Why does every indie band sound exactly the same nowadays?
Hey, what’s that one band with a male lead singer who’s got messy hair and vaguely problematic relationships with women? Yeah, that one.
By Ozzie Frazier
The other day, my friends and I were sitting in my room doing homework (as we always do). Constantly searching for background music to fill the void in my brain, I eventually moved to put on a random playlist that I made during my senior year of high school. At some point, “Just Like A Movie” by Wallows came on, and one of my friends turned to me and asked, “Is this Bleachers?” It was at that moment that I was struck by the similarity between the two bands: raspy lead vocalists with drawn-out vowels and repetitive lead guitar parts.
The two bands are so similar that when I pulled up “Just Like a Movie” several days later to test the hypothesis, the next two recommended songs were “Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat” (Del Water Gap) and “Wake Me” (Bleachers). After listening to a few more songs, I realized that Del Water Gap also sounded eerily similar. It was then that I set out on a mission to discover the limits of this subgenre. How many confusable indie bands could there possibly be?
The criteria for my search was fairly simple: they must be an indie band with a male lead singer. So, after asking around and doing some quick googling, here is the list I scrounged up (and yes, I’m sure I’ve missed at least a few obvious ones):
Wallows
Bleachers
Del Water Gap
The Neighbourhood
Peach Pit
Vampire Weekend
Her’s
The Strokes
Cage the Elephant
Dr. Dog
The 1975
Bright Eyes
flipturn
The Killers
Mt. Joy
Hippo Campus
While googling, I also stumbled into a Reddit rabbit hole about what constitutes “indie” in the first place. Of course, the term was originally used to describe artists who released music independently without a major record label. This meant that “indie” could encompass a wide variety of genres — the term referred more to the way the music was released rather than what it sounded like.
As the music industry has evolved (and it has become increasingly easy to produce music independently), the term “indie” as a reference point has begun to lose meaning. To avoid confusion over the label, some artists have shifted towards the “alternative” label to describe the genre they identify with, although some critics point out that this label creates similar disagreements. Several micro-labels have also emerged from this dialogue, such as indie pop or alternative rock, etc. If we expand our search to include a slightly broader lens of genres, we can also include:
Palace & Lovejoy (“alt-rock”)
Arctic Monkeys & The Backseat Lovers (“indie rock”)
TV Girl (“indie pop”)
Vista Kicks (just regular rock?)
To be perfectly honest, I don’t really think this phenomenon has some fancy scientific cause, but I do think it’s kind of fun to analyze. I guess what I’m saying here is that genre labels are just that: words we use to put things in categories. Maybe “indie” doesn’t mean what it used to, but that’s okay! Maybe it’s useful for genres to describe sound rather than production style. And if you want to listen to a bunch of bands that sound exactly the same (which I do), go right ahead. At the end of the day, it’s your music taste. Do whatever makes you happy :)