Indie is a strange word.
It used to tell you something about where a record came from. A small label. A band finding its own way. A record shop where someone behind the counter knew exactly which new single you needed to hear. A scene that existed largely outside the major record companies.
Then indie started to sound like something.
A certain kind of guitar. A certain kind of singer. A certain way of looking. Eventually, a band could sign to a major, play the biggest festivals around and still be called indie.
There is a nice problem in that.
Indie has never had one sound.
Maybe that is why it has stayed interesting for so long.
The eight albums below are not an attempt to name the eight greatest indie records ever made. That would be a fairly pointless argument, probably ending somewhere around number four with someone bringing up The Cure.
These records are here because they moved something.
An idea about what a guitar record could sound like. A different way of recording. A new relationship between the underground and the mainstream. A songwriter suddenly building an entire world with almost nothing.
Together, they don't make a neat history.
They show how far the word indie travelled along the way.
01
THE SMITHS
THE QUEEN IS DEAD
1986
There was a time when a guitar could sound like sunlight and misery at exactly the same time.
Johnny Marr was very good at that.
By the time The Queen Is Dead appeared in June 1986, The Smiths had already spent several years building their own little world. Morrissey's lyrics, Marr's guitar, Andy Rourke's bass and Mike Joyce behind the drums. The band was firmly rooted in the independent British music scene, but the music itself never felt particularly small.
You hear that mostly in Marr.
The guitars on The Queen Is Dead aren't loud for the sake of being loud. They are melodic. Jangly. Sometimes almost cheerful, while Morrissey is singing about boredom, desire, class, death and the kind of British misery that can turn a rainy Tuesday afternoon into a philosophy.
And then there is There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.
One of the strange things about The Smiths is that they never let melancholy become completely dark. There was always something bright sitting next to it. A melody you wanted to sing along to while the words were telling you that things weren't going particularly well.
That became an important part of indie.
Not the pose of being an outsider.
The combination of vulnerability and guitar.
The Queen Is Dead showed that a band from the independent scene didn't have to make small music.
02
PAVEMENT
SLANTED AND ENCHANTED
1992
Pavement made it easier to play badly.
That sounds unkind. It is actually a compliment.
Slanted and Enchanted appeared in 1992 on Matador Records and became one of the records that showed how much freedom there could be in a messy guitar album. At times, the recording sounds like the band might fall apart at any moment.
That was part of the attraction.
Stephen Malkmus sings as if he isn't particularly worried about whether everyone can understand him.
The guitars collide.
The drums sometimes sound like they have arrived just in time.
A song can speed up, slow down or disappear before you are quite ready for it.
And there are still great melodies everywhere.
That mattered.
Indie didn't have to sound as if somebody was trying to make the perfect record.
Pavement gave a generation of bands permission to make strange choices. To be a little sloppy. To let humour into the room. To leave a song slightly unfinished around the edges.
You could pick up a guitar, turn on an amplifier and just start.
It turned out to be a pretty useful idea.
03
RADIOHEAD
OK COMPUTER
1997
In 1997, the future suddenly seemed like something you had to worry about.
Radiohead made a record about it.
OK Computer arrived at a moment when Britpop was losing some of its momentum and alternative rock was starting to move somewhere else. Radiohead made an album that still worked as a rock record, but was filled with strange sounds, electronic ideas, studio experiments and songs that seemed to be getting too large for the traditional band format.
The interesting part wasn't only what Radiohead were doing themselves.
Other bands began to hear that rock could be produced differently.
Electronics could be part of it.
Space could be part of it.
A rock record didn't always have to sound like four people standing in a room with amplifiers.
OK Computer became a turning point. The guitar was still there, but the world around it had become much bigger.
There is a small irony in that.
Radiohead had no interest in becoming the band everybody copied. The number of groups that subsequently sounded like some version of “Radiohead Lite” was one of the reasons the band moved in such a different direction with Kid A.
That might be the best kind of influence.
You make something.
Everybody copies it.
So you go somewhere else.
04
THE STROKES
IS THIS IT
2001
In 2001, rock was a little out of fashion.
That sounds almost impossible now.
But the charts were full of nu metal, post grunge, rap rock and anything capable of sounding heavier than the record before it.
Then came The Strokes.
Is This It sounded like someone had taken the whole history of rock and reduced it to a few good guitars, a dry drum kit, a bass line and Julian Casablancas sounding as if he wasn't particularly bothered by any of it.
The record became a major starting point for the garage rock revival of the 2000s and influenced a long list of bands that followed. The Strokes also helped create space for other New York acts such as Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and LCD Soundsystem in a rock scene that had suddenly become interested again.
The great thing about Is This It is how little it seems to need.
The guitars are sharp.
The drums are tight.
The songs are short enough to start again before you've had time to get tired of them.
And suddenly everybody wanted to be in a guitar band again.
The Killers became the Las Vegas Strokes. Kings of Leon became the Southern Strokes. Later, Vampire Weekend seemed to get the Ivy League version of the label.
That's how quickly a sound can turn into a template.
It doesn't take anything away from the record.
If anything, it shows how much was there.
05
ARCADE FIRE
FUNERAL
2004
Arcade Fire shouldn't have worked on paper.
Too many people.
Too many instruments.
Too much feeling.
And then Funeral arrived.
The album was recorded in Montreal between 2003 and 2004, with many of the songs shaped by personal losses within the band and their circle. It was released in 2004 through Merge Records.
But Funeral never sounds like a group trying to make an “important” album.
It sounds like people who have lost something making music together.
Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) starts small and grows. Then Wake Up does something very few indie bands had managed so convincingly before: it sounds like you need a stadium, while you are still listening to a small band from Montreal.
That became another kind of indie.
Big without becoming polished.
Emotional without apologising for it.
A band could suddenly use strings, horns, piano, guitars and several voices and still sound like something real was happening in the room.
The influence showed up everywhere afterwards.
Sometimes beautifully.
Sometimes less beautifully.
The members of Arcade Fire themselves eventually noticed how often other bands tried to recreate something from Wake Up.
But the original record still feels like its own thing.
Maybe because the sadness never feels like decoration.
06
ARCTIC MONKEYS
WHATEVER PEOPLE SAY I AM, THAT'S WHAT I'M NOT
2006
Alex Turner was nineteen.
That is a detail worth letting sit for a second.
Nineteen.
And already writing as if he knew exactly what a Saturday night in Sheffield looked like.
Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not was released in January 2006 and became the fastest selling debut album in British history at the time, selling 363,735 copies in its first week.
But the sales figures aren't the interesting part.
The interesting part was how the Arctic Monkeys got there.
Their music had spread online through demos and fans before the traditional music industry really knew what to do with them. By the time the album arrived, the songs already had a life outside the record company.
And then there were the songs.
When the Sun Goes Down.
Mardy Bum.
I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor.
Turner wrote about nightclubs, relationships, boredom, girls, boys, drinking and the kind of small social situations that normally wouldn't be turned into an album.
That was the shift.
Indie no longer had to mean being somewhere far away from the mainstream.
A band could come from a small scene, grow through the internet, reach number one and still sound like you could have seen them in a small room that same night.
The distance between bedroom, rehearsal room and chart success had suddenly become very small.
07
BON IVER
FOR EMMA, FOREVER AGO
2007
There are albums you make with a lot of people.
And there are albums where you mostly hope nobody knocks on the door.
Justin Vernon went away to a hunting cabin in Wisconsin and wrote and recorded most of For Emma, Forever Ago there. The album appeared in 2007 and was later picked up for a wider release.
You can hear the room.
Not the big room of a stadium.
The room around the microphone.
A guitar close to the mic. A voice that doesn't always try to sound tidy. Sounds that might normally have been cleaned up, but here become part of the record.
And then that falsetto.
Skinny Love eventually became the song that brought many people to Bon Iver, but the album is more interesting than one song.
For Emma, Forever Ago changed the idea of what an indie folk record could be.
You didn't need a band.
You didn't need a big studio.
You didn't even need many people.
A computer, a microphone, a guitar and enough time could be enough.
That idea almost became a genre of its own afterwards.
The one man band.
The bedroom recording.
The whispering voice.
Sometimes it worked brilliantly.
Sometimes it gave us an entire generation of men with acoustic guitars and sad beards.
But that isn't really Bon Iver's fault.
08
TAME IMPALA
LONERISM
2012
And then the bedroom got psychedelic.
Lonerism appeared in 2012 and was largely written, recorded, performed and produced by Kevin Parker, with recordings made in places including Perth and Paris. The record moved further away from the guitar driven sound of Innerspeaker and made much more room for synthesizers, samples and studio experimentation.
That was the interesting part.
Tame Impala sounded like a band.
But increasingly, it sounded like one person building an entire band at home.
Parker wasn't using the studio simply to record the songs.
The studio became part of the songwriting.
That changed the possibilities again.
You didn't have to choose between a band sound and electronic production.
You could make psychedelic rock with the same curiosity someone might have when switching on a synthesizer for the first time.
And underneath all of that, the songs were about something very simple.
Being alone.
Not quite knowing where you fit.
Having people around you and still wanting to be somewhere else.
The title tells you quite a lot.
Lonerism sounds big.
The subjects are small.
That contrast still works.
A WORD THAT KEPT CHANGING
Put these eight records next to each other and it becomes difficult to argue that indie is one sound.
The Smiths made melancholy with guitars.
Pavement made messiness part of the beauty.
Radiohead let rock into the studio and pushed the walls outward.
The Strokes pulled rock back towards the street.
Arcade Fire made room for big emotions.
Arctic Monkeys took a local voice straight to a huge audience.
Bon Iver showed how much one person and a few pieces of equipment could do.
Tame Impala turned the studio itself into an instrument.
Eight records.
Eight different answers.
Maybe that's the interesting thing about indie.
It kept changing because nobody really knew where the edges were.
And just when somebody thought they had figured out what indie was supposed to sound like, another band was somewhere else, in another room, trying something completely different.
That still happens.
Which is why looking back at these records isn't really about nostalgia for us.
We want to understand where music came from.
Because when you listen closely to the records that changed things, you sometimes hear the music that came afterwards already hiding inside them.
A guitar line.
A way of recording.
A voice deciding to do something differently.
An artist thinking, why not?
And then something starts.
Maybe that is the only definition of indie that still holds up.
Not one sound.
Just enough room to try something new.