined ‘80s ideal that Drive sent into cultural overdrive. And Refn wasn’t the only one worshipping at his altar.

At the same time Johnny Jewel’s Italians Do It Better empire was on the rise, the French electronic shoegaze project M83 was morphing into a cinematic synth-pop tour de force. Though the band first specialized in mountainous post-rock instrumentals, it evolved into an ‘80s pop fever dream, with mastermind Anthony Gonzalez looking to Hughes as his lodestar. By 2008’s Saturdays = Youth, they were openly referencing the Hughes filmography from their production to their cover art, crafting hopeful, fantastical, larger-than-life anthems. And with 2011’s Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, M83 delivered the ‘80s pastiche to rule them all: “Midnight City,” a song that never fails to tingle my spine.

These trends had been building throughout the 2000s through the work of Daft Punk, the Knife, and myriad others. But the Drive soundtrack and M83 gave them a powerful momentum. The sound was huge within indie circles, where Chromatics offered a template for pop music far too dark and artsy to be misinterpreted as a craven bid for accessibility. But it also made its way out of the underground, into video games like Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, TV shows like Stranger Things, and, depending on how you tilt your ears, even radio hits like Taylor Swift’s “Style.”

As with Garden State, which gets a great deal of attention in SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS Chapter 3, Drive’s soundtrack is arguably more influential than the movie itself. “Drive is a niche film,” Jewel told Variety a decade later, “but it’s very popular and very groundbreaking and, in a musical sense, very impactful. The level of discovery from people seeing the movie and then wanting to hear more stuff like that put what we were doing in the underground in the focus of the mainstream.”

I didn’t write about the Drive phenomenon in my book. I didn’t even mention Chromatics, though they could have easily factored into Chapter 6 on bloghouse, “indie sleaze,” and bands morphing into party DJs. M83 were somewhat awkwardly shoehorned into Chapter 9 about music festivals, chillwave, and modern indie psychedelia, but their specific brand of pop metamorphosis didn’t slot naturally into any part of my story. So this post and playlist exist to acknowledge what a prominent role these twin touchstones played in shaping the sound of indie music in the 2010s.

The following three-hour sequence is a loose collage, not a chronological progression. It includes the ‘80s-inspired pop songs from Drive and some of the finest M83 tracks, as well as forebears, peers, and artists who sped away under Drive’s influence. Listen to it at Apple Music or via Spotify below.

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion, is out now via St. Martin’s Press. Buy it!

I can’t believe they didn’t call it Float On.

Two months ago, I was aboard the Norwegian Pearl for Ice Cream Floats, a cruise headlined and curated by Modest Mouse. They played three times (plus the first performance by side project Ugly Casanova in 24 years), and we got two or three performances each from Built To Spill, Mannequin Pussy, Kurt Vile, Califone, Tropical Fuck Storm, Portugal. The Man, the Black Heart Procession, and Mattress. David Cross did his standup routine twice, hosted bingo, and watched the Super Bowl one table away from me.

The Modest Mouse cruise was one of 26 demographically targeted cruises on the schedule this year for Sixthman, a leader in the themed cruise industry, which grew out of the band Sister Hazel throwing their street team a cruise the week before 9/11. Ice Cream Floats had a lot of other bespoke elements and events selected by Modest Mouse, but in other ways it was a standard four-day cruise from Miami to the Dominican and back.

When I heard about this luxury indie rock vacation, I was convinced it could make for a good story, and I think the one I wrote for Stereogum turned out well. Response has been encouraging since the article came out last week. I wanted to share it again here because I am proud of it and because I think you’ll enjoy it if you liked my book about indie rock’s 21st century metamorphosis, SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion. A Modest Mouse cruise is also squarely in the sweet spot of the book proposal I’m plugging away at right now, which, if it comes together, will be a nice companion to SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS. (Subscribe to this newsletter if you want to stay in the loop about future projects!)

While we’re here, a few more updates:

My book is now available in a second language. Ediciones Península has translated SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS into Spanish under the title LA MÚSICA INDIE: Una Historia Cultural. What a privilege and a thrill! It’s available now, so cómpralo.

I’ll be back at my alma mater next week for the Ohio University Music Industry Summit. This is always an excellent conference, and I’m excited to be part of a schedule that also includes Dev Hynes. I have two events scheduled for Wednesday, April 15, both of which involve smart, savvy people who are active on this platform.

First, I’ll be interviewing , president of Beggars Group, for the Featured Entrepreneur Session from 10:50-11:40 a.m. ET. Nabil has led an incredible life, and he’s an incredible writer; I highly recommend his memoir My Life In The Sunshine. We’ll be discussing his career path—which includes stints as a touring musician, record store owner, label head, writer, and podcaster—as well as “the philosophy behind building artist-first label relationships, and what the future holds for independent music in an industry increasingly shaped by consolidation and streaming economics.” This event will be livestreamed; all you have to do is sign up here for free virtual registration.

Later that day, from 4:45-6 p.m. ET, I will be part of a panel about the future of music journalism with and . It’s a great honor to be included alongside those two, and I’m looking forward to it. Given the state of media these days, our chat could easily be the verbal equivalent of a skull emoji, but I anticipate something more hopeful and productive will emerge from the conversation.

People continue to invite me on their podcasts. I recently stopped by The Hot Mic to discuss my history with Nelsonville Music Festival (which rules), and my appearances on two more pods are scheduled to drop later this month. If you missed it during the peak of the Such Great Heights promo campaign, I had the privilege of appearing on such estimable pods as 60 Songs That Explain The ‘90s: The 2000s, Sound Opinions, and Kreative Kontrol, and Anthony Fantano was kind enough to interview me for his YouTube channel.

Writing for Stereogum has been a blast lately. Besides the Modest Mouse feature, I have been piling up some other SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS-adjacent interviews for publication this spring, but you’ll have to wait a while for those. In terms of features you can read right now, I conducted We’ve Got A File On You interviews, where we ask artists about the extracurriculars of their career, with Maynard James Keenan and Bill Callahan. Skewering the mediocre new Harry Styles album was fun, as was diving into the preposterous (complimentary) new Johnny Blue Skies album. I feel like I’ve been cooking with the album retrospectives, too, including Band Of Horses’ debut and milestone releases from two of the best, most divisive bands of the 2010s, Pinegrove and the 1975.

More newsletter posts are coming soon. I have at least three SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS B-sides (bonus features) mentally queued up for the spring, it’s just a matter of finding the time to actually write them. One is sort of an epilogue for the book, one relates to an upcoming podcast appearance (and one of the holes in the book), and one is a conversation with another author whose book covers roughly the same timeframe as SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS from a different angle. Stay tuned, and as always, thanks for your time and attention.

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is out now via St. Martin’s Press. Buy it here.

When did you first realize your city had an exciting local music scene? Not a “vibrant” and “eclectic” scene as described by your local tourism bureau—one that mesmerized and magnetized you, full of bands that could mean the world to you? For me, that moment was ComFest 2005.

ComFest—Community Festival—is an annual summer gathering in Columbus’ Goodale Park. It was founded by hippies in 1972, with hippie ideals. “The party with a purpose,” they call it. It’s a great excuse to get a beer and a corndog and randomly run into people you haven’t seen for a while, but it’s only occasionally a good place to see music. Despite its breadth, the lineup does not always reflect the most vital sounds coming out of Columbus, for reasons related to both questionable taste and scene politics. But whoever was tasked with curating the Offramp Stage that year rose to the occasion.

As a discerning listener, or maybe just a wannabe hipster, I thought a lot of the music at ComFest was either disinteresting or actively corny. The Offramp Stage was where they funneled most of the artists most relevant to a 21-year-old Pitchfork reader like me: indie rock, punk, metal, hip-hop, and so on. On the first official Friday of summer, it would become my portal to a captivating flesh-and-blood scene in my hometown.

Like a lot of people my age, I’d found my way to indie music online, not by being enmeshed in a local music scene. My experience of indie rock in the early 2000s mostly involved loading up Pitchfork and other indie-focused sites like Stylus, Tiny Mix Tapes, and Hipinion, and then going to see the bands I read about there in concert when they toured within driving distance. In the internet era, it was becoming possible to engage with so much music, to even feel like you were part of a community, without actually leaving your bedroom. Whereas the people I was reading about in Our Band Could Be Your Life had started out on a grassroots level and worked their way outward into a sprawling network of interconnected local scenes, I tapped into that network through websites and file sharing, then had to work my way backwards to the grassroots level.

My local music epiphany at ComFest did not come out of nowhere. When I arrived at Ohio University in 2002, I started poking around the scene in Athens, the pastoral southeastern Ohio town where the school was located. I willed my way into a gig as the music reporter at the student newspaper and started publishing weekly profiles of local artists. I formed an indie band of my own and started angling for gigs with the acts I liked and respected, especially Southeast Engine, a band that reminded me of Dylan and Bright Eyes and my beloved Wilco. I had gained an appreciation for local music as a concept and was trying to wedge myself into the scene on my campus. I just wasn’t aware yet how much cool shit was happening up the road in my hometown.

This was the summer between my junior and senior years of college. I was living at home in the Columbus area, working an internship at the Ohio Newspaper Association a couple suburbs over. Ostensibly I was helping ONA complete a survey of Ohio newspapers, I think about the extent of their incorporation of digital media? But I can’t remember the specifics because I mostly spent my days at the office clicking around MySpace and the message board at Donewaiting.com, which had become an important community hub for Columbus music. I was on there to promote my own going-nowhere college band, but in the process I was learning about the Columbus music landscape.

On Donewaiting, some people were touting a record label and recording studio called Columbus Discount Records as a new vanguard for Columbus music. The pro-CDR contingent were really feeling themselves, often poking and prodding at other cliques who they considered uninspired and irrelevant. A lot of that bravado was in good fun, but their excitement about their little corner of the scene was genuine. The more I learned, the more I was inclined to agree with them. One of the CDR bands, Terribly Empty Pockets, had played with my band in Athens and blown me away. So I was intrigued when I saw they were booked for the Offramp Stage consecutively with two more affiliated acts. When ComFest weekend arrived, I dipped out early from my internship and headed down to Goodale Park for what would amount to an indie rock happy hour.

First up were Terribly Empty Pockets, a jangly and depressive indie-pop band pulling influence from the likes of the Smiths and the Magnetic Fields. Ever since sharing a stage with them, I’d been smitten with their quirky, sad, catchy music. They struck me as fully capable of holding their own next to bands I was reading about on music blogs at the time. Next came their pals Necropolis, a band whose members included the Columbus Discount Records braintrust. Necropolis played wild, discordant post-punk indebted to groups like Devo and the Fall—they had a song called “Stalking Mark E. Smith Around NYC”—plus a bunch of Columbus predecessors they worshipped, like Gaunt and New Bomb Turks, whose torch they were consciously trying to carry with CDR. Their songs were a tangle of twisty guitars propelled by aggressive, prominent bass, performed with explosive anxious energy. I’d never seen anything like them. I was dumbfounded.

A swarm of CDR friends and acolytes had been crowding around the stage during these performances, feeding off each other’s excitement and fueling mine. They seemed especially excited for what was about to happen next, and for good reason. Times New Viking, a trio of students from Columbus College of Art & Design, were poised to become the city’s underground breakout stars. They’d released an incredible 7-inch on CDR but had already graduated to Siltbreeze, a dormant, cult-beloved Philadelphia label that was reactivating specifically so they could put out TNV’s debut album Dig Yourself. The enthusiasm around the band was palpable as they ripped through future classics like “We Got Rocket” and “Skull vs. Wizard.”

Not everyone felt the same buzz. Times New Viking were a controversial band on the Donewaiting forum and, later on, in the world at large. For reasons both practical and philosophical, they embraced lo-fi recording and primitive, bashed-out technique, which made some people feel like they were sloppy amateurs. But the sloppiness was mostly intentional, and there was nothing novice about their songwriting. TNV crafted brilliant, scrappy pop songs and performed them with reckless abandon. In raw bursts of melody, they sang about art and drugs and love and war and letting your hair grow long because the summer will be gone. The vocal dynamic between drummer Adam Elliott (aloof, faux-British) and keyboardist Beth Murphy (on fire yet ice cold) was incredibly distinctive, and Jared Phillips always had the right combustible guitar part to complement them.

I found this band’s music intoxicating. They were about my own age, but they were rock stars to me. I saw them every chance I got. I hit up their album release show later that summer at Andyman’s Treehouse, a venue with a giant tree trunk growing through the ceiling of the performance room. (Treebar wasn’t really TNV’s scene, but they picked it for their release show because you could still legally smoke inside.) When I was interning at the Columbus Dispatch over my holiday break, I spent New Year’s Eve wandering around downtown nabbing quotes for the paper’s coverage of the festivities, then raced to watch TNV inaugurate 2006 at Cafe Bourbon Street, a shitty dive that very much was their scene.

The following summer, I got a job writing for the weekly newspaper Columbus Alive, which had just been purchased by the Dispatch (the city’s morning daily, where I’d interned). The hiring introduced an awkward dynamic because the fervent TNV boosters in the paper’s previous regime—including Elliott’s brother, a great musician and critic in his own right—had been ousted by the new ownership when they hired me. The new publisher was steering the paper in a fluffier, less alternative direction. I was the kid fresh out of college who was tasked with taking over for the entrenched veterans, doing my best to keep the music coverage relevant. But even if I wasn’t literally family, Times New Viking would never lack for boosters at Alive as long as I was around, and the band fortunately never held the strange circumstances of my arrival against me. As I branched out into various corners of Columbus music, I always held a special affection for those CDR bands that had been my big bang, and I devoted plenty of ink to them.

Within a couple more years, my localized experience of indie rock intersected with my online world. TNV made one more album for Siltbreeze, 2007’s killer The Paisley Reich, and were bestowed with a glowing 8.2 Pitchfork review. They signed to my favorite label in the world, Matador Records, for 2008’s Rip It Off, which earned them Best New Music status from the aforementioned ‘Fork at a time when that designation provided some serious juice career-wise. In the wake of TNV’s breakout, I traveled to SXSW to report on their activities down there and wrote an Alive cover story about their “shitgaze” movement with Psychedelic Horseshit and Pink Reason. We shot the cover image outside Cafe Bourbon Street, the beer-soaked shithole nerve center of their scene, which itself became a character in the story. I wish the article was still online, but I can’t find it on the Columbus Monthly site, where lots of old Alive content was dumped when the paper went kaput.

That trip to Austin was illuminating, especially in hindsight. At least one Times New Viking performance in a Sixth Street bar featured the exact same people who attended their Columbus shows crowding around them, going nuts. They were chuffed to perform as the backing band for one of their mentors, Ohio independent music pioneer “Mike Rep” Hummel. (They covered “Sugar, Sugar.”) Their existing connections to their world back home seemed to matter a lot more than climbing the ladder of the music industry. It’s funny to think that Times New Viking played the same Pitchfork day party where I first saw Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver. They were operating in the same world, but they weren’t playing the same game.

Even when TNV were blowing up, they were at odds with the zeitgeist. At a time when indie rock was moving in a glossy, eclectic, crowd-pleasing direction, as documented in my recent book SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS, the band was part of a wave of counterprogramming. Bands like Deerhunter and No Age (both of whom also played that Pitchfork party) were flourishing by carrying the torch for heady, noisy art music, and TNV were right there on the front lines, being noisy and heady as hell. Their very existence represented a form of resistance against a cleaned-up, playlist-friendly, festival-optimized version of indie. Though I loved a great many of the indie-goes-pop acts and perhaps even more of indie’s earnest arena rockers, I needed the fuzz and skuzz to balance out my listening diet. Two things can be true: (1) Indie rock should not be limited to bands like TNV and (2) an indie rock landscape bereft of bands like TNV would feel hollow.

I’d have to make do in a landscape minus the actual Times New Viking soon enough. Once the hype subsided and the blogger apparatus moved on in search of their next new fascination, the promotional whirlwind started to feel more like a grind. TNV made two more albums: 2009’s less aggressively staticky Born Again Revisited for Matador and 2011’s even cleaner Dancer Equired for Merge, the iconic indie label most likely to sign Matador refugees. They toured relentlessly and dutifully conducted interviews, but they were still barely scraping by. It took more than critical acclaim to build a sustainable music career in the early 2010s, and even top-tier indie rock success stories like Grizzly Bear were feeling squeezed. For a band as peculiar as Times New Viking, with significant barriers to entry, there was always going to be a ceiling. Logistics became more complicated when Murphy moved to Memphis, and Phillips soon relocated to Cleveland. Factoring all this in, as the bandmates approached 30, they bowed out of the rat race. It was 2012, and Times New Viking was over.

I was disappointed about the breakup, but it wasn’t until 2016, when TNV got back together for a one-off show at the parking lot festival 4th & 4th Fest, that I realized how much this band meant to me. It felt too early to be nostalgic about a group that had barely been gone long enough for the ringing in my ears to subside. But how else could I describe the twinge of feeling that welled up when I was hearing Beth, Adam, and Jared burn through “Teenage Lust!” and “Move To California” again? It was like attending a memorial for that era and those versions of ourselves, like the concert was taking place in the afterlife. The performance left me on the verge of tears.

Another decade has gone by since then. Suffice it to say nostalgia for Times New Viking’s heyday no longer feels unnatural. They’ve been gone long enough to sound incredibly fresh all over again—to be dearly missed by those in the know and excitedly discovered by a new generation that only thinks it knows what lo-fi means. Plus it seems like the entire pop cultural apparatus has been fixated on the 2000s lately. I’d have welcomed a reunion at any point in time, but right now feels ideal, even if I’m not sure they fit in now any better than they did back then.

We can thank Jeff Klingman, who curates the Outline Festival at the Knockdown Center in Queens, for providing the initial spark. When he invited TNV to play last weekend’s installment of Outline with the Spits, the Serfs, Snööper, and Prison Affair, he initiated what appears to be an open-ended return. As Elliott recently told me, “We’re looking for some family weekend vacations, you know? I would like to see friends again and try foods again.” Thus, they tacked on a visit to the esteemed upstate venue Tubby’s while in New York last weekend, and they’ll hit Chicago in April. But before any of that, they played a hometown warmup show.

Everything about Feb. 27’s return gig felt right. It had to be at Cafe Bourbon Street, and so it was, even though TNV could have feasibly dredged up a large enough crowd to play somewhere bigger. But beyond the appropriateness of the venue, the lineup was a stroke of genius. By filling out the bill with Ron House, their legendary forebear, and Golomb, the city’s new hotness, Times New Viking were presenting themselves as a link in a chain. It struck me as an historic occasion: three generations of Columbus indie rock coming together to tell a story about the history of their genre and their hometown.

House was up first, strumming sweet, twisted songs on acoustic guitar like a savvier Daniel Johnston with a sinister streak. There were tunes that took depression and alienation quite seriously, written with empathy for struggling friends. And there were ones, like “Negative Guestlist,” that channeled House’s own neuroses into brilliant satire: “My name is on the negative guestlist/ Even if I pay I can’t get in.” House came up during an era when indie rock was truly an outsider’s game, and he came off at least partially like an outsider artist on the Bourbon Street stage. Some open mic crowds would have laughed him off stage for imperfect pitch or inexact fretwork, but he commanded this particular room with an off-kilter gravitas. If you’re looking for a patron saint of the pre-Nirvana underground, you could do a lot worse.

Even in Columbus, House is taken for granted, but for those unaware, he’s a local treasure with a cultural footprint that extends far beyond his home city. In the ‘80s, he fronted Great Plains, an inspired and eccentric punk/new wave/jangle-pop outfit that signed to Homestead Records just before future Matador guy Gerard Cosloy took over. That made them label-mates with luminaries like Sonic Youth, Big Black, Swans, and Dinosaur (not yet Jr.). When Great Plains broke up, House formed Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, a far rawer, more electrified unit that eventually put out their debut LP on Onion Records, a subsidiary of Rick Rubin’s American Recordings. Did that make them label-mates with Johnny Cash and Slayer? Not really, but it’s fun to think about them existing under the same corporate umbrella.

Both Great Plains and TJSA are diamonds in the rough. If you’re digging around for vital indie rock that hasn’t been sufficiently canonized, their catalogs represent an absolutely essential research project. (Both groups have been thoroughly canonized in Columbus, but I fear the outside world doesn’t recognize their genius, give or take a Thurston Moore.) House was the kind of wildcard frontperson you won’t find outside of a punk or indie context, a guy whose singing would be dismissed as grating by an unreasonable percentage of the population. He flaunted his piercing, neurotic tenor in ways both abrasive and sneakily melodic, and his bandmates knew how to play to his strengths.

House’s legacy runs deeper than those two groups. For years he was one of the owners of the storied campus-area record store Used Kids. He was a member of Ego Summit, a sort of Traveling Wilburys of Central Ohio lo-fi rock cranks. In the 2000s, he participated in an event called the Rock Potluck where musicians are shuffled into new bands for the day, and his randomly assembled group Psandwich ended up not only sticking together but making some incredible records. After the end of TNV, Phillips’ first move was to form a new project called Counter Intuits with House. I could keep going, but the point is he is a titanic figure in Columbus underground rock. The scene that yielded Times New Viking would not have existed if not for the efforts of people like House.

And it might have died out if not for bands like Golomb. The rising power trio was literally birthed by House’s generation of Columbus rockers. Bassist Xenia Shuman and drummer Hawken Holm’s parents have been playing in rock bands for decades. Guitarist Mickey Shuman, who married into the family, met Xenia when they were teens zealously exploring their local scene. Golomb are blowing up right now—I touted their new album The Beat Goes On in a Stereogum Band To Watch feature last summer, and I’m far from the only critic who’s noticed they rule—but they understand the lineage they’re a part of. From the stage, Mickey called this show their Columbus bar mitzvah.

What TNV were for me, Golomb undoubtedly are for some current Columbus twentysomething. Still, I hadn’t realized how much the two bands have in common—the guy-girl vocals, the collision of pop and noise, the three-person lineup—until I saw them play the same venue together. One big difference: If TNV have a way of sounding like a beautiful blurry photo, Golomb’s adventurous melodic rock feels more in-focus, even as it brims with unkempt energy.

Golomb are venturing out into the world at a time when making a living in music feels more and more like a pipe dream, but also one where rock music feels relevant and alive for the first time in years. They spent the early weeks of this year touring with fellow rising rocker Greg Freeman, a period of seasoning that had them sounding both loose and incredibly locked-in at Cafe Bourbon Street. The bright vocal harmonies, the sprawling solos, the sense that the tectonic plates beneath these well-crafted songs might constantly be shifting: They’re a proper rock ’n’ roll band. As much as I love The Beat Goes On, I feel like they haven’t approached their peak yet, and I’m excited to see what they come up with next.

By the time TNV started loading their equipment onto the stage, I was buzzing, and not just due to $3 Tecate cans. It did not feel real to be at a Times New Viking concert, at Cafe Bourbon Street, in 2026. Yet it was real, and it was spectacular. The energy level was high. The execution was surprisingly sharp for a band that’s been gone this long, one that wasn’t necessarily known for precision even at their peak. Every song was a holy shit moment. Oh hey, “Natural Resources,” I forgot that one! Ah yeah, “(My Head),” I’d been hoping for that one! “Devo & Wine,” are you serious right now? It was like I was back at ComFest 2005 again, except now, rather than a sense of breathless discovery, I felt like buried memories were being joyously dislodged from dark corners of my brain.

In my interview with Elliott, he talked about how exhilarating Times New Viking’s rehearsals had been, and in that first show back, you could tell. Both band and audience were vibing hard. It was the kind of reaction you hope for when a band reunites, giddy to an extent I’m not sure would be possible outside the context of a local music scene, where love of the music is multiplied by hometown pride. The minimal footage I’ve seen from the show suggests that TNV’s performance was slightly messier than I perceived. If I was swept up in a collective flow state, that makes perfect sense. Locking in with this band has always involved a little hypnosis, and in this context, the wistfulness was potent. The spell was broken late in the set when they screwed up “Not High” and decided to circle back to it at the end. But even the error felt right in a way. It wouldn’t be Times New Viking if it wasn’t a little fucked up.

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is out now via St. Martin’s Press. Buy it here.

Every chapter in my book SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is accompanied by a soundtrack. The tracklists are printed in the book, and I’ve been republishing them here at the newsletter intermittently. Today, we reach the soundtrack for the final chapter, “Love It If We Made It.”

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS examines indie rock’s impact on the mainstream and the mainstream’s impact on indie rock in the 21st century. It traces the steps from the ‘90s conception of indie all the way to the point where Taylor Swift’s folklore was described as indie — from “Autumn Sweater” to “cardigan,” so to speak. Along the way, I discuss dance-punk, The O.C., Pitchfork, MySpace, bloghouse, indie folk, Hipster Runoff, Urban Outfitters, chillwave, Tumblr, poptimism, and much more.

Chapter 12 marks the end of that arc. Just as Chapter 1 offers a speedrun through the late 20th century in an effort to define what “indie rock” meant at the end of the '90s, “Love It If We Made It” breezes through a good chunk of the 2010s, big-picture style. It’s about how the rise of streaming and social media impacted indie music — Spotify and TikTok in particular. It’s about a new wave of guitar bands rising up at the height of the indie-goes-pop movement. It’s about a women-led singer-songwriter boom that in some cases blurred together with the “indie” pop stardom of earlier in the decade. It’s about both Matty Healy and Jack Antonoff.

My original subtitle for the book was How Indie Rock Went Pop, which guided my choices about what to include in this chapter (and what to include on its soundtrack, which happens to mirror the trajectory of the book in general). There’s a lot more about indie in the 2010s that could have been jammed into this chapter if I had the space for it. There’s even more to say about what “indie” means today, several years beyond the purview of the book. I hope to get into it in an upcoming post here at the newsletter, one of many I have planned for the coming weeks and months. Until then, enjoy this playlist (and if you’d prefer it on Apple Music, go here).

Parquet Courts, “Stoned and Starving” (2013)

Waxahatchee, “Peace and Quiet” (2013)

The War on Drugs, “Red Eyes” (2014)

Alex G, “Harvey” (2014)

Courtney Barnett, “Pedestrian at Best” (2015)

Speedy Ortiz, “Raising the Skate” (2015)

Pinegrove, “Old Friends” (2016)

Angel Olsen, “Shut Up Kiss Me” (2016)

Car Seat Headrest, “Drunk Drivers/Killers Whales (Single Version)” (2016)

St. Vincent, “Los Ageless” (2017)

Lorde, “Green Light” (2017)

Mitski, “Washing Machine Heart” (2018)

Soccer Mommy, “Your Dog” (2018)

Snail Mail, “Pristine” (2018)

The 1975, “Love It If We Made It” (2018)

boygenius, “Me & My Dog” (2018)

Caroline Polachek, “So Hot You’re Hurting My Feelings” (2019)

Clairo, “Bags” (2019)

Lana Del Rey, “Venice Bitch” (2019)

Taylor Swift, “cardigan” (2020)

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is out now via St. Martin’s Press. Buy it here.

Heated Rivalry is a new kind of TV show: a sexually explicit romance about closeted gay hockey players. Based on the Game Changers series of novels, the wildly popular series—described as “premium smut” by creator and showrunner Jacob Tierney—premiered on the Canadian streaming service Crave and HBO Max in November and became a viral sensation over the holidays. HBO Max says the show drew 9 million viewers per episode. That’s almost 50% more than the 6.15 million per episode The Pitt pulled off in its first season, to cite another recent HBO Max success story.

The Heated Rivalry glow-up is fascinating from many angles. It’s a queer story, but maybe straight women are too excited about it? It’s a sports story, but maybe the NHL isn’t excited enough? It’s a publishing story, again demonstrating the book industry’s inability to predict which titles will catch fire. It’s also, to a lesser extent, a music story.

As with many hit movies and TV shows, songs featured in Heated Rivalry have enjoyed a viral boost. The biggest beneficiary has been the Montreal indie rock band Wolf Parade, whose 2005 stunner “I’ll Believe In Anything” factored heavily into one of the series’ subplots. The song, from Wolf Parade’s stone cold classic debut album Apologies To The Queen Mary, jumped 3,000% in Spotify streams and has been used in thousands of TikToks since soundtracking a climactic on-ice kiss that served as a pro hockey player’s coming-out moment.

“I’ll Believe In Anything” was already arguably the definitive Wolf Parade song. It was their most-streamed track even before it appeared on Heated Rivalry, and it felt like the obvious choice to represent Wolf Parade on the soundtrack to the chapter about Pitchfork and music blogs from my book SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion. (Buy it here!) Revisiting Apologies for its 20th anniversary recently, Ian Cohen noted that “I’ll Believe In Anything” has acquired a reputation as “not just the platonic ideal of an indie rock song, but a theme song for indie rock as a social movement during its cultural peak.”

The song’s appeal is obvious. The lyrics are about a desperate passion so intense you’d give yourself over entirely to another person (“I’ll believe in anything if you believe in anything”) and the ecstasy of true freedom (“I’ll take you where nobody knows you and nobody gives a damn”). Every line is a huge shout-along hook, shot through with an unnerving electricity by singer Spencer Krug. The band’s dynamic control is masterful, building up so much tension you could snap the song over your leg and then explosively cutting loose at just the right times. As if by magic, the whole thing comes together from abstract individual parts—that squealing synth melody; those pounding toms; that slicing, swaying guitar riff—into a thunderous, cathartic whole. It’s a first-ballot hall of fame indie rock power ballad.

Tierney would surely agree. The showrunner has called “I’ll Believe In Anything” his favorite song. He told the hockey podcast What Chaos! that he specifically built “this big emotional rom-com kind of glorious celebratory moment” with “I’ll Believe In Anything” in mind, even working elements from the lyrics into the dialogue two episodes earlier: “I built two episodes around this one Wolf Parade song.”

The choice to not just soundtrack scenes with 2000s indie rock but weave the music into the series’ DNA reminds me of a different chapter from SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: the one about The O.C., Garden State, and 2000s Hollywood’s indie rock cottage industry. Filmmakers had always used cool music in their soundtracks, but that era stood out for the way indie rock so often became part of the plot. These shows and movies, in turn, became distribution systems, connecting the music with people outside the indie rock bubble (and often contributing to the music’s gentrification in the process).

Scott the hockey star doesn’t define himself as a Wolf Parade fan the way Seth Cohen defined himself as a Death Cab For Cutie fan, and Kip the barista doesn’t beckon Scott to put on headphones with the promise that “I”ll Believe In Anything” will change his life, a la Natalie Portman’s Sam offering up “New Slang.” But like those productions, the music was integral to Heated Rivalry. And like The O.C.’s Josh Schwartz and Garden State’s Zach Braff, Tierney pulled the music for the show from his own library of tunes. That personal touch is why Garden State had multiple Shins songs, and it’s why Heated Rivalry has two Feist songs.

“Music is so important to me,” Tierney told Rolling Stone. “‘I’ll Believe in Anything’ was so built into the show — I wanted to clear it before we even started filming. That’s kind of like an indicator of how music is crucial to the way that I like to tell stories.”

One crucial difference is that The O.C. and Garden State were youth-driven phenomena, as were the various Michael Cera and Zooey Deschanel projects that followed later in the decade. What we’re seeing here is not The O.C. for a new generation. (That would entail, perhaps, a show about a teen who is the world’s biggest MJ Lenderman fan.) This is more like The O.C. generation striking back now that we have wrestled cultural hegemony from our parents.

Heated Rivalry is approaching George W. Bush-era music through a nostalgic lens. Tierney, 46, has described his playlist for the show as “the music of my early twenties.” In that sense the show’s Wolf Parade spotlight is more akin to Stranger Things introducing Kate Bush to a new generation. It is decidedly a blast from the past—so old that Krug told The Globe And Mail, “To be honest, it’s like another person wrote the song, because it was so long ago. I don’t really connect with my 25-year-old self any more.”

The material’s vintage character became painfully clear when Tierney’s actors began riffing on the soundtrack. “They made me feel really old,” he told Rolling Stone. “They were like, ‘What is a wolf and why is it on parade?’ And I was like, ‘I hate both of you.’ And I was like, ‘Feist? 1,2,3,4?’ And they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, we watched that on Sesame Street.’ And I was like, ‘Again, I’d like to push you down a flight of stairs. Your youth enrages me.’”

Do I foresee a new wave of TV shows and movies incorporating 2000s indie rock on a cellular level, running back the O.C. era for nostalgic millennials? It’s possible such a wave is already in progress. We’re several seasons deep into The Bear’s parade of Wilco, Sufjan, and LCD Soundsystem syncs and a couple years past Saltburn spotlighting the likes of Ladytron, Bloc Party, and MGMT. In that light, Heated Rivalry could be viewed as the next big splash in a flood of media soundtracked by iPod-era indie. I’ll really consider it a revival when we start getting more programming about that music—like, say, a rom-com starring Cera and Deschanel as exes who fall back in love when they run into each other on the Modest Mouse cruise.

At a time when Hollywood is routinely giving old music new life, when the whole “indie sleaze” thing has revealed the public’s interest in reliving the 2000s, when shows like Euphoria and Yellowstone are upholding TV’s capacity as a music distribution system, it wouldn’t be the craziest turn of events to see more stories built around my generation’s Pitchfork-approved favorites. And if not, we can at least count on a second season of Heated Rivalry. Tierney says he’s been listening to the New Pornographers and TV On The Radio while writing, so the “Wolf Like Me” renaissance may be imminent.

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is out now via St. Martin’s Press. Buy it here.

Every chapter in my book SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion (out now!) starts with an accompanying 20-song playlist. They’re printed in the book, and I’ve been sharing them here at the newsletter intermittently. Today we arrive at the soundtrack for the book’s penultimate chapter, “Art Angels.”

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS explains how indie rock changed the mainstream and the mainstream changed indie rock in the 21st century. Most readers describe it as a book about 2000s indie rock, and it is that. But to me, this chapter is the whole point of the exercise.

When I was writing the book, I thought the subtitle would be How Indie Rock Went Pop, and I had this destination in mind: that early 2010s moment when hipster R&B was the vanguard, Big Indie was minting its own pop stars, and trend-conscious bands were doing everything they could to distance themselves from the “guys with guitars” configuration. I found it fascinating that the same commercial/media ecosystem that got me hooked on indie rock seemed to so completely move past “indie” and “rock,” that the same audience who once defined itself by Built To Spill now worshipped Beyoncé. The story I was telling about the 2000s was most interesting to me because of where it led in the 2010s.

One factor in all of this was poptimism, a word that has become a boogeyman for certain listeners. In a comprehensive Slate piece this year, Carl Wilson explained the history of the philosophy—which is really just supposed to mean giving all kinds of music a fair shake and interrogating your reasons for deriding certain genres—and illuminated how it has become a straw man for disingenuous observers. People like to argue that culture is dying because critics and trendsetters embraced an ethos of “popular = good,” but that’s an inaccurate, oversimplified view of the ideas that were driving the change.

Seemingly every week someone on Substack or at a legacy magazine publishes an anti-poptimism tirade to this effect. I didn’t want SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS to be one of those. I like poptimism as a concept, and I love a great deal of the “indie” music it wrought, even if I have reservations about how the race to embrace the mainstream impacted indie long-term. So for me, Chapter 11 documents an exciting time in music that I look back on fondly.

Eric Harvey called this my “most overstuffed” chapter, and it’s true. “Art Angels” covers a lot of ground, maybe too much ground, which means I had so much music to choose from here. As a time capsule, it’s as meaningful and nostalgic for me as any chapter in the book. Dig into it below and see if you don’t feel the same way. (By the way, since I can’t embed Apple Music playlists here, you can access the Apple version of the soundtrack right here.)

Annie, “Chewing Gum” (2004)

Lykke Li, “Little Bit” (2007)

Dirty Projectors, “Stillness Is the Move” (2009)

How To Dress Well, “Ready For the World” (2010)

Sleigh Bells, “Crown On the Ground” (2010)

Robyn, “Dancing On My Own” (2010)

The Weeknd, “House of Balloons/Glass Table Girls” (2011)

Lana Del Rey, “Video Games” (2011)

Grimes, “Oblivion” (2012)

Purity Ring, “Fireshrine” (2012)

Frank Ocean, “Pyramids” (2012)

Solange, “Losing You” (2012)

Sky Ferreira, “Everything Is Embarrassing” (2012)

Blood Orange, “You’re Not Good Enough” (2013)

Charli XCX, “You (Ha Ha Ha)” (2013)

Vampire Weekend, “Step” (2013)

Lorde, “Royals” (2013)

Chvrches, “The Mother We Share” (2013)

Haim, “The Wire” (2013)

Carly Rae Jepsen, “Run Away With Me” (2015)

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is out now via St. Martin’s Press. Buy it here.

The last music festival I attended before COVID was Hopscotch in September 2019. The Stereogum staff rented a house together in Raleigh, and we spent a long weekend bouncing between the big outdoor stages and venues around town. We were supposed to catch one of the first ever Purple Mountains shows—I’m still aching about that—but all in all it was an amazing time. I saw Lucy Dacus and Tomberlin cover Sufjan Stevens together. I bore witness to the glory of Mdou Moctar in person. I begrudgingly had to admit Sleater-Kinney’s live show was still incredible at their first post-Janet performance.

That trip was the end of an era in many ways. For one thing, it’s when Scott told us he was buying Stereogum back from our parent company and taking the site independent again. Although we were still six months out from lockdown, as with all “last [x] before the pandemic” milestones, my memories from Hopscotch have taken on a twilight tint, as if they took place at the blurry edge between reality and the bizarre dreamstate that was about to overtake humanity. Also, it was the last time I got to see a Deerhunter show.

There was no way I was going to miss it. My coworkers all decided to see Channel Tres, which I trust was as excellent as they say, but by 2019 Deerhunter were entrenched in my personal pantheon. With each passing album cycle, I approached their concerts with increasing reverence, never sure what the night would entail but certain there would be moments of transcendence. And maybe I sensed they were on their way out, or at least entering a veteran phase that would involve much longer breaks between LPs and tours.

I don’t remember many specifics about that night at Raleigh’s Lincoln Theatre, and setlist.fm has no documentation to jog my memory. But I know I got the rush I was hoping for when the band ended the show with a performance of Microcastle closer “Twilight At Carbon Lake.” It’s one of my favorite Deerhunter songs, an eerie slow-burn swoon that erupts into violent euphoria in its final moments, like the apocalypse unfolding in the middle of Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee. I spilled out onto the streets of Raleigh in a giddy daze, already anticipating my next Deerhunter concert experience.

It hasn’t happened yet. The band spent the rest of 2019 on the road supporting that year’s aptly titled Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? Then came COVID, and the world hasn’t heard from them since. (“Was not seen again/ Was not seen again/ Was not seen again/ Was not seen again.”) Guitarist Lockett Pundt became a software developer in the early months of 2020, and though his 2022 resume—one of the first results when you search Lockett Pundt software developer—still listed Deerhunter as an active concern, it also referred to band activities as something he did “prior to web development.” Hearsay suggests this was a typical instance of a rocker settling down to raise a family and that the band is on hiatus but not broken up. Drummer Moses Archuleta is at least still releasing music as Moon Diagrams.

As for Cox, once an inescapable fixture of the indie rock news cycle, he was even farther off the radar until offering proof of life this year in the form of a two-part NTS Radio broadcast on the 4th of July. He returned with another NTS show in October, but we’ve been deprived of new music, new pullquotes, and new spectacle from one of his generation’s most prolific creative forces—even as he continues to write “hundreds of songs,” per a new podcast interview with Grizzly Bear’s Daniel Rossen. Who knows whether Cox still feels this way, but in 2019 he told Stereogum he wasn’t interested in solo projects anymore, just group records, so maybe he’s biding his time until the band can reconvene. He doesn’t owe us anything, but I miss the days when he was churning out new music faster than I could process it and feeding interviewers gems like “That’s why I decided to be gay, so I never have kids that love Taylor Swift.”

That line emerged during the promo campaign for Fading Frontier, which recently turned 10 years old. You better believe I quoted it in my review at the time. Against my better judgment, I spent a good chunk of the piece relitigating Deerhunter’s previous album, 2013’s Monomania, a classic In Utero-style pivot to abrasion following 2010’s relatively accessible fan favorite Halcyon Digest. At the time, it felt important to me to establish that Monomania was a masterstroke because it validated my argument that Deerhunter were the greatest indie band of their era. This is how I kicked off the article:

Around the time of 2010 career pinnacle Halcyon Digest, it became clear that Deerhunter were the greatest indie rock band of their generation. By “indie rock” I mean the fertile niche of guitar-driven noise-pop pioneered by the Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth, Pavement and their ilk — bands that have a deep reverence for rock ‘n’ roll’s old, weird past and an ear for its future. But however you want to define “indie” or “rock,” which of Deerhunter’s peers has assembled a more captivating, challenging, rewarding catalog over the past decade? They have competition, sure, but whereas many bands their age have bloated and curdled or settled into a comfortable groove, Bradford Cox and friends continue to thrive and evolve. Deerhunter are six full-lengths, two EPs, numerous side projects, and countless rarities deep into a discography that’s about to get one album deeper, and even at that prolific pace, they still haven’t made a false step.

Another decade down the line, I still believe Deerhunter stood tallest among their peers. Despite being anchored by a huge personality, they were a true collaborative unit in which every member put their stamp on the music. To appreciate what a communal effort they put forth, just read Cox’s reverent remembrances of the late Josh Fauver’s input, or spend a few minutes with Pundt’s Lotus Plaza albums and realize how much he contributed to the fabric of Deerhunter’s sound. The group’s unique alchemy helped them pull off so many different kinds of songs while still sounding unmistakably like Deerhunter, a pattern that holds true when you zoom out and go album by album.

As with all the greatest bands, the best Deerhunter record is whichever one I’m listening to right now, even when that happens to be an EP. They were master world-builders, attuned to every little detail—versatile enough to build propulsive momentum or slow down into a lurching swoon, fearlessly vulnerable yet alluringly oblique, masters of atmospherics but not at the expense of sharp songwriting. More than most bands, their catalog feels comparable to the filmography of a brilliant film auteur. But they’ve never been in the business of popcorn cinema, of giving people the chance to forget their troubles for a spell. Nor have they lowered themselves to sloganeering or flattering the sensibilities of a particular political bloc in a way that can be easily commodified. They walked their own path at their own pace and trusted listeners to follow.

That arc played out entirely within the time period I covered in my recent book SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion. So if Deerhunter were the best indie band going back then, why did they merit little more than a passing mention in those pages? SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS is a book about how indie rock impacted the mainstream and the mainstream impacted indie rock in the 21st century. My original subtitle for the book was How Indie Rock Went Pop—a trajectory that feels antithetical to Deerhunter, even if they ended up writing pop songs of a sort. They were among the most vital contributors to 2000s and 2010s indie, yet, like Yo La Tengo before them, they were carrying the torch for a more classic iteration of the genre that had little to do with the pop-cultural glow-up I documented in SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS.

At a time when a large percentage of the public understood indie rock to mean whatever albums were available on vinyl at Urban Outfitters, Deerhunter were in the crates for real, immersing themselves in the old, the obscure, the under-celebrated. (It’s telling that Cox’s most recent NTS show featured records released on or before October 1958.) They were music fanatics with a hunger for the kind of raw, confounding exhilaration they offered up in their own catalog, whether that meant chic critical darlings like Sonic Youth and Stereolab, decades-old popular sounds from roughnecks like Hank Williams and Bo Diddley, or myriad artists too obscure to be cult favorites. They existed within the Big Indie sphere, but it was not their natural environment.

It’s why Cox, while hailing Monomania as Deerhunter’s best album in one of his last interviews before going dark, rejected any association with “indie rock,” the genre I keep trying to pin on him: “Monomania is the greatest album I’ve ever made and anybody that doesn’t like it has no idea what I’m about or what I’m doing. They’re simply avid fans of what’s called indie rock and think we’re a notable indie rock band. I hate indie rock and never liked the term. I don’t consider myself a participant in indie rock. I think it’s a ghetto.” When the interviewer suggested the phrase “indie rock” is just marketing, Cox responded, “It’s worse than that, it’s an insult. ‘Indie’ rock is like saying: You know, rock, but lazy.”

You may find it illuminating that my book repeatedly makes time for the National, the only other indie band whose output from ‘05 to ‘15 I’d hold up against Deerhunter’s. The version of indie rock Matt Berninger and friends were pursuing was not without its quirks, but nothing that would be too off-putting to normies. Even at his freakiest and most spiritually disheveled, Berninger was still playing the part of the white-collar striver, the Midwest transplant, the Sad Dad™. His bandmates learned to summon a regal splendor from within the hyper-literate college rock tradition, and over time they fine-tuned their sound in ways that appealed to both the algorithm and its queen, Taylor Alison Swift. I don’t think they ever compromised their creative instincts in a way previous generations would classify as “selling out”—and, to reiterate, I love them so much—but their approach was nothing if not upwardly mobile.

Deerhunter didn’t play that game. They were covered by a lot of the same media, booked for a lot of the same festivals, and even signed to the same record label. For tapped-in indie fans, they were a huge deal for a while, and when they wanted to make a crowd-pleasing anthem, they damn sure could. But they were sometimes too much for the unadventurous masses to handle—too languid, too noisy, too Southern, too queer. There was a bit of Replacements-style self-destruction to them, too, the kind of volatility certain music fans love to lionize. Though Cox had matured into a consummate professional by the end, in the band’s chaotic heyday you never knew when a Deerhunter gig might go off the rails. (The time he played “My Sharona” for an hour straight was at an Atlas Sound show, but it gets the point across.)

Cox repeatedly spoke about how he thought culture was dying and he was completely uninspired by most modern music. But I think it’s noteworthy that when given the chance to shit on Imagine Dragons and Twenty One Pilots in 2019, he opted not to. He wasn’t interested in holding up Deerhunter as a paragon of Real Music, and neither am I. I have conflicted feelings about the changes that allowed for “indie” to encompass bands like Vampire Weekend and the 1975, well-heeled young men playing high-concept pop songs that sound great at H&M. But those are two of my favorite bands of all time—bands that, in my estimation, have made incredible art under the guise of lifestyle music. So it’s not from a posture of snobbery or self-righteousness when I say Deerhunter were pursuing a vision of indie rock that thrives in the margins rather than one that pushes toward the middle. It’s just a statement of fact.

“You can listen to Cryptograms or Fluorescent Grey and hear that we weren’t trying to be the fucking Arcade Fire,” Cox said during the Fading Frontier rollout. “We never had dreams of playing in arenas. My hero was Pauline Oliveros. And Bowie. But Bowie is an interesting case. He really got it, man. He was really able to fucking be the one Bowie. Where you can actually do whatever the fuck you want, at any given time, and it’ll be fine. That’s something to aspire to.” By that point, Deerhunter had already achieved a smaller-scale version of that vision, and they were exercising their freedom by making the most placid music of their career. But they hadn’t always been so chill.

Deerhunter were perfect specimens for the blog era. Partially this was because, between the main band and all the side projects, they released so much music, providing endless fodder for those of us perched at our laptops in search of some interesting racket to write about. But they were also ideal for blogs because, at least in his younger days, Cox was a provocateur. From the first album title forward, he was always poking and prodding, sometimes strategically, sometimes on a whim. Marfan syndrome made him stand out physically, and he sometimes leaned into that otherness with wild costumes like the one he wore on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon for the band’s legendary performance of “Monomania,” or simply by thrashing around in a dress at Deerhunter’s early shows.

In those days, indie musicians were thrust under a microscope as a vast ecosystem of websites embarked on tabloid-like coverage of their every stray tweet. Some people pushed even farther into full-fledged invasion of privacy, like when Cox’s online archive containing childhood photos, demos for Atlas Sound’s Logos, and the entirety of Weird Era Cont. (which had been intended as a surprise addendum to Microcastle) leaked in 2008. Cox found this new reality as jarring as anyone: “The Internet nowadays is all sensationalism, and it’s just terrifying when you’re actually experiencing it as a person,” he said in 2009.

Yet he knew how to pull those strings for attention or amusement when it suited him, turning some of his interviews into a kind of performance art—particularly with Pitchfork, who published so many Q&As with him. “I am a terrorist,” he told the site after the 2012 “My Sharona” incident. “As a homosexual, my job is simply to sodomize mediocrity. I am terrified and horrified and shocked that anyone would mention Phish in any article related to me.” A year later, while promoting Monomania: “Indie rock is such a bratty culture, and I don’t see a lot of ugly people in it, either. I feel very proud to be hideous. Thank God I don’t look like every other fucking dude wearing their girlfriend’s fucking jeans out there on stage.”

The music itself could be confrontational too—sometimes caustic, but more often challenging in its softness and slowness, its demand for your patient attention between fireworks displays. The prettiest tracks on breakthrough album Cryptograms are the extended ambient passages, and the rock songs are odysseys built on a foundation of droning repetition. It was thrilling and, in the words of Pitchfork’s Marc Hogan, “willfully cryptic,” a pointed attempt to channel the long, slow shots of filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. Follow-up Microcastle stacked up several barely-there swoons in the center of the tracklist—a dreamy no-man’s-land to be navigated like the Darién Gap (yes I’ve been watching Pluribus) before “Nothing Ever Happened” jolts the album back to life.

On 2010’s Halcyon Digest, they minimized the detours and hired producer Ben H. Allen, fresh off co-producing Animal Collective’s own freaks-go-pop opus Merriweather Post Pavilion (and Asher Roth’s “I Love College”). It was the closest Deerhunter came to working with a mainstream figure, and it brought them as close to the mainstream as they’d get. Allen applied a majestic sheen to songs like “Helicopter,” a shoegaze power ballad about a fictional human trafficking victim invented by author and core Deerhunter inspiration Dennis Cooper—an ideal example of how their fascination with the sordid could still function in crystalline hi-fi.

Cox and Allen spent the sessions butting heads. Cox, for instance, insisted on recording the teenage reverie “Basement Scene” in an actual basement with a 14-year-old engineer, in defiance of the glossy cinematic dreamstates that were becoming Allen’s specialty. Allen kicked Cox out of the studio while the rest of the band recorded Pundt’s “Desire Lines.” “I thought that he was enormously competent,” Cox told Noisey, “but I wasn’t looking for an artistic collaborator at that point, so we did not get along.” Despite their frequent clashes, Halcyon Digest became the most popular Deerhunter album: the one that goes down most smoothly and the one most often hailed as a masterpiece.

In that regard it’s similar to an even bigger 2010 sensation: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, the widely beloved IMAX-scale blockbuster Kanye West later shrugged off as “my long, backhanded apology,” his attempt to get back in the public’s good graces after the Taylor Swift debacle by giving them exactly what they wanted. Because I am a music critic and a basic indie bro, you won’t be surprised to learn that Halcyon Digest and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy were my two favorite albums of 2010. Nor will you be surprised that Cox, a wily and cantankerous artist’s artist with little time for the Critically Acclaimed Prestige Mainstream, does not buy into the hype around either Halcyon or MBDTF.

As far as Deerhunter albums are concerned, he far prefers Monomania, the (quite Yeezus-esque) noisy freakout he recorded in the midst of a nervous breakdown. Pundt, who only wrote one or two tracks per album but contributed many of the band’s most straightforward bangers, applies his dream-pop special sauce to the aerodynamic “The Missing.” But for the most part Monomania is a charred and brittle lo-fi garage rock record, aggressively trebly and prone to left turns like the hootin’, hollerin’ “Pensacola.” It’s not that different from the prior Deerhunter albums—in a way, it made perfect sense coming after an album that ended with a tribute to the late Jay Reatard—but on songs like “Leather Jacket II,” “Dream Captain,” and the incendiary “Monomania,” the band’s eerie, liminal treatment of retro rock gives way to something more nightmarish.

In the wake of that on-record meltdown—and Cox’s hospitalization due to being struck by a car, an incident he acknowledged as a turning point but eventually grew weary of discussing—Deerhunter mellowed out for Fading Frontier. Surprisingly, they reunited with Allen, who helped them summon a sleek, understated beauty. Every guitar arpeggio, droning keyboard, and drum fill cohered into something gorgeous and deceptively complex. Though they introduced the album with “Snakeskin,” a freaky Southern funk track that once again found Cox mining sinister allure out of old-time religion, it was defined by the melancholia and self-searching of tracks like “Living My Life.” The song is plainspoken and unshowy, moving with a confident grace even as Cox lays bare sentiments like “Will you tell me when you find out how to conquer all this fear?”

At the time, the poised and reined-in Fading Frontier did not blow me away like Deerhunter’s more combustible releases, but these days I’m inclined to agree with Cox’s take that fans’ more muted response to the album stemmed from narrow expectations and short attention spans. The older I get, the more it feels like a definitive work, worthy of all the hosannas reserved for Microcastle and Halcyon Digest. But if those albums had been outliers within an increasingly gentrified indie rock landscape, Deerhunter’s turn toward nuanced precision and quiet introspection was even more out of step with a culture of mind-numbing instant gratification.

By the time I caught Deerhunter at Hopscotch ’19, they had journeyed much farther into a “boring” maturity that feels all the more riveting each year they’re gone. Cox, always more levelheaded than he was given credit for, was bringing an almost prophetic clarity to his interviews. Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? was an even more patient, plaintive pop record than Fading Frontier—the album version of giving up fast food and learning to cook exquisite healthy meals full of vegetables and lean proteins. Its arrangements were crisp and clear in a way that mirrored Cox’s grown-up headspace: streaked with dreamy keyboards as usual, but also dotted with harpsichords and brass and marimba. The songs moved with an understated momentum, breathing but never exploding. When Cox sang of “the village green” on “No One’s Sleeping,” it was impossible not to think of the Kinks, another band that turned down the distortion in favor of a more elegant sound.

Rather than Ray Davies’ quaint stories of pastoral living, Cox was plumbing humanity’s darkest depths. No longer focused on his own struggles with illness and isolation, his perspective was now trained outward toward a world defined by death: the Russian revolution, the looming threat of climate change, the murder of British politician Jo Cox. The percolating “Plains,” the closest thing to disco this band has yet attempted, surveyed the demise of James Dean after a summer spent filming in Marfa, where Deerhunter recorded the album. The most transgressive thing about these songs was not their focus on the hopelessly morbid but their airy, upbeat delivery system for such bleak stories.

Unflinching looks at Earth’s ugly realities have always been central to the Deerhunter project. A refusal to turn away from the worst this world had to offer is a throughline from the beginning of the band, and it has only intensified with time, even as their approach has become more refined. Halcyon Digest’s theme was “the way that we write and rewrite and edit our memories to be a digest version of what we want to remember, and how that’s kind of sad.” From there, Cox continued to decry nostalgia with increasing intensity; he described it as “toxic” in notes accompanying Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? “I think if people could stop being so escapist, we can have some real culture in the world,” he told Stereogum while promoting that album.

That may seem like a funny sentiment coming from somebody so enthralled by the sounds of the past—the guy who was, by his own account, “Saved By Old Times.” But one of the most exciting aspects of Deerhunter’s music was the way it recombined and refracted all those retro influences—from the hillbillies to the krautrockers, from the tunesmiths to the sound designers—channeling them into something vital and unstuck in time. It’s one of many reasons I long to engage with Deerhunter in the present tense again. For a band that built their legacy on dreamy deep-dives into music history, they were never meant to be confined to the haze of the good old days.

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is out now via St. Martin’s Press. Buy it here.

Every chapter in my book SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion has a soundtrack. They’re printed in the book, and I’ve been sharing them here intermittently. Recent soundtracks have covered bloghouse and indie folk, fussy prestige indie and druggy tank-top indie. Today we progress to the tunes for Chapter 10, “Late Registration,” which tackles the 21st century indie rock audience’s relationship to hip-hop.

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS (now available for purchase!) is about how indie rock changed the mainstream and the mainstream changed indie rock in the 21st century—or, more simply, how indie rock went pop. The book speed-runs the 20th century in the first chapter and crams a lot of late 2010s material into the last one, but it’s especially focused on the years from about 2001-2015. That’s where this chapter and its soundtrack live.

We begin in the early 2000s with the rise of indie rap movements like Def Jux, Rhymesayers, and Anticon and an influx of British talent. Then we move forward into the blog era and the intermingling between post-Kanye rappers and the indie rockers they loved to sample. By the end, we’ve seen the likes of Odd Future, Kendrick Lamar, Death Grips, and Danny Brown in some ways supplant indie rock, and Run The Jewels are reigning supreme.

I can’t embed the Apple Music version of this playlist, but you can find it here and check out the Spotify version below.

Cannibal Ox, “Iron Galaxy” (2001)

cLOUDDEAD, “Apt. A (1)” (2001)

The Diplomats, “I Really Mean It” (2003)

Dizzee Rascal, “Fix Up, Look Sharp” (2003)

Lady Sovereign, “Random” (2005)

Clipse, “Momma I’m So Sorry” (2006)

M.I.A., “Paper Planes” (2007)

Lil Wayne - “A Milli” (2008)

Kid Cudi, “Day ‘n’ Nite (Crookers Remix)” (2008)

The Cool Kids, “Black Mags” (2008)

Drake & Peter Bjorn and John, “Let’s Call It Off” (2009)

Jay Electronica, “Exhibit C” (2009)

Asher Roth, “I Love College” (2009)

Lil B, “I’m God” (2009)

Kanye West & Bon Iver, “Lost In The World” (2010)

Tyler, the Creator, “Yonkers” (2011)

Kendrick Lamar, “A.D.H.D.” (2011)

Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire, Danny Brown, Despot, El-P, & Das Racist, “The Last Huzzah!” (2011)

Death Grips, “I’ve Seen Footage” (2012)

Run the Jewels, “Oh My Darling Don’t Cry” (2014)

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is out now via St. Martin’s Press. Buy it here.

I recently became aware, through Ian Cohen’s Apologies To The Queen Mary retrospective, of the blog-era indie rock tribute band called Black Crystal Wolf Kids. That’s funny, and it reminded me that I’ve been meaning to power rank the indie band name trends of the 2000s.

My book SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion (buy it now, don’t miss out) isn’t entirely about the aughts. In fact, I wrote it largely because I was fascinated about where indie music and its attendant culture went in the 2010s. But tracing that trajectory required a heavy focus on the decade prior, which meant a semi-exhaustive retelling of blog-era indie rock.

The following is a power ranking of 10 indie band name trends from the 2000s. I am limiting this to artists that released an album no later than 2010, and I’m mainly extending the range to 2010 so I can keep the beach bands, all of whom are spiritually from the 2000s. IMPORTANT NOTE: I am ranking the quality of the music produced by each cohort of artists, grouped by band names. I’m not ranking the quality of the band names. If I was assessing the coolness of the names alone, obviously the “Crystal” bands would run away with this. OK, let’s begin.

10. “Kids” bands

Black Kids, Cold War Kids, Casiokids, etc.

None of these bands were very good!

9. Geographical bands

Beirut, Architecture In Helsinki, Tokyo Police Club, I’m From Barcelona, the Rural Alberta Advantage, etc.

I might have played “Postcards From Italy” more than any other blog-era MP3. That’s a perfect song. I played the first Tokyo Police Club EP almost as much. But a lot of this music was obnoxious, and I wouldn’t be too bothered if even the best of this category was permanently deleted from this planet.

8. “Black” bands

Black Eyes, Black Dice, Black Mountain, Black Kids, etc.

With the exception of Pitchfork hype cautionary tale Black Kids (the only band to be represented in multiple categories here), this list has a lot of cred working for it. You’ve got art-punk cult heroes from DC’s Dischord scene, abstract adventurers from the height of New York’s DFA empire, and towering Cascadian classic rockers. None of these groups are my favorite, but they all command my respect.

7. Disemvoweled bands

MGMT, MSTRKRFT, STRFKR, etc.

Did you know it was called “disemvoweled” when you spell words this way? That’s cute. Some solid tunes here, but those Oracular Spectacular singles are being asked to shoulder a lot of weight.

6. Beach bands

Best Coast, Wavves, Beach Fossils, Surfer Blood, etc.

A lot of these bands now have a reputation as ephemeral hipster fluff propped up by blog hype, but there are some stone-cold classic albums among these ranks. (Crazy For You, King of the Beach, and Beach Fossils, to be specific, though at this point Astro Coast might deserve a reappraisal.) Note that this list omits several beach-obsessed artists, e.g. most chillwave acts, who worked the beach into their ethos but not their band name.

5. “Crystal” bands

Crystal Castles, Crystal Stilts, Crystal Antlers, etc.

The once-mighty Crystal Castles’ legacy is marred by disturbing allegations against Ethan Kath. Crystal Stilts and Crystal Antlers, however, are both severely underrated at this point, and I’m making them my favored underdogs in this exercise. Newcomers, go seek them out.

4. “Wolf” bands

Wolf Parade, Wolf Eyes, Wolfmother, etc.

There are not many indie rock albums more classic than Apologies to the Queen Mary. There are not many underground fixtures more accomplished than Wolf Eyes. There will be football stadiums playing Wolfmother songs for the rest of my life. But really, this category is so high because of Apologies. What a record.

3. “Bear” bands

Grizzly Bear, Panda Bear, Minus The Bear, Bear In Heaven, Muggabears, etc.

I am so annoyed with myself for not making the trip to one of Grizzly Bear’s recent reunion shows. I don’t think most people have forgotten about them, but that group is due for a proper revival; somebody needs to put “On A Neck, On A Spit” in a funny TikTok or something. Meanwhile, I’d argue the solo Panda Bear discography prevails over Animal Collective proper (and, while I’m taking stances, that Tomboy is every bit as good as Person Pitch). Those two bodies of work alone are enough to lift this category toward the top of the list, even if Minus The Bear is dragging it down by being decidedly Not My Shit.

2. “The” bands

The Strokes, the White Stripes, the Hives, the Vines, the Libertines, the Cribs, the Rapture, the Walkmen, the Killers, etc., etc., etc.

Is it cheating and/or overly general to include bands whose name begins with “the” within a list of era-specific naming trends? Maybe, but ask most people about the indie band names of the 2000s, and this construction is what they will refer to. The Strokes and the White Stripes, two iconic bands fronted by actual-genius songwriters, are sufficient to spare this category whatever disrepute was earned by some of the landfill indie slop that later popped up. Also: “Hate To Say I Told You So”! “Can’t Stand Me Now”! “Mr. Brightside”! “The Rat”! House of! Jealous lovers!

1. “Deer” bands

Deerhunter, Deerhoof, Deer Tick, etc.

I have a soft spot for that first Deer Tick album, but let’s be serious: Deerhunter and Deerhoof in the same category? That’s the ballgame, folks. Almost diametrically opposed, yet both have a claim as the greatest indie band of their generation.

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is out now via St. Martin’s Press. Buy it here.

Every chapter in my book SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion (out now!) has an accompanying soundtrack. The 20-song playlists are printed in the book, but I’ve been posting them online here at the newsletter too in streamable form. Today I give you the music from Chapter 9, “Terminally Chill.”

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS is about how indie rock changed the mainstream and the mainstream changed indie rock in the 21st century—in other words, how indie rock went pop. Chapter 9 covers a fairly wide range of late 2000s-early 2010s developments that felt aligned to me: the evolution of indie synth-pop, the infusion of blog-boosted buzz bands into the music festival ecosystem, the rise of the sun-dazed lo-fi nostalgic psych known as chillwave (and a preponderance of beachy garage bands developing in parallel), the emergence of streaming-friendly vape-pen-era psych acts, the continued proliferation of pop hits that mimic these indie sounds, the glory days of Hipster Runoff…

This music was all happening at the same time as the prestige indie rock I covered in the previous chapter, artists like the National and Arcade Fire that were getting Grammy love and being embraced by Barack Obama, built for elegant theaters and fancy events rather than filthy Bonnaroo weekends and H&M playlists. There was some overlap between these iterations of indie, but with a few exceptions, here I mostly tried to focus on stuff that made sense for tank tops, shorts, and sunglasses rather than the Dark Was The Night compilation.

Check out a Spotify version of the soundtrack below and an Apple Music version (which won’t embed on this platform) right here.

Passion Pit, “Sleepyhead” (2007)

MGMT, “Kids” (2007)

Empire of the Sun, “Walking on a Dream” (2008)

Phoenix, “1901” (2009)

Animal Collective, “My Girls” (2009)

Neon Indian, “Deadbeat Summer” (2009)

Vivian Girls, “Where Do You Run To” (2008)

Washed Out, “Feel It All Around” (2009)

Real Estate, “Beach Comber” (2009)

Toro y Moi, “Blessa” (2009)

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, “Round and Round” (2010)

Beach Fossils, “Daydream” (2010)

Best Coast, “When I’m With You” (2009)

Wavves, “King of the Beach” (2010)

The Drums, “Let’s Go Surfing” (2009)

Foster the People, “Pumped Up Kicks” (2010)

M83, “Midnight City” (2011)

Beach House, “Myth” (2012)

Tame Impala, “Feels Like We Only Go Backwards” (2012)

Mac DeMarco, “Ode to Viceroy” (2012)

In case you missed it, I talked with Anthony Fantano about the book:

Previous chapter soundtracks:

Chapter 1: “Slanted and Enchanted: What Do We Mean When We Say Indie?”

Chapter 2: “Take Me Out: The Indie Kids Learn To Dance”

Chapter 3: “This Song Will Change Your Life: Hollywood Goes Indie”

Chapter 4: “Best New Music: Pitchfork, Blog-Rock, & The Indie Media Pipeline”

Chapter 5: “Music Is My Boyfriend: iTunes, MySpace, and Indie’s Digital Revolution”

Chapter 6: “D.A.N.C.E.: The Ballad of Bloghouse and Indie Sleaze”

Chapter 7: “Upward Over the Mountain: The Evolution of Indie Folk”

Chapter 8: “Fake Empire: Prestige Indie Rock’s Moment of Ubiquity”

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is out now via St. Martin’s Press. Buy it here.

I’d like to believe that every town has a person like Kyle Sowash, but I’m not so sure that’s true. If you live in a municipality with its very own Kyle Sowash, consider yourself lucky.

The first time I met Kyle, I was at a Spoon and Crooked Fingers concert in 2003. It was in some sort of café on the third floor of the student center at Denison University, just east of Columbus. The show was supposed to be for Denison students only, but my friend David and I, both freshmen at other schools, had acquired some student IDs from my distant cousin.

I have no idea how Kyle and his partner Jenny got in there. They’re older than me—not significantly older, but old enough that I was surprised to see them at a concert for college students when we ended up in conversation that night. As someone who was interested in becoming involved in my local music scene—who was showing up to see as many indie bands as I could, who was about to launch one of my own—I probably would have met these two kind, bespectacled people eventually even if they hadn’t wiggled their way into that particular gig.

Kyle is a fixture of Columbus underground music. It was true back then, and it’s true now. As long as I’ve known him, he’s been booking shows. I can’t remember, but I wouldn’t be shocked if he handed me a little pocket-sized flyer the first time I met him. He used to be the booking guy at Andyman’s Treehouse, a beloved, now-defunct bar with a giant tree growing through the middle of the performance room, a place with far too much lore to get into here. Later he booked the Big Room Bar, another now-shuttered establishment in the building that housed the city’s late, great, independently owned alternative rock station, whose former programming director was the same Andyman that owned the aforementioned Treehouse. But again, the amount of backstory is overwhelming.

A dental hygienist by trade, Kyle has slowed down as a concert promoter in recent years, especially since he and Jenny had a kid. But he still sometimes brings cool, quirky underground rock acts to town (I was glad he got Bill Fox to come down from Cleveland this past summer) and/or assembles an array of talented locals. He can regularly be found at gigs he did not book, basking in the glow of live music. He’s often onstage playing songs of his own, too. That’s where I found him a few Fridays ago, at the first of two nights celebrating the 20th anniversary of his band, the Kyle Sowashes.

Kyle is one person I think of when I think of indie rock. I recently published my first book, SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion, which is about how indie rock changed the mainstream and the mainstream changed indie rock in the 21st century. One throughline in the book is that the meaning of “indie” has been morphed and stretched so much that it has become almost meaningless, even if it means so much to many of us. But the first chapter starts out by attempting to define what indie rock was in the ‘80s and ‘90s, before the main action of the book takes off. Here at the newsletter, I called Yo La Tengo torchbearers for a 20th century indie rock ideal. That’s very much true of Kyle too.

Kyle grew up in Dayton, where he absorbed the influence of local heroes like Guided By Voices, the Breeders, Brainiac, and Swearing At Motorists. After spending the late ‘90s in New Mexico as a dental technician in the Air Force, he landed in Columbus. When we met, he was fronting a trio called Tom Foolery and the Mistakes, playing charming, scraggly indie songs inspired by the likes of Built To Spill, Pavement, Superchunk, and Archers of Loaf. I was instantly smitten.

Kyle writes from the perspective of the scrappy underdog—a fundamentally decent man trying to get by in a brazenly indecent world, constantly thwarted by some new injustice or indignity. “The Flu,” performed in the above video, is all about a bus ride where people are not providing appropriate personal space; the offending party is loudly singing along to a Ludacris song blaring in his headphones while also coughing and wheezing all over our poor protagonist. Other song titles on the Tom Foolery album Fatter Of Mact: “Let Me Down,” “What The Hell Is The Matter With You?,” “Why You Gotta Be Like That?”

There’s a Larry David quality to Kyle’s social observations—it’s no coincidence that one Tom Foolery song title was “These Pretzels are Making Me Thirsty!”—and like Larry David, he’s funny. But Kyle is also a big Weird Al Yankovic fan, and he brings a similar earnestness, enthusiasm, and goofball spirit to his work. At base level, Kyle is a bearded Midwestern dad whose music is an extension of community—good songs to go along with good friends and good food. “For me, being in a band is just about getting together with my friends and drinking beer,” he recently told Matter News. “And if we get to make music, yeah, that’s great. But sometimes you just need to eat hot dogs in the backyard.”

When Tom Foolery flamed out in 2005, Kyle made a solo album. Because he recorded all the instruments himself, he chose the band name the Kyle Sowashes. That first album, What’s Important (And What’s Not), had so many lo-fi bangers; my favorite was “In The Mail,” an indie rock waltz about going to the post office to send out a fan club membership, involving the phrase “Aw, shucks!” (It takes a darker turn in the second verse.) For the live show, he recruited a rotating cast of friends to back him up, an arrangement that continued for several years, at least up through the truly excellent 2008 sophomore album Yeah Buddy! It’s hard to pick just one song to recommend on that one, but “Yr Band Flaked Out On Me,” about being ghosted while trying to book a DIY tour, is so perfectly Kyle Sowash.

For a brief moment, I was a part-time member of the Kyle Sowashes. I subbed in as the bass player occasionally in the late 2000s, tagging along for a couple road trips to the East Coast and a handful of other shows. It was a rewarding experience; I’ll never forget seeing M.I.A. at Coney Island for Siren Fest during our 2007 trip to New York. I was never a core member, but I consider that stint a badge of honor, even though I’m pretty sure I’m the unnamed person Kyle cited in that Matter article who ruined a house show by not knowing the songs, inspiring him to lock in a more permanent lineup going forward. (Sorry, Kyle!)

Kyle has stayed busy over the years. He never seems to stop embarking upon the most Kyle musical endeavors possible. He organizes an annual GBV covers marathon, and he’s the bassist in Smug Brothers, a group with at least one former GBV member. He has occasionally played in a Silkworm tribute band called the Watery Percentages, whose Facebook page has been used most recently to promote shows by actual Silkworm members when Kyle has brought them to town.

All the while, the Kyle Sowashes have kept churning out good-to-great records, continuing up through the one they released this month. It’s called Start Making Sense; you see what they did there. I like how the title track ties together the Cleveland Browns, Buster Brown, Bobby Brown, and Julie Brown, and I love that Kyle once again played saxophone here and there across the LP. Like most Kyle Sowashes albums, Start Making Sense came out on Anyway, a label run for decades by another pillar of Columbus indie rock, Bela Koe-Krompecher. Bela deserves his own tribute post here, but you’d be better off reading his book than reading whatever flowery praise-prose I came up with.

As the music has persisted, so has the camaraderie that encircles the band like dust around Pigpen. Every December, Kyle throws a pizza party for anyone who’s ever played in the Kyle Sowashes, and even stragglers like me are invited. The sense of community I associate with the Sowashes extends beyond the members of the band to the many musicians who’ve been running in the same circles over the past two decades and change. Several of them opened the anniversary shows: groups that have been together forever, but also ones that resulted from shuffling familiar faces into new configurations.

At the show I attended, I was reminded of how vital indie rock can be at the local level. Ghost Shirt, one of the opening acts, gave a speech about how they were well past the point of hitting it big, emphasizing that the best part of performing was having an excuse to get so many friends together—music as a form of social glue at a life phase where old relationships tend to disintegrate. Yet even at 200-capacity Rumba Cafe, they played with so much passion and dynamism that night that I felt like they could crush on much larger stages if ever given the opportunity. Their set affirmed the truism that you never know what life-affirming music might be unfolding at the bar down the block.

When the Sowashes took the stage, their catalog snuck up on me. I couldn’t believe the number of catchy, clever, low-key moving songs they’d accumulated over the years. Less surprising was the humble jubilation that consumed the place while they performed those songs—a sensation that intensified when they brought a makeshift horn section onstage, led by yet another Columbus legend, Bob Starker. It was an appropriate celebration of this band: small-scale but heartfelt, not overwhelming in a force-of-nature sense yet still somehow greater than the sum of its parts.

The Kyle Sowashes have never been cool in that distant, oblique, avant-garde Sonic Youth way, or even in a holy shit take-your-breath-away Neutral Milk Hotel way. They’ve always been cool more along the lines of, “What a cool bunch of guys” — big-hearted everyday people making fun music with a startling amount of hooks and pathos. That distinction goes to show how much range exists within even the classic pre-Y2K conception of indie rock. Kyle’s music has always felt attainable in that Our Band Could Be Your Life way—the punk-rock ideal that anyone could do what he does if they tried as hard and cared as much—yet at the same time unattainable because nobody else would do it like he does. What could be more indie rock than that?

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is out now via St. Martin’s Press. Buy it.

My book SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is out now(!), so I’m no longer asking you to pre-order it; instead, I’m asking you to buy it. A lot of you already have, which is how it ended up on the USA Today bestsellers list. Thanks so much — now let’s beat To Kill a Mockingbird next week.

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS is about how indie rock impacted the mainstream and the mainstream impacted indie rock in the 21st century—or, put simply, how indie rock went pop. If you’ve been a fan of indie music (however you define it) at any time since Y2K, you’ll probably enjoy it. Every chapter has an accompanying soundtrack, and you can find the first seven by clicking around the archive here. Today we’re getting to Chapter 8, “Fake Empire.”

This one is about the rise of an elegant, mature wave of prestige indie bands that were welcomed into the halls of power and often intersected with the world of high art. I’m talking about the Obama campaign embracing the National and Arcade Fire. I’m talking about Arcade Fire and Bon Iver winning big at the Grammys. I’m talking about the kind of indie that involves formal attire and rather than festival wear, the artists that might hire Nico Muhly to do string arrangements, the scene summed up by the Dark Was the Night compilation.

This subset of bands was peaking at a time when indie rock had penetrated into the mainstream in a significant, undeniable way, yet most of its biggest stars were still inspiring rampant “Who are these guys?” reactions whenever thrust into a true general-audience spotlight. Indie bands were routinely topping the albums chart but rarely cranking out hit singles. Soon enough, the industry would replace them with similar-ish performers who lacked hipster cred but fit nicely into radio playlists. This soundtrack digs into some of that aftermath as well.

Note: Apple Music playlists will not embed in this newsletter, but I am linking to the Chapter 8 soundtrack on my personal account here and we’ll see if you all can access it.

The National, "Fake Empire" (2007)

Feist, "I Feel It All" (2007)

Andrew Bird, "Heretics" (2007)

LCD Soundsystem, "All My Friends" (2007)

Yeasayer, "2080" (2007)

Frightened Rabbit, "The Modern Leper" (2008)

Grizzly Bear, "Two Weeks" (2009)

Dirty Projectors, "Cannibal Resource" (2009)

The Antlers, "Two" (2009)

Vampire Weekend, "Giving Up the Gun" (2010)

Arcade Fire, "Ready to Start" (2010)

St. Vincent, "Cruel" (2011)

Fleet Foxes, "Grown Ocean" (2011)

Destroyer, "Kaputt" (2011)

Bon Iver, "Beth/Rest" (2011)

Fun., "We are Young" (2011)

Mumford & Sons, "I Will Wait" (2012)

Of Monsters and Men, "Little Talks" (2011)

The Lumineers, "Ho Hey" (2012)

Phillip Phillips, "Home" (2012)

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is out now via St. Martin’s Press. Buy it here.

I can’t believe we finally made it. For the past six months, I've been rolling out my debut book, sharing lots of bonus content (chapter soundtracks, “B-side” essays, and more) here in the newsletter and telling you to pre-order this thing at every opportunity. I promise to never do that again because as of now, I'll be telling you to buy it instead. Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History Of The Indie Rock Explosion, is out today. I hope you read it, and I trust you'll enjoy it.

We celebrated the release last night with a launch event at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn. My friend Jason Lipshutz from Billboard was on hand to moderate, and the store sold out of its initial stock of the book, which I'm taking as a good sign. Thanks so much to everyone who came out. My hometown launch event in Columbus is this Wednesday, Aug. 27 at Used Kids Records with The Ringer's own Rob Harvilla, Ohio's favorite son. More events are coming up in September and October. Get in touch if you want to schedule a book event in your town!

Back in February when we officially announced this thing, I explained what it's all about:

So, what is this book? In multiple senses, it's about how indie rock went pop. Such Great Heights takes a big-picture look at the way "indie" music and the attendant culture transformed over the course of the 21st century, evolving from an insular subculture to an aesthetic descriptor so flexible it was applied to Taylor Swift's folklore. I start by establishing what "indie rock" meant by the end of the '90s; then, following alongside my own journey with the music, I trace how the public-facing version of indie transformed throughout the first two decades of this millennium, illuminating how indie rock changed the mainstream and how the mainstream changed indie rock.

There are chapters about how disco-punk and the New Rock Revolution got the indie kids dancing, how The O.C. and Garden State kicked off Hollywood's indie rock feeding frenzy, how indie folk led us to stomp clap, how Pitchfork and blogs like this one developed into a star-making pipeline, the impact of iTunes and Myspace, the connections between bloghouse and "indie sleaze" fashion, the indie rock audience's sometimes awkward relationship with rap, the rise of the "indie" pop star, and more. We end up in the 2010s, as streaming and social media irreparably alter the Big Indie ecosystem and a new generation of indie artists takes hold, perhaps to start the cycle all over again. Along the way, there is discussion of coffee shops and indie dance nights, of Urban Outfitters and Bonnaroo, of (sorry) hipsters and (sorry) poptimism. I don't think there's been a more comprehensive look at the trajectory of indie music over the past quarter-century.

The narrative I'm telling played out over many years, via countless MP3 downloads, TV and movie moments, and live concert experiences — but also through hundreds of articles and blog posts, many of which have become dead links. As someone who lived that story and knew it intuitively, I felt like it deserved to be pulled together into a less ephemeral, more permanent historical document. I especially saw the need for a book that follows onward past the Big Indie blow-up of the 2000s to its 2010s aftermath.

If any of that piqued your interest, I can almost guarantee Such Great Heights is for you. Get yourself a copy and look out for lots more bonus content coming up here.

My book SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is out this coming Tuesday. Pre-order it now so you can enjoy it on release day.

Every chapter in the book has an accompanying soundtrack. I’ve shared the soundtracks for Chapters 1-6 here at the newsletter, and today I’m passing along the tunes for Chapter 7, “Upward Over The Mountain,” which is about the evolution (and gentrification) of indie folk.

Tracking a time period concurrent with the previous chapter’s bloghouse exploits, Chapter 7 touches on open mic nights, the rise of freak-folk, 2000s coffee shop culture, Portlandia, and indie folk’s metamorphosis into something more sanitized, scalable, and twee. As it happens, a decent-sized excerpt of this chapter was published today at BrooklynVegan, so head over there to check it out after pressing play below (or building your own version of the playlist; as far as I know, it’s not possible to put Apple Music embeds in Substack posts, which is too bad because the Joanna Newsom song from this playlist is not on Spotify).

A few more book promo notes:

• My tour dates kick off Monday night in Brooklyn at Powerhouse Arena. Jason Lipshutz will moderate, and as with all SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS events, I’ll do a Q&A and a book signing too. Get your ticket here, and buy the book while you’re at it. This is happening on the eve of my release date, so it will be your chance to get a copy one day early.

• Ethan Sawyer was kind enough to interview me about the book, the value of critical takedowns, my life in Columbus, and more, for his newsletter Human Pursuits.

• Scott Tobias generously let me promote the book by recommending the LCD Soundsystem documentary/concert film SHUT UP AND PLAY THE HITS at his and Keith Phipps’ brilliant movies newsletter The Reveal.

• Amy Juravich welcomed me into my local NPR station, WOSU, and let me talk about myself, indie rock, and the book on All Sides. Check me out at the 36-minute mark of the latest Fascinating Ohio segment.

• ICYMI in the last post, I went on Rob Harvilla’s 60 Songs That Explain The 90s: The 2000s to discuss the book and Vampire Weekend, who factor into its storyline quite a bit. Listen here.

The Mountain Goats, "The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton" (2002)

Wilco, "Jesus, etc." (2002)

The Decemberists, "Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect" (2002)

Neko Case, "I Wish I Was the Moon" (2002)

Damien Rice, "The Blower's Daughter" (2002)

José González, "Heartbeats" (2003)

My Morning Jacket, "Golden" (2003)

Sufjan Stevens, "For the Widows In Paradise, For the Fatherless In Ypsilanti" (2003)

Animal Collective, "Who Could Win a Rabbit" (2004)

Joanna Newsom, "Bridges and Balloons" (2004)

Devendra Banhart, "Little Yellow Spider" (2004)

Iron & Wine, "Naked As We Came" (2004)

Espers, "Caroline" (2004)

Bright Eyes, "First Day of My Life" (2005)

Beirut, "Postcards From Italy" (2006)

Jenny Lewis & The Watson Twins, "Rise Up With Fists!!" (2007)

Glen Hansard & Markéta Irglová, "Falling Slowly" (2007)

Fleet Foxes, "White Winter Hymnal" (2008)

Bon Iver, "Skinny Love" (2007)

Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes, "Home" (2009)

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is out Aug. 26 via St. Martin’s Press. Pre-order it here.

After six months of spamming the internet at every opportunity, my book SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is finally out next week. Pre-order it now, and then make plans to attend one of my upcoming events in a city near you.

OK, these cities are not near everyone, but if you’re a New Yorker or residing somewhere drivable from my home base in the greater Columbus area, you can and should come through. Events in Brooklyn, Columbus, Kansas City, Perrysburg, Indianapolis, Louisville, Cincinnati, and Chicago are on the docket. If you want me to come do a book event in your city, get in touch!

In other SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS promo news, today I am the guest on my favorite podcast, Rob Harvilla’s 60 Songs That Explain The 90s: The 2000s, discussing the book and Vampire Weekend. Listen to that here — my part starts one hour and six minutes into the pod, but you should definitely listen to the whole thing because Rob is great — and look out for a lot more media hits coming up.

With promotional business ramping up, I haven’t had the time to crank out a new B-side essay for the newsletter lately, but I intend to keep those coming for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, look out for more chapter soundtracks and maybe some silly low-impact posts coming soon. Thanks for reading my work, subscribing to this newsletter, buying the book, attending my events, and otherwise supporting my efforts to make a living writing about indie rock in the year 2025.

TOUR DATES:

8/25 - Brooklyn, NY at Powerhouse Arena, 7 p.m. (in conversation with Jason Lipshutz)

8/27 - Columbus, OH at Used Kids Records, 7 p.m. (in conversation with Rob Harvilla; presented by Prologue Bookshop)

9/2 - Kansas City, MO at Kansas City Public Library, 6 p.m. (with Bliss Books; in conversation with Misti Mundae)

9/4 - Perrysburg, OH at Way Public Library, 7 p.m. (with Gathering Volumes; in conversation with Adam Marier)

9/8 - NOTE: Virtual event is cancelled

9/9 - Indianapolis, IN at Golden Hour Books, 7:30 p.m. (in conversation with Dave Lindquist)

9/17 - Louisville, KY at Carmichael Books, 7 p.m. (in partnership and conversation with Guestroom Records)

9/18 - Cincinnati, OH at Mercantile Library, 6:30 p.m. (with Joseph-Beth Booksellers)

10/6 - Chicago, IL at Gman Tavern, 7 p.m. doors (in conversation with Jack Reidy; with City Lit Books)

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is out Aug. 26 via St. Martin’s Press. Pre-order it here.

My book SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is about how indie rock changed the mainstream and the mainstream changed indie rock in the 21st century—or, to put it another way, how indie rock went pop. It’s out ridiculously soon, so pre-order it while you still can say you were ahead of the curve.

Each chapter in the book comes with a soundtrack, delivered as a list of 20 songs printed at the start. Some of the songs are mentioned in the text of the chapters; others simply help to capture the vibe. I’ve been publishing the soundtracks as actual playlists here in the newsletter—you can revisit Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 for a good time. Today we’re on to Chapter 6.

This one should really be made up of low-bitrate MP3s. Titled “D.A.N.C.E.,” the chapter looks at indie bands incorporating more and more electronic elements in a post-Postal Service landscape and bloghouse producers (some of whom were in indie bands) bringing a scrappy guerrilla spirit to their lo-fi remixes. I also used this chapter to talk about the fashion movement we’ve lately taken to calling “indie sleaze” and its connection to the bloghouse world of glamorously skuzzy raves and flash photography photography.

A couple notes about this playlist: 1. It should have Diplo on it, as he’s a major figure in the chapter’s narrative, but a lot of crucial documents like the old Hollertronix mixes and Favela On Blast aren’t on DSPs, and his work with M.I.A. is represented in the soundtracks for other chapters. 2. It should have Dan Deacon on it, too, but I realized that after the lists were finalized and the book was off to the printers. Dan Deacon rules.

Daft Punk, "Aerodynamic" (2001)

Junior Senior, "Move Your Feet" (2002)

Ratatat, "Seventeen Years" (2004)

The Go! Team, "Huddle Formation" (2004)

The Knife, "Heartbeats" (2002)

of Montreal, "Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games" (2005)

LCD Soundsystem, "Daft Punk Is Playing at My House" (2005)

Justice, "Waters of Nazareth" (2005)

Hot Chip, "Boy From School" (2006)

Junior Boys, "In the Morning" (2006)

Simian & Justice, "We Are Your Friends (Justice Vs. Simian)" (2006)

Girl Talk, "Hold Up" (2006)

Simian Mobile Disco, "Hustler" (2006)

Cut Copy, "Hearts on Fire" (2007)

Does It Offend You, Yeah?, "We Are Rockstars" (2008)

Crystal Castles vs. Health, "Crimewave" (2007)

MSTRKRFT, "1,000 Cigarettes" (2009)

The Bloody Beetroots & Steve Aoki, "Warp 1.9" (2009)

Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Heads Will Roll (A-Trak Remix)" (2009)

Caribou, "Odessa" (2010)

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is out Aug. 26 via St. Martin’s Press. Pre-order it here.

A giant rock sat outside my high school. We called it “the rock.” Maybe your school had one too. Seniors would paint the rock with messages: wishing their friends a happy birthday, cheering on the football team before a big game, that sort of thing. The one and only time I painted the rock, I did so to shit on John Mayer.

One morning my senior year, my friend David and I decided to make an important statement. We acquired paint, headed to school well before classes began, and got to work on our masterpiece.

Do you remember the Radiohead bear? The creepy little guy who became the band’s logo circa Kid A? David and I haphazardly painted that character on the rock with a thought bubble above his head reading “John Mayer sucks.” I wish I still had the photos. I’m pretty sure it looked terrible.

Our mild attempt at provocation was painted over by lunchtime. But for me it was worth it to mock Mayer, even if briefly. To my 18-year-old self, he represented everything terrible about modern music. I just had to let the people know.

I was recently listening to an episode of the wonderful documentary podcast Life Of The Record about Titus Andronicus’ The Monitor. On each episode of the show, ​​Dan Nordheim lets musicians, mostly indie rock musicians, talk at length about a classic album they made, starting with some scene-setting and then going through track by track. In this case, it was Titus mastermind Patrick Stickles detailing the context and backstory of his widely acclaimed punk rock epic.

One major point of inspiration for The Monitor was Ken Burns’ documentary miniseries The Civil War. While discussing the song “Four Score and Seven” on the podcast, Stickles talked about a parallel between the Civil War era and modern America: people’s tendency to seek out conflict as a way of giving themselves purpose and direction, to define ourselves by what we’re against rather than what we stand for. “And it doesn't matter what the conflict is,” he said. “It's just like they seem to want to run towards that state of just being in conflict against what—it could be anything.”

To Stickles, this approach seemed counterproductive:

If this “us versus them” mentality is the main thing that's guiding us and informing all the decisions that we're making as individuals and as a society, then we're actually never going to really make any progress, which would make it the war we can't win, like I sang about. And, you know, the whole history of human civilization apparently for some people doesn't provide enough evidence that you know, this bickering and this whole “fuck you” attitude that people have and that they cherish so much in place of actually like, believing in something or trying to actually achieve something constructive. Our whole human history has not been sufficient to convince these people that maybe we need to think differently about how we're going to work together to achieve a more perfect union, for lack of a better term.

As it pertains to the future of America, I can think of reasons to agree and disagree with Stickles on this matter. Even if I’m not sure it’s possible to “reach across the aisle” in 2025, I like his idealism and his hope for a better way forward.

Applying these ideas to music elicits a far different, less wholesome reaction from me. Maybe politics and pop culture are so entangled that it’s impossible to discuss this principle as it pertains to music without extrapolating it into a holistic worldview. But one thought that came to mind as I listened to Stickles’ monologue is that as a young music fan, negative polarization was huge for me. Rallying against that which sucks can be clarifying, galvanizing, and deeply satisfying. Few highs are more intoxicating than the ones that come from being a stone-cold hater.

As a teenager, like many before and after me, I developed strong opinions about which music was cool and which music was a public atrocity. To me, Dave Matthews Band and John Mayer obviously fell into the latter category. I’d at least dabbled in DMB as a middle schooler—“Ants Marching” remains a jam—and I have come to begrudgingly respect both of them now that I’m a dad rather than a kid. But in high school, those kinds of frat-friendly singer-songwriters were the bane of my existence. They struck me as the sonic embodiment of Abercrombie polo shirts and Puka shell necklaces, far inferior to the Sigur Rós and Modest Mouse CDs I’d picked up from the independent record store uptown.

In fact, my revulsion against these Matthews/Mayer types informed my search for something better. As my peers gravitated toward the sounds of open mic night in Margaritaville, I had to wonder whether this was really the best music my generation had to offer. Disdain for these artists informed my decision to define myself as an aspiring hipster. In that immediate post-Y2K moment, we budding snobs had plenty of rising indie music to latch onto, and I latched onto it all the harder out of spite for the guy who sang, “I wanna run through the halls of my high school.”

I wrote all about that embrace of post-Y2K indie, and where the genre went from there, in my book SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS. It will be out extremely soon, so please pre-order it now. In those years, I fled from what I heard as a curdled, boring mainstream toward a whole new canon of bands that had escaped my attention up to that point. I became a late-breaking scholar of Pixies and Pavement. I jumped aboard the hype train for the Strokes, Stripes, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. I opened my ears to the burgeoning dance-punk movement but also more mature masterpieces from the likes of Wilco and Yo La Tengo. Indie rock would change a lot in the next couple decades—that’s what the book is about, more or less—but I still hold a special place in my heart for those artists that first represented a refuge from the norm.

As I scan the radio or survey the charts these days, I wonder if the current state of pop music will drive a new generation of young taste-havers toward indie rock. There is always some bullshit for weird and/or smart kids to turn their noses up at. It’s not like we ever run out of execrable cultural output; we’re going on more than a decade of Ed Sheeran at this point, and for all his peculiarities, he is but one link in a chain of saccharine, high-fructose troubadours. But things have taken an especially bleak turn in the mainstream lately, and I wonder if this wave will spark discerning young folks to aggressively align themselves with alternative offerings.

Last year, pop seemed so much better off. The zeitgeist was fixated on hip female singers who were breaking through to new tiers of stardom after years of toil: Charli XCX, Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan. These ladies were all impossibly talented and undeniably cool—so cool that the alt-leaning Barcelona mega-festival Primavera Sound booked them all to headline this year. But by the time Primavera had erected a Powderpuff Girls monument in their honor, the mainstream had pivoted to an altogether blander, burlier epoch.

You know these artists, even if you think you don’t. I’m talking about Benson Boone, with his mustache and his jumpsuit and his backflips and his boundless enthusiasm. About Alex Warren, the former TikTok influencer with ballads far too muddy to be described as beige. About Teddy Swims, whose take on smoky, soulful pop-rock makes the Black Keys feel like actual Delta blues legends by comparison. About Myles Smith, who seems to have built the whole plane out of Aloe Blacc and Avicii’s “Wake Me Up.” These guys are everywhere, and every time I come across one of them I groan and think to myself, “These fucking guys.”

You can’t turn on Top 40 radio without hearing one of Boone’s hits. Warren’s CCM-esque “Ordinary” has been No. 1 all summer, and seemingly only Kpop Demon Hunters can stop it. (I guess in this case Alex Warren is the demon?) “Lose Control” just broke the record for most weeks on the Hot 100, and given that it’s still in the Top 10, I don’t expect it to drop off the chart anytime soon. Collectively, they are an oppressive force. Theirs is music that never challenges, never surprises, never ventures away from a baseline competence. Some people would say this is true of all mainstream popular music, but those people are idiots. These particular guys represent an especially anodyne form of earnestness that connotes authenticity to a disconcertingly large bloc of listeners.

Rolling Stone’s Larisha Paul smartly described this wave of hits as The Voice audition music. The savvy podcast Switched On Pop pointed out this crew’s resemblance to Christian worship music. Slate’s pop-chart maestro Chris Molanphy points to “a kind of Jelly Roll–ification of the charts”—blandly earnest anthems from “a whole brigade of dudes who really mean it, man.” Molanphy also invoked one of the most pervasive social-media-era tropes, the “wife guy,” due to Warren’s casting of his fiancée in the “Ordinary” video and use of footage from their actual wedding in an alternate clip. This life-as-content strategy betrays Warren’s background as a YouTuber and TikTok personality who once lived in a content house, the subject of his other hit “Burning Down.”

I like some of these fucking guys more than others. I thought Boone, a former American Idol contestant who voluntarily left the show after advancing through a few rounds, was the nadir of modern pop culture when his breakthrough hit “Beautiful Things” was blowing up last summer. No amount of Freddie Mercury cosplay could undo his status as whitebread incarnate. And then Warren came along with his bellowing solemnity, and Boone tracks like the edgeless “Shut Up And Dance” pastiche “Sorry I’m Here For Someone Else” started to feel positively vibrant by comparison. Smith’s “Stargazing” is far too Mumford-coded to be my cup of tea, but until it becomes as inescapable as Teddy Swims’ boutique-gritty “Lose Control,” it could never bug me like that.

The reasons for this cohort’s rise are vast and complex, and I don’t intend to unpack them here, though I will at least note that this archetype didn’t come out of nowhere. The aforementioned Jelly Roll paved the way, certainly, with the kind of impassioned fortitude that plays well on emotionally manipulative reality TV shows like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. So did Harry Styles, who presented a metropolitan but mostly banal vision of easy-listening masculinity on 2022’s Harry’s House. I’d guess Justin Bieber’s pivot from sultry R&B to lite wife-guy pop-rock on 2021’s Justice played a role, too, as did the recent resurgence of solemn balladeer Hozier and the emergence of Noah Kahan, the American Hozier. And we can’t ignore the reinvention of the crossover country star, from Zach Bryan to Morgan Wallen to Shaboozey. A whole lot of fellas have been laying the groundwork for this moment.

These fucking guys are running the zeitgeist right now, with this latest generation of hearty would-be Idol winners standing on the shoulders of all who came before them. It feels a little too easy to draw connections between these artists’ stranglehold on pop culture and the Trump administration’s pursuit of white nationalism, but those lines would have to be dotted at best. For one thing, not all of these singers are white, and beyond that, I’m sure some of them are lefties who agree Stephen Miller is a villain. I’m not trying to say these musical artists represent actual evil. I just mean their music, on balance, is the kind of dross that sent me scurrying in search of a superior alternative when I was a teenager.

I wonder if being bombarded with mediocrity will result in disgruntled adolescents flocking to the latest wave of inspiring indie bands in larger numbers than usual. Could the next indie rock explosion be an equal and opposite reaction to these fucking guys? Lately, I’ve been geeked about bands like Geese, caroline, Lifeguard, Horsegirl, Friendship, Water From Your Eyes, and the Wednesday/Lenderman axis, to name a few. All of those acts are effectively pushing back against the easily digestible empty calories that prevail in pop culture right now, offering up unkempt, unhinged, or unpredictable sounds instead. If some of it is recycled, at least they’re recycling jagged shards of the past.

I like to imagine teens who are repulsed by “Ordinary” seeking out something extraordinary in its stead, people who are being subjected to so much “Lose Control” grasping for an actual sense of release. Maybe they’d find it through this exciting crop of indie bands, or maybe it won’t be indie rock at all—something like the frenetic genre jumbling of Jane Remover or Los Thuthanaka, perhaps? Maybe it’s music that isn’t even on my radar yet. Whatever it is, it’ll probably be a lot messier and more volatile than our current strapping young lads. I know if I was 18 right now, I’d be seeking out artists like that as an antidote to the blasé sounds all around me—and possibly painting some Benson Boone slander on my high school’s rock in the meantime.

Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is out Aug. 26 via St. Martin’s Press. Pre-order it here.

There’s a soundtrack for every chapter from my book SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion. (It’s out soon! Pre-order it!) The book is about how indie rock went pop—or, to put it another way, how indie rock changed the mainstream and the mainstream changed indie rock in the early years of the 21st century.

I’ve previously published the soundtracks for Chapter 1 (a survey of 20th century indie rock), Chapter 2 (a look at the Strokes-era garage rock boom, dance-punk, and the Postal Service opening up the indie synth-pop lane), Chapter 3 (The O.C., Garden State, and Hollywood’s indie rock boom), and Chapter 4 (the emergence of Pitchfork and music blogs as a star-making pipeline). Today I’m sharing the playlist for Chapter 5, “Music Is My Boyfriend.”

This chapter focuses on the rise of iTunes and MySpace and how they related to the evolution and popularization of indie rock. It explains how some of the defining tech platforms of of the 2000s used indie music as a branding mechanism—even if that music wasn’t always in line with the tastes of actual indie music fans—and tech’s role in promoting the hybrid approach to genre that would have major ripple effects across the music world, including in indie rock. That means this playlist has a lot of songs that were featured in iPod commercials and a lot of artists who blew up on MySpace, including several who helped to reshape the landscape of “indie” music.

Due to the MySpace focus, there’s also a subplot about the divide between indie rock and emo. That facet of the chapter not explored in this soundtrack because it didn’t fit with these tunes, but it might be my favorite part. (Did I make room on the playlist for my own college band’s song making fun of Jet, though? I did. I promise I had a good reason for bringing it up.)

Jet, "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" (2003)

U2, "Vertigo" (2004)

Caesars, "Jerk It Out" (2002)

Gorillaz & De La Soul, "Feel Good Inc." (2005)

M.I.A., "Galang" (2004)

Arctic Monkeys, "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor" (2005)

Lily Allen, "Smile" (2006)

CSS, "Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex" (2006)

Feist, "1234" (2007)

Los Campesinos!, "You! Me! Dancing!" (2007)

Kate Nash, "Foundations" (2007)

Calvin Harris, "Acceptable in the 80's" (2007)

The Ting Tings, "Shut Up and Let Me Go" (2008)

Coldplay, "Viva La Vida" (2008)

Santigold, "L.E.S. Artistes" (2008)

The Submarines, "You, Me and the Bourgeoisie" (2008)

Chairlift, "Bruises" (2008)

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, "Young Adult Friction" (2009)

Cymbals Eat Guitars, "...And the Hazy Sea" (2009)

Fine Dining, "Here Comes the Warm Jet" (2005)

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion will be out Aug. 26 via St. Martin’s Press. Pre-order it here.