Indie

As the year approaches the halfway mark, we bring you our list of the best indie rock songs of 2017 to date, featuring heavyweights like The National and LCD Soundsystem and striking new voices like Jay Som and See Through Dresses.Some of these artists, like EMA and Algiers, grapple with the surreal confusion of our times; others, like Broken Social Scene and Grizzly Bears new work, offer a soothing balm, while Japandroids try to raise spirits and Waxahatchee attends to matters of the heart.Click here to follow this playlist on Spotify.

Keeping tabs on new releases is a job in and of itself these days, what with the scattering of arenas for announcing albums, distributing music, and telling your friends about what youve been listening to lately. Gone are the relatively simple days of heading to a shop staffed by people who have earned your trust (either individually or through some hivemind-harnessed power) and plunking down money for the things their employees, or some underpaid alt-weekly denizen, recommended.But the explosion of releases occasioned by the rise of digital platforms in particular has allowed me to take more chances on virtual A-sides. Playlist-surfing is how I found out about the British three-piece Peaness, whose name still causes me to stifle giggles when I say it on the radio and whose chunky, standoffish take on twee is absolutely delightful. And it’s how I first heard the Montreal duo She-Devils, whose come-hither cabaret promises a dark ride. And! I found out about the sweetly vicious Florida trio UV-TV through, of all things, a blog.It’s also been a solid year for older acts who are still in the music-making business, thus shoring up the "it’s been a good year for music" claim that Im pretty okay with staking at this early June moment. The Afghan Whigs, who I adore enough to continent-hop in their honour, released the uneasy, swirling In Spades; Mark Lanegan soldered his scorched-earth burr to warm electronic textures on Gargoyle; Juliana Hatfield pointed her hooky disdain toward the Trump administration on Pussycat; and Stephin Merritt got big and conceptual again with 50 Song Memoir, which has perhaps one of the best musical encapsulations of the quixotic relationship between humans and felines ever put to tape. That moment on “‘68: A Cat Called Dionysus” when he drolly sings "he haaaated me… but I… loved… him" could probably soundtrack more than a few self-aware rom-coms, too.

As cassette tapes and CDs proliferated in the ‘80 and ‘90s, music began to travel to uncharted territories—like small villages in South America. And thanks to the vast reach of MTV and, later the internet, that cultural cross-pollination has only accelerated. One of the more intriguing results of this process has been the rise of Latin American shoegaze: young South American musicians in thrall to U.K. bands like My Bloody Valentine and Ride, but putting their own spin on the genre.Latin American Shoegaze can be milky and romantic (see: Robsongs’ “Essa Grande Falta de Você”), touching and spiritual (Sexores’ “Sasebo”), or brisk and spiky (Blancoscuro’s “Figaro”). The lyrics are often completely in Spanish or Portuguese, bringing a unique, authentic tone to the music (particularly in a genre known for obscuring the words). As this playlist shows, shoegaze has permeated the Latin American underground from Sao Paulo to Mexico City to Buenos Aires—have a listen to hear how they do it down south.

How fitting that James Murphy released his last album in 2010, for LCD Soundsystem lives in a climate-controlled space where college students and post grads, downloading songs onto their new smartphones, got excited about voting for Barack Obama. To say the music is “dated” is redundant—all music sounds like the time in which it was recorded. Also wrong. If anything, the collar-loosening white boy boogie of “Dance Yrself Clean” and “Daft Punk is Playing in My House” predated the ways in which the Silicon Valley ethos of app-ready affluence established itself in the last three to five years: dancing to “I Feel It Coming” after a few pints of the local microbrew. LCD’s 2010 show at the Fillmore presented the act at its best, with Murphy and Nancy Whang trading instruments and losing themselves to the music. He started losing me with the singer-songwriter material that won him praise a decade ago: all that “In My Life” stuff. I included a couple moments anyway because I won’t renounce my past.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

Middlemarch. The Changing Light on Sandover. Get Up On It. When I’m seventy, I’ll be divining their mysteries. Even if D. Boon hadn’t died in a car accident in 1985, The Minutemen suggest plumbless depths. Marrying the terseness of Wire to an adoration of classic rock produced musical haiku whose undulating bass riffs and shouted hooks ultimately owed nothing to no one. I can’t even say I’m a devotee; I’m still figuring out how to listen to them, and it’s a thrill. To realize slop and precision is some kind of feat, hence their CCR and Steely Dan covers (adducing the precision side) and “Bob Dylan Wrote Political Songs” (adducing their sloppy-visionary side)The most amiable of double albums, Double Nickels on the Dime is also among the deepest. I’ve owned it for fifteen years yet I look at the track listing and couldn’t hum a bar of certain songs — and that’s fine. I look at the list below and have trouble recalling certain riffs too. Boon’s furtive tone is, of all people’s, like Dionne Warwick: he’s sharing a conversation which listeners may or may not be able to follow, babbling and crooning as required, wondering if you know the way to San Jose because he wrote the directions down on a scrap of cig pack paper he lost. George Hurley can be as spare as Robert Gotobed or insert a roll as unexpectedly as Keith Moon. Negotiating between Mike Watt’s stentorian bass runs and Boon’s chikka-chikka riffs defined the Minutemen’s tension — see “Mutiny in Jonestown.”I titled this post after a lyric in “The Price of Paradise”; awed by CCR’s “Don’t Look Now,” they wrote their own distillation of what they’d learned about American life under a frightening president, in their case Ronald Reagan, i.e. life is cheap and, to quote the song, you die without dreams. Hi! It’s 2017. 3-Way Tie (For Last), its host album, has a tune called “The Red and the Black,” named after Stendhal’s classic novel about political intrigue in post-Napoleonic France. Imagine if Boon had lived long enough to read about Iran-Contra.Visit our affiliate/partner site Humanizing the Vacuum for great lists, commentary, and more.

There was a time when emo and indie were forced to sit at separate tables in the lunchroom. But volcanic new songs from the battle-hardened Brand New and Rainer Maria prove that genre tags are often too restrictive and willy nilly, and that its never too late for a band to express themselves via insightful lyricism and volcanic outbursts. And while we praise the emocore veterans for their standard-setting returns, take some time to breathe in the potent resurrection of shoegazing hardcore/proto-emo deities Quicksand, while also appreciating the stunning artistic growth Turnover has already shown.Elsewhere: Seven years after This Is Happening, LCD Soundsystem has returned with some of their more searching, epic songs, while R.E.M. guitar god Peter Buck and Sleater-Kinneys Corin Tucker have made sweet music together with Filthy Friends. And though his band cant seem to stick to a name, Oh Sees leader John Dwyer continues to prove himself one of the undergrounds leading lights.

We weren’t prepared for the dissolution of Sonic Youth in 2011. An alternative-rock institution for three decades, the band’s last few records were of such high quality, fans were entitled to question whether they’d sold their souls to an ungodly demon to achieve the kind of perpetual, everlasting prime that was suggested by their band name. (The final record was, funny enough, called The Eternal.) No, nothing lasts forever, but with seemingly so much creative juice left in the tank, it’s no shock that each member has continued to thrive post-Youth.Lee Ranaldo’s songwriting contributions usually came out to just one or two tracks per album, so it always seemed likely that his creative dam would burst outside of the group. Tracks like “Xtina As I Knew Her” and “New Thing” are classic Ranaldo—melodic cuts with textural guitar licks and slightly sardonic vocals. The latter track closes his fine 2017 album Electric Trim, which sees the guitarist testing the borders of his sound, working with north African grooves and electro-tinted folk.Thurston Moore seems the most interested in continuity. With an emphasis on gentle melodies and lengthy, spacious guitar sections, tracks like “Speak to the Wild” and “Smoke of Dreams” sound like first cousins of latter-day Sonic Youth cuts. However, his collaboration with Yoko Ono and former bandmate Kim Gordon on the challenging avant-garde record YOKOKIMTHURSTON allowed Moore to indulge his experimental inclinations.Connecting the work of Ranaldo and Moore has been drummer Steve Shelley, who has continued to back his ex-Sonic Youth comrades, as well as Admiral Freebee and Sun Kil Moon, among others. Meanwhile, Jim O’Rourke, a member from 1999 to 2005, has built a fine solo catalogue (mostly unavailable on Spotify) without losing the producer/session-musician spirit that has seen him orbit the alt-rock scene for years. Recent team-ups has included work with Vova Zen.But among all of Sonic Youth’s alumni, Gordon has been the most free-ranging. She’s released just one track under her own name, but what a track! The bass-heavy, blood-thirsty “Murdered Out” is a thunderous rocker: “You get lost, murdered out of my heart,” she asserts with a fierce punch. Elsewhere, the Wild Style Lion team-up “Lovewasinme” runs as barbed as a subway train wrapped in razor wire, while the rumbling, tuneless “Last Mistress”—released with guitarist Bill Nace under the name Body/Head—offers a freaky bedrock for her breathy vocals, forever one of indie rock’s most cutting instruments.This playlist isn’t an attempt to piece together a kind of lost Sonic Youth album, as though pulling together tracks could forge a singular, cohesive record that never was. (Besides, latter-day bassist Mark Ibold, who has kept a low-profile of late, isn’t here at all). Instead, it acts as a sampler of the fine music the band’s former members continue to create—songs that honour their history without stifling the ambition that powered their peerless oeuvre.

A modern-day punk label if there ever was one, Sacred Bones has been doing serious work since forming in Brooklyn in 2007, not only to unearth strange new sounds bubbling from the underground, but to reframe the very concept of what punk music is in the 21st century. They may adhere to a very rigid aesthetic framework (almost all their releases come with the full tracklist and recording details listed right there on the cover, along with their trademark ouroboros), but in terms of sound they couldn’t be a harder collective to pin down. Ghostly folk balladeers like Marissa Nadler and Amen Dunes take a seat next to ear-bleeding noise concoctions from Pharmakon and Pop. 1280, while rootsy indie rockers like The Men and Case Studies saddle up with mind-altering musical works from cult film directors like David Lynch and John Carpenter. It’s a strange scene—a sort of neo-goth coalescence of various genres and styles that come together in the name of worshiping the dark god of underground music.Even with such a far-reaching catalog of artists calling the label home, it’s not difficult to get into the zone with Sacred Bones’ distinct brand of homegrown black magic. Hit play to take our tour of the label’s greatest musical offerings, and see just how many different ways punk music can sound today.

We’re supposed to be living in the age of infinite, unimpeded access to the entire history of recorded music. The reality, of course, isn’t so simple. If streaming services are the new record stores, they can be just as susceptible to supply-side issues as their brick-and-mortar predecessors. In other words: sometimes, the album you really want to hear isn’t in stock. In the streamiverse, certain artists’ discographies can resemble digital Swiss cheese, particularly if they bounced between number of labels over the course of the career, and especially if some of those labels went belly up. Historically, reissues have taken the form of lavish packages that come loaded with outtakes, rare photos and detailed liner notes, and that often still is the case. But in this day and age, “reissue” has also just become a fancy code word for “old album I can now stream on Spotify.”As such, some of the year’s most welcome new arrivals to the streaming world were technically reissues of once-lost records whose preceding reissues had also gone out of print, such as Simply Saucer’s crucial early ‘70s proto-punk document Cyborgs Revisited or pre-teen disco-punk diva Chandra’s 1980-era Transportation. 2018 also proved that there are still obscure private-pressed singer-songwriters (like Colorado-based pro-rock-climber-turned-troubadour Pat Ament), ‘70s space-rock groups (Canada’s Melodic Energy Commission), ‘80s post-punk bands (New Zealand’s Nocturnal Projections) and unsung ‘90s grunge groups (Australia’s Magic Dirt) out there waiting to rediscovered; still unsung funk auteurs deserving to be rescued from the crates (Tim Jones a.k.a. Preacherman); still no limit to the synth-fueled freakery lurking in the back catalog of late electronic-music pioneer Bruce Haack (check the proto-rap jam “Party Machine”); and still no bottom to the well of wiggy grooves emanating from West Africa in the 1970s (see: the Benin-focused second edition of Analog Africa’s Africa Scream Contest series).Among more high-profile reclamation projects, The Beatles’ 50th-anniversary White Album box set proved to be the rare classic-rock cash grab whose bonus tracks are just as mythical as the original material. (On top of providing fans with official versions of oft-bootlegged curios like “Revolution 1 - Take 18”—which connects the familiar acoustic sing-along with the sound-collage chaos of “Revolution 9”—the alternate Take 10 version of “Good Night” suggests Ringo invented the third Velvet Underground album a few months early.) In some cases, reissues transported us back to a watershed moment in rock history, be it Detroit’s mid-’60s garage-band scene (via a pre-fame Bob Seger’s band the Last Heard) or Neil Young’s infamously rowdy post-Harvest/pre-Tonight’s the Night residency at the Roxy in Los Angeles circa 1973. With others, we revisited notoriously mercurial bands at a key early stage in their evolution, like when The Flaming Lips started to dress up their psych rock with bells and whistles (on the ‘92-era gem “Zero to a Million”) or when Brooklyn bruisers The Men started to infuse their punk-rock roar with more emotional undertones on “Wasted.” And then there were reissues that gave us an intimate audience to private moments of creation—like Prince’s largely improvised Piano & A Microphone1983, Julee Cruise’s early ethereal demos, or the 25th-anniversary excavation of Liz Phair’s lo-fi Girly-Sound Tapes, which was perfectly timed to reify her profound influence on a new generation of confessional indie-rockers.But some of this year’s most notable archival projects were less about satiating completists than commemorating lives cut short far too soon. Women guitarist Chris Reimer—who passed away suddenly in 2012 at age 26—was honored with a collection of private home recordings, Hello People, that showcased his budding talents as an ambient soundscaper. The legacy of Ross Shapiro, the late singer/guitarist for Athens indie-rock hopefuls The Glands, was fortified with the release of the outtakes collection Double Coda. The free-ranging career of Chris Cornell was encapsulated by an box set featuring a handful of previously unreleased oddities—including a cover of U2’s “One” that subs in the lyrics to Metallica’s “One”—that present a more playful portrait of the brooding grunge god. And a survey of Joe Strummer’s solo career, 001, was capped with the 1988-era castaway “U.S. North,” a valorous 10-minute cavalry charge that marks a rare reunion with Mick Jones, suggesting the sort of epic rock music The Clash might’ve headed toward had they survived into the late ‘80s. It’s a reminder that the best reissues and compilations don’t just preserve history, but allow us to imagine an alternate one.

On their debut record, Auckland, NZ four piece The Beths channel their longtime friendship into hook-filled, energetic guitar pop with attitude. Titled Future Me Hates Me, the pessimistic, self-loathing wit is inescapable while the upbeat soundscapes juxtapose that stance nicely. Influenced by guitar-driven pop, name-checking Rilo Kiley and Fall Out Boy as influences, The Beths are creating thoughtful power pop for a jaded generation. As explained to Pitchfork, frontwoman Liz Stokes "typically writes her lyrics most when I’m upset," so when we asked her for a playlist, we werent too surprised that she honed in on that sadness to come up with this mix.Says Stokes: "I feel sad today and so it was difficult to compile a playlist of anything other than songs where I can wallow and commiserate. Of course, I like my sad songs to have a beat and a melody. It should be hard to put on a happy face when youre down and out, but sometimes its the easiest thing to do. So I feel like these are songs that can shuffle along next to me with a smile while I go about my day, without giving too much away."Listen above or go right here.