Alternative and Indie

Away from the mainstream glitz, a generation of misfits built their own infrastructure: college radio stations, fanzines, independent labels (SST, Dischord, Twin/Tone, Homestead, Sub Pop by 1988), a circuit of clubs a van could reach. R.E.M.'s "Murmur" (1983) is where most people start: jangling Rickenbackers from Athens, Georgia and a singer you could not quite understand, on a label, I.R.S., that was independent in spirit if not on paper.

The Replacements and Hüsker Dü, both from Minneapolis, both on independents, both on the road constantly, showed that hardcore could grow melodies without losing its nerve. The Minutemen's "Double Nickels on the Dime" (1984) crammed forty-five songs onto two LPs. Sonic Youth tuned their guitars wrong on purpose and made "Daydream Nation" (1988). The Pixies, from Boston via the London label 4AD, wrote the quiet-loud-quiet trick that Nirvana would take to the top of the charts. Dinosaur Jr. turned it up.

Britain ran a parallel scene. The Smiths (1982 to 1987) made Johnny Marr's guitar and Morrissey's misery the sound of a bedsit. The Jesus and Mary Chain buried bubblegum under feedback on "Psychocandy" (1985). Echo and the Bunnymen, the Cure, Siouxsie and the Banshees and Bauhaus drew the darker corners: post-punk that thought too much, goth that dressed for it. The Cocteau Twins and My Bloody Valentine made guitars sound like weather. By 1989 the Stone Roses had crossed indie with acid house in Manchester, and the next decade was already audible.

Grunge was not just a genre. It was a cultural detonation. Sub Pop in Seattle had been putting out murky, slow punk with metal riffs since the late 1980s: Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Nirvana's "Bleach". Then Nirvana signed to Geffen, hired Butch Vig, and made "Nevermind". Released on 24 September 1991, it hit number one in January 1992 and knocked Michael Jackson off the top. Pearl Jam's "Ten" was more classic rock and deeply principled. Soundgarden were heavy, sludgy and operatic. Alice in Chains were the darkest corner, metal-drenched and harrowing. Stone Temple Pilots had the hooks and the swagger. The sound was dirty guitar, quiet-loud dynamics and a voice that cracked on purpose. The subject was depression, isolation and whether any of it was real.

Kurt Cobain hated what fame did with the music, made the abrasive "In Utero" with Steve Albini, sat down for "MTV Unplugged" in a cardigan, and died on 5 April 1994. Hole's "Live Through This" came out a week later. The scene did not end there, but it changed: Foo Fighters were Dave Grohl's reinvention, Bush and Live and Collective Soul and Candlebox took the sound to arena radio, and Creed made it a punchline that sold ten million copies. I call that post-grunge: grunge aesthetics with polished production. It ruled the dial until nu-metal took the slot.

Alternative in the 1990s meant rock that did not fit the boxes, and suddenly it was on every radio and movie soundtrack. Radiohead went from "Creep" to "The Bends" to "OK Computer", art-rock outsiders who became the decade's visionaries. The Smashing Pumpkins layered glam, goth and metal into "Siamese Dream" and a two-disc epic. The Red Hot Chili Peppers were funk-rock punks who found depth. Beck was the slacker king of genre-hopping. Jane's Addiction were psychedelic, sexual and chaotic, and Perry Farrell's Lollapalooza put the whole scene on one stage in the summer of 1991. Weezer were geeky and secretly heavy. R.E.M., Sonic Youth and the Pixies, the college-rock elders, made their best-selling records and, in the Pixies' case, broke up by fax.

The indie underground kept its own counsel. Pavement, Guided by Voices and Built to Spill made the lo-fi, hooky, wrong-on-purpose rock that indie would run on for twenty years. Neutral Milk Hotel's "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" and Elliott Smith's whispered albums became the records people passed hand to hand. Jeff Buckley made "Grace" and drowned. And a generation of women did the decade's most honest writing: Liz Phair answering the Stones from a Chicago bedroom, PJ Harvey, Björk, Tori Amos, Sinéad O'Connor tearing up a photo of the Pope on live television, Alanis Morissette selling thirty million copies of a breakup, and the riot grrrl bands, Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney, who made a punk scene where girls were the point.

Britain built its own thing. My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless" made shoegaze, a wall of guitar with the melody buried like a secret, and Slowdive and Ride followed it in. The Stone Roses played to thirty thousand people at Spike Island in 1990 and then vanished for four years. Suede brought glam back. Then Britpop: Oasis were the Gallagher brothers' Beatles obsession turned stadium-sized, Blur were the brainy art-school rival, Pulp were kitchen-sink drama and sexual politics, the Verve were orchestral grandeur, the Manic Street Preachers were the conscience. In August 1995 Blur and Oasis released singles the same day and the whole country picked a side. In Bristol, Massive Attack and Portishead slowed hip-hop down into trip-hop, the sound of a city after midnight.

Indie stopped meaning "independent label" and became a sound, an ethos and a whole aesthetic. Fueled by mp3 blogs, Pitchfork reviews and iPod commercials, it took over dorm rooms, festival stages and iTunes libraries. Arcade Fire's Funeral, on Merge in September 2004, was orchestral drama and communal catharsis from a Montreal collective that had just buried several family members. Modest Mouse's weirdness went pop with Float On. The Shins got Garden State immortality. Death Cab for Cutie turned gentle sadness stadium-sized. Vampire Weekend brought Ivy League Afro-pop and baroque bops. The Killers were a synth-drenched Springsteen revival from Las Vegas. Late in the decade MGMT and, in Australia, Tame Impala made it psychedelic and playful.

The blog era had its own lineage. Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was dropped by its label, streamed free from the band's website in September 2001, and became the decade's best-known story about a record company being wrong. James Murphy's DFA label and LCD Soundsystem put punk kids on the dancefloor. TV on the Radio, the National, Spoon, the Hold Steady, the New Pornographers, Neko Case, Broken Social Scene, Feist and the Postal Service filled out a scene that was as much Brooklyn and Toronto as Seattle. Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion in January 2009 and Phoenix's Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix later that year showed where it was going: toward electronics, toward pop, toward Coachella.

Britain sent its own wave. Coldplay's A Rush of Blood to the Head made stadium melancholy, Arctic Monkeys made the fastest-selling debut in UK history in January 2006, and Radiohead's In Rainbows, sold from their own website for whatever you wanted to pay in October 2007, was the decade's most-discussed business decision. Elliott Smith died in October 2003, and Beck's Sea Change, Sufjan Stevens' Illinois and Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago carried the quieter end of the genre into folk.

Indie began the decade in the biggest room it had ever played. Arcade Fire's The Suburbs won Album of the Year at the Grammys in February 2011, an award nobody expected a Montreal art-rock band to win, and for a moment the blog-era class looked like the new mainstream. LCD Soundsystem played what they said was a farewell show at Madison Square Garden that April. Bon Iver won Best New Artist a year later.

Then it dispersed. Tame Impala turned psychedelia into a solo project made in a bedroom in Perth and ended up at the top of festival bills. Vampire Weekend made their densest and best record, Modern Vampires of the City, in 2013. The National perfected a specific kind of adult dread. Beach House, the War on Drugs, Sufjan Stevens, Father John Misty and Angel Olsen each found a different way to be sad at length and in high definition.

The most important shift was who got to make it. Recording moved into bedrooms, distribution moved to Bandcamp and streaming, and a generation of young women and queer artists took over the guitar: Mitski, Julien Baker, Lucy Dacus, Phoebe Bridgers, Snail Mail, Soccer Mommy, Japanese Breakfast, Big Thief, Courtney Barnett, girl in red, Clairo. Baker, Dacus and Bridgers made boygenius together in 2018. This is the algorithm's secret weapon, and it is true, but the songs came first.

Britain and Ireland kept the noise going. IDLES, Shame and Fontaines D.C. made post-punk that sounded like a pub argument you would want to be in. Wolf Alice won the Mercury Prize in 2018. Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine came back and found a huge new audience, because shoegaze turns out to be perfect music for headphones and anxiety.

The 2020s did not just bring emo back, they recontextualised it. This is the era of sad online music, of introspection, of DIY aesthetics meeting genuinely expensive production. Phoebe Bridgers was the ghost of Elliott Smith with meme fluency and a stadium reach. Ethel Cain made Southern Gothic dreamrock with a cult around it. Beabadoobee took Britpop and 2000s emo and became a Gen Z guitar icon. MUNA, Soccer Mommy and Mitski wrote emotionally dense, rock-rooted records that sounded nothing like each other.

The scene organised itself around collaboration rather than competition. boygenius, the trio of Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, made "The Record" in 2023 and took three Grammys with it. Big Thief made a double album in four studios that sounded like it was recorded in a field. Waxahatchee and MJ Lenderman made country-shaped indie records that outsold most actual country records in the cities. Clairo, Japanese Breakfast, Snail Mail and Bartees Strange all did their best work in this decade.

The common thread is narrative. These are songs with people and places and specific rooms in them, sung quietly over ambient guitar tones, and the audience knows every word because the lyrics are the point. It is the opposite of the fifteen-second hook, and it turned out both could be enormous at once.