The internet has always been a great place for pirating music. Napster took advantage of this truth and are now paying for it, but that hasn't really stopped anyone. P2P file sharing sites like Soulseek are still active, even though my account was banned after using it three times. In spite of the streaming era, Carti fans have amassed hundreds of his leaked songs in meticulously organized spreadsheets and anonymous accounts make pretty good money uploading Alex G’s viral unreleased tracks to streaming services.
Increasingly, artists have combatted this issue by beating leakers to the punch and putting out their own unreleased music off-streaming, like Drake making a “burner” Instagram account full of screen recordings of voice memos. This seems to work well, and I can imagine that for lovers of the 6 God, your IG algorithm serving you a post from @plottttwistttttt is like a warm, tender embrace from Aubrey Graham himself :).
This kind of faux-indie self-releasing is good for business, but it’s not real. I’m sure some executive on Drake’s marketing team thought it up as a way to redirect traffic from online leakers and [ultimately] send it back to Drake’s Spotify. At the same time, you have the bonus of giving fans the feeling that even though Drake is the most popular artist in the world, he’s still niche! And so are you for knowing about his finsta!
What feels a lot more organic is using the same free-to-use sites that leakers take advantage of (Youtube, Soundcloud) as another way to just put out your music - as opposed to doing it as as a reaction to the unauthorized releases. Worldpeace DMT (Leo Fincham) is uploading his self-produced noise-rock covers of Young Thug and The Kinks with help from Bassvictim’s Ike Clateman and The Femcels on Psychadelicdump, a faceless Youtube account with a little over a thousand subscribers. On streaming, WPDMT has only a single, a few features and a fantastic debut album with Rowan Please, but Psychadelicdump reveals the dozens of covers, rehearsal tapes, demos and performances that fill in the gaps of how Fincham got to the freaked-out sound that is so well-defined on The Velvet Underground & Rowan.
Otto Benson has had a few different aliases since he started releasing music publicly as a teenager. These different names (mostly) coincide with experimentations in genres and styles. As Memo Boy, Benson made catchy 4-track-style indie rock. Under the moniker OTTO, he sways more to upbeat dance-pop with skittering drum machines and chipmunk vocals. There are a few more out there that I haven’t mentioned. I first got into his music from seeing the artwork for his album “Songs Before Bed (2022)”, (then, the artist name was Pudding Club, and it is still like this on Apple Music because they suck with artist profiles) which is a painting of a cat perched on top of a large equally-orange moon, both sporting similarly smug expressions to the characters you see in the Peanut art above
Since then, I’ve made my way through his backlog and waited on new releases from Benson. In the first couple tracks of “Peanut”, it becomes clear this is a uniquely different record than previous projects. His voice is sharp and unaltered, at the center of the recording, accompanied only by sparse instrumental motifs that mostly hang in the background, apart from acoustic guitar which is a mainstay. His writing is witty and unassuming, and each song has a careful balance of mystique and appeal. If you look through Benson’s Bandcamp, a few of his albums are outlined with clear intentions for the listener, like the previously quoted description for “Songs Before Bed (2022)”. In interviews, Benson often gravitates towards a cosmic explanation for his connection to music, which aligns with these written instructions for the listener that are meant to guide one through the project in a grounded way. Human connection, or lack thereof, is at the center of Benson’s music, and on Peanut, the intentionality that was always present in Otto Benson’s music is at its most focused yet.
Because of his devoted fans, Alex G has cultivated a vast musical archive, with entire profiles dedicated to unearthing his unreleased music, beginning with his noisy teenage garage band. If you found out about Alex G through a Youtube recommendation of this sort or from (some of) his Tiktok hits, you might be surprised to hear the slick production and mostly radio-friendly nature of his newest album, "Headlights".
However, the same themes and sounds that crop up across Alex G’s entire discography, like his love for Yamaha presets and pitch-distorted vocals, appear on his newest record as well. As his sound has evolved from the lowest of lo-fi recordings on a Scarlett and a laptop to being bankrolled by a major label for the first time on Headlights, Alex G has continued to hold onto the stories and instruments that he loves. On this record, he pushes towards a new place in his lyrics: adulthood. “I’ve been on the road for a long time / I’m about to lose my mind” sounds full of distress without the cheerful, lilted delivery and heavy downbeat that accompanies it on the album’s closer, “Logan Hotel (Live)”. This line doesn’t feel like it comes from one of the characters that Alex G often conjures up, even (for example the reoccuring football star on the cover of DSU, and now as a character in “Beam Me Up”, one of my favorite songs on the new record), but a blunt opening--not shrouded in any metaphor--to a track about reckoning with change and growth.
This angle from a 32-year-old Alex G does not mean that “Headlights” lacks experimentation or playfulness, however. After being probed by a Pitchfork interviewer on what makes Logan Hotel any more live than the other studio-produced tracks on the album, Alex G replied: “I like putting “live” on shit.” For tracks that veer into new territory, “Louisiana” and "Bounce Boy" come to mind, the former a slow head-banger with vocals that feel coated in pitch-altered molasses; and the latter an upbeat dance-track with a mathy bass riff and Milwaukee lowend claps ( I hope).
The live show was great. He’s kept the same band--Sam Acchione (guitar/keys), John Heywood (bass) and Tom Kelly (drums)--pretty much his entire career, and although they were still working out some new songs at the start of the tour, they have the whole act pretty much locked. I asked him to play “Boy” during the encore and he did. He never gets too wasted in NYC, but it seemed like Boston was the right place to do it. No Elton John covers or yelling at the audience though, sadly. At risk of sounding jaded, I did notice that as the years have gone by of seeing Alex G live, the crowd knows less and less of the old songs, which is natural for an artist getting more popular, but Tiktok definitely fast-tracked that aspect in particular. Still, you can’t really get mad at people for seeing music they like.
Nostalgia is powering the independent sound! In reaction to the uncontrollable push to the future of tech, there is a potent desire for organic and real-sounding music. It seems like the easiest way to achieve this is looking to the aesthetics of music on the internet in the unregulated infancy of the 2000s-10s. This means saturated visuals in 400fps, glitches, loops, distortion, and lo-fi emulation abound. The most commercially successful example of this I can think of is the current UK underground rap scene, and the entire trend can be boiled down to Lauzza’s video for YT & Lancey Foux’s “Black & Tan”. Taking the bounce and swag of early 2000s west-coast (and Atlanta) beats and videos and cranking up the pastiche until it itself is a contemporary artifact. It doesn’t hurt that Lancey Foux is one of the most reliable features you can get. This style unabashedly pays homage to its forefathers, and that homage is a crucial part of the appeal.
In other burgeoning scenes pulling from the 2000s, these influences are splintered and harder to trace. Lower-fi or otherwise less polished indie music with electronic sounds has always been my favorite stuff to listen to, and recently I’ve seen a new strain of this kind of music that draws from early internet aesthetics in a similar way to the UK underground. Laptop-twee is an emerging term that many seem to be attached to, but I prefer the idea that this genre is based on a kind of soft abstraction and blending of notoriously hard-style genres to ultimately create nostalgic pop. For example, low-passed screamo vocals are a hallmark on tracks like Worldpeace DMT’s “Hello Marshmallow” and B7lanket’s “pitcher! not a belly itcher”. Also, muted versions of classic club instrumentation like on Nikki Nair’s “Juliette” with Harmony & Blaketheman1000, which would be a Moldy Peaches song if it wasn’t for the jersey club kick pattern.
At its core, the Pop-y blending of drum-machines, guitars and synthesizers to make compelling love songs has been a fool-proof strategy for niche success since the 90s. Broken Social Scene, Yo La Tengo (after the fuzz-phase), and The American Analog Set come to mind as members of this sect that achieved critical adoration and cult fans, and these bands stand out against the larger landscape of American indie because of their quirky (or you could say TWEE) styles. But AmAnSet just so happened to be one of the only American bands signed to Morr Music, a German label at the height of their operations at the turn of the century. I recommend listening to:
- B. Fleischmann
- Dntal
- Guitar (more noise/shoegaze here)
- Guther
- Lali Puna
- Hermann & Kleine
- The Go Find
This past weekend Chanel Beads headlined the last day of JWAR Fest, a three-day residency for over a dozen bands at Philadelphia’s Ukie Club, organized by Julia’s War. My girlfriend and a few friends of mine drove down in a mini-van to see the band on Sunday. Ukie Club is just one part of the Ukrainian American Citizens Association, a multipurpose space in Fishtown (“The Williamsburg of Philly”, according to my cousins). The building is massive in size, but has an unassuming cement facade. It looks like an unlikely venue for hip rock bands, but the endless number of mustache-ioed, cargo-short-and-trucker-hat wearing patrons of JWAR Fest made it clear that we were in the right place. Between sets they could be found adorning the front steps, smoking cigarettes in the courtyard, or dealing out merch in the back of the basement concert hall of Ukie Club. Each band took a half-hour set on the same stage, accompanied by live analog projection work.
Inside was dimly lit and wood-panelled. It looked as though it used to be much more of a bar than it is now. We caught all but two of the six bands that played, including a break for a dodgeball tournament halfway through. After Stab, self-described as a “shoegaze-adjacent alt-rock quartet” played a set of distorted guitar work and crooning, their frontman joined a sea of graphic tees lined up on the pitch in the grassy backyard of Ukie Club. As I watched bands and audience members alike pelting balls at each other, JWAR Fest began to make sense to me. It was equally as much a music festival as it was a way for the indie-rock enthused 20-somethings of North Philly to get together and hang out.
Chanel beads were not a part of this niche as the headliners of the day. Shane Lavers and Maya Colle make up the duet, and I’ve been avidly following them for about a year now. As a touring band, they expand to a trio with Zachary Paul on electric violin. I saw the three of them as Chanel Beads at Public Records last winter, and without Paul as Maya Colle’s solo project, Colle, in the spring. The band has developed a clear palette of sound with only a debut record and a handful of singles over the past few years.
Colle was on lead guitar, easily replicating the moody, alluring sound of the record with only an old Boss ME-50 guitar processor and a Wah pedal. Zachary Paul was fantastic on the violin, providing drones and textures that filled out the performance. Lavers gave the show some bite, his on-stage mannerisms a mismatch to his quiet and polite chatter with fans after the show. As the opening to “Unifying Thought” played, he leered at the audience, his pacing of the stage interrupted only by ad-libbed hisses into the mic. His vocal delivery was sharp and unpredictable, certain words erupting into screams, and others subdued to a whisper. It was a 50-minute set, but the three performers made it through the band’s entire catalog, excluding the first EP listed under Chan\l Beads on major streaming, Zut Alors, a solo project by Lavers (there’s more early work from Lavers on Bandcamp).
Full list of performers:
Kettle, Stab, Loadcard, MTV, Bad History Month, Worlds Worst, Chanel Beads.