WINNING TO LOSE THE INDIE ROCK REVOLUTION A DECADE AND A HALF LATER
“We feel very grateful that we were able to come of age and make what will most assuredly be our most successful and popular albums when people were still buying records.”
– Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie
In 2001, when Under the Radar’s first issue was released, the music industry had reached a transitional moment. In January, Apple introduced its iTunes program to the world, laying the groundwork to forever change how listeners interfaced with their music. In July, after facilitating the illegal downloading of millions of songs, Napster was forced to shutter its doors following a court injunction. By December, Rhapsody became the first streaming service, offering a glimpse at the most dominant music delivery system of the future. Linkin Park sold nearly five million records—more than anyone else—but that number was less than half of the previous year’s top seller. A college student in Montreal named Win Butler formed a band called Arcade Fire, Joey Ramone and George Harrison died, and music—especially classic rock—became comfort food following the 9/11 attacks. The world was in a state of upheaval, and the music industry represented just one of the tremors.
For all of the turmoil in the air, the view from music’s underground didn’t look that much different than it had the year before. By 2001, the post-Nirvana boom had largely subsided, and indie rock was branching off in three very different directions. The first represented the more-or-less linear evolution of the genre, leading from The Velvet Unground through The Stooges, punk rock, hardcore, Sonic Youth, Pavement—you get the picture. It was artsy, noisy guitar-based music, and 2001 presented the last real revival (or perhaps death rattle) of that strain of indie music, with the garage rock revival of The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Hives, and any number of bands with plural names preceded by the article “The.”
The second branch would become the dominant current for the next 15 years, and you can trace the roots of nearly everything that would follow leading back to 2001. A year after Radiohead forever upended the notion that rock music had to prominently feature guitars with their electronic opus Kid A , a stampede of experimental acts with laptops started to flood in from Europe. That was the year that an Australian band called The Avalanches released Since I Left You to an international audience, essentially a pop album made almost entirely out of samples. Blur’s Damon Albarn formed Gorillaz with a team of collaborators and released an album that sounded like an iTunes playlist of the future, tying together hip-hop, Britpop, psychedelia, reggae, and any number of other hybridized variants. Daft Punk made futuristic dance-pop for hipsters, Dntel mixed vocals with IDM, and Fennesz created a hybrid of glossy guitars and digital noise that pointed the direction for the sorts of melodic ambient music that would be released over the next decade. Songs moved away from verse-chorus-verse structures, hooks got weirder and less focused, and digital programming allowed textures to expand far beyond the standard guitar-bass-drums palette.
The final branch, perhaps better than any other, represented the changing face of indie music. Led by Death Cab for Cutie, a generation of sensitive songwriters popped up that favored heart-on-sleeve sincerity and vulnerability over angst and irony, and artists such as Sufjan Stevens, The Decemberists, and Joanna Newsom made theatrical, highly literate albums whose ambitions sometimes seemed to eclipse the music itself. Along the way, indie music simultaneously got more experimental through Animal Collective and St. Vincent more accessible through Grimes, HAIM, and CHVRCHES, acts that would have been considered mainstream pop only a decade before. By the middle of the next decade, bands on independent labels routinely released albums that appeared in the upper ranks
