As far as rock stardom goes, Grizzly Bear was never an obvious candidate. A Brooklyn-based band that formed in 2002, it specialized in subtlety—delicate riffs, choir-like singing, meandering melodies. Some musicians ask their crowds to “make some noise”; in the new book Such Great Heights: The Complete History of the Indie Rock Explosion, the music journalist Chris DeVille remembers seeing Grizzly Bear’s lead singer praise an audience for being “so quiet and attentive.”
Yet by 2009, Grizzly Bear was a hot ticket. The band’s album Veckatimest debuted in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 200—and would eventually sell 1.1 million copies worldwide, buoyed by its single “Two Weeks” appearing in a Super Bowl commercial for Volkswagen. When Jay-Z and Beyoncé attended one of the band’s concerts, it seemed a sign that the tectonic plates of culture were shifting. Grizzly Bear was indie; Jay-Z and Beyoncé represented what indie was supposedly independent from: the mainstream. But the separation between the two worlds was becoming blurrier every day. Reacting to observers who’d been surprised to see him at the show, Jay-Z told MTV News, “What the indie rock movement is doing right now is very inspiring.”
The phrase indie rock originated in the late ’70s to refer to niche, punk-influenced bands—Buzzcocks, Hüsker Dü, R.E.M.—that got their start distributing their own records and booking their own shows. But during the 2000s, it came to refer to all sorts of art and product united by a vague preference for scruffiness over polish. Indie included songs on the Billboard Hot 100, such as Modest Mouse’s “Float On.” It encompassed the music on The O.C., a show watched by millions. It was a consumer economy that made vintage clothing and microbrewed beer into corporate endeavors (pour one out for American Apparel). And eventually, the term seemed to lose any meaning. Twenty-first-century indie shaped the identities of many Millennials, but it’s now often talked about with pitying nostalgia—as the bygone style of hipsters with handlebar mustaches pretending to be countercultural while making easy-listening music for hotel lobbies.
DeVille’s book is a meticulous recounting of that twee and heady era. A writer and editor for the stalwart music blog Stereogum, DeVille catalogs indie’s permutations with the enthusiasm of a baseball-card collector, astutely sorting small developments amid larger trends. (For example: I’d never before considered how the availability of Wi-Fi internet drove demand for coffee-shop-friendly music.) But as to what indie meant—whether it was understood best as an artistic renaissance, a marketing fad, a by-product of technological change—he offers a shrug: “Multiple interpretations are valid.” The book also has a bit of an elegiac feel, suggesting that whatever indie was, it’s definitively over. Yet in many ways, indie still lives—and represents an idealistic approach to art and culture that’s well worth preserving.
The book opens with a reminiscence from DeVille’s adolescence in the late ’90s. While the girls at his high school listened to MTV stars like Britney Spears, the boys followed nu metal bands such as Korn—though DeVille never fully connected with that music’s rageful essence. Eventually, he got into the artier angst of Deftones, which led him to Radiohead, which led him to full-blown music geekdom. “For me, indie wasn’t about DIY ethics, avant-garde disruption, or any kind of radical worldview,” he writes. “It was about albums I could spin incessantly and organize into lists in place of a personality, songs I could burn onto mix CDs for my friends and family to show off my good taste, and bands that doubled as a secret handshake with people cooler than me.”
His trajectory mirrors my own journey from Incubus-loving tween to Shins-loving teen, but I found the explanation of his own motives a little depressing. Smug posturing and insularity were certainly part of the subculture, but so—at least we told ourselves—was serious musical appreciation. Mainstream musical offerings of the time tended toward the overly macho or overly feminine, overly loud or overly slick—but indie appeared to value complexity and smarts. Albums such as Modest Mouse’s The Moon & Antarctica and Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot didn’t seem like they were created to perform an identity or please a constituency; they were, instead, exploring abstract musical and lyrical ideas.
Of course, believing you’re too sensitive and authentic to care about identity categories is an identity itself—as indie’s transformation into a lifestyle-branding buzzword would come to demonstrate. Many of the scene’s prominent artists were white and male, and the scene was brimming with naivete and privilege (making weird music for no money is a lot easier when you have a trust fund, as some artists did). But there’s a reason that, as DeVille carefully tracks, the term indie evolved beyond the white-dudes-with-guitars stereotype to encompass a variety of rappers, R&B singers, and even low-wattage pop divas. Indie is, at base, an aesthetic sensibility: a belief about what music is for. It stakes out a zone between the avant-garde notion of music as pure sound and the pop notion of music as pure pleasure. Indie says it’s nice to hear someone do something different.
What helped early-2000s indie blow up was the new way music was able to travel. The internet—listening platforms such as Napster and iTunes, emergent media such as music blogs—gave a scattered constellation of scrappy bands new reach. Indie’s predecessor scenes, such as ’90s grunge or ’70s post-punk, were all rooted in real-life neighborhood venues where bands, listeners, and journalists mingled. Indie’s bands arose from specific local conditions too. But we fans, in large part, got invested virtually. Kids scattered all over the world were listening deeply and solitarily in headphones—and swapping songs and opinions about those songs online.
Perhaps this is also why, despite the connotations of the word indie, fans didn’t tend to accuse their faves of selling out when they got popular. When music is a purely aesthetic endeavor, severed from any particular material or geographical context, what does it matter if Red Bull is sponsoring a tour? Certainly, when my beloved Modest Mouse started to gain mainstream traction, I don’t recall feeling defensive of the band’s purity. I wasn’t a follower who’d seen the band gigging in bars for years; I’d just discovered it in some online listicle. I liked the music it made, and I was glad I’d have more people to talk about it with.
Being the first mass musical movement to flourish online also explains 2000s indie’s relatively dangerless aura. Previous books chronicling rock scenes, such as Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life or Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s Please Kill Me, were full of juicy anecdotes set in tour buses and rock clubs. Indie bands, no doubt, have plenty of those sorts of stories to share. But DeVille has no dishy scoops to impart. Such Great Heights tells the story of indie as it was experienced by its consumers: largely through a succession of Pitchfork reviews. The publication—founded in 1996 and famous for the decimal-point precision with which it rates albums—is mentioned more than a hundred times in the book, raising the question of whether the story of indie is really the story of one website’s influence.
Pitchfork has long gotten a bad rap for snottiness and tortured writing, but it’s an important institution for a reason. By the early 2000s, Rolling Stone seemed overly preoccupied with Boomer artists of fading vitality; Spin, while containing punchy criticism, was a glossy consumer magazine inflected by celebrity and fashion. Pitchfork, by contrast, had a near monastic devotion to talking about music as music. In 2024, the site’s founder, Ryan Schreiber, told The New York Times that he wanted to create something “that was very tough from a critical standpoint,” and that was guided by a question: “Who’s making music that’s truly innovative and progressive?”
The credibility of that description is well supported by Pitchfork’s history of trashing once-praised bands whenever their new work sounded repetitive or unadventurous. And the site really does have a record of championing albums that had an evolutionary impact on the way music sounds. In the early 2000s, a vein of innovation was being mined by artists twisting folk traditions into new shapes (Sufjan Stevens’s whimsical orchestration, Animal Collective’s ghostly harmonizing, Joanna Newsom’s harp epics). Other bands, such as Arcade Fire and the Postal Service, were turning away from the disaffection that characterized Gen X rock to express bighearted feelings in bespoke ways.
Of course, not all—or even most—indie bands were groundbreaking. DeVille traces the knockoff effect that happened over time, like when the unpredictable pop experimentalists of MGMT were succeeded—and commercially eclipsed—by bands with blander takes on their ideas (Capital Cities, Foster the People, Empire of the Sun). As the homespun sounds of early-2000s indie rock became mall-soundtrack fare, tastemakers took a new interest in rap, R&B, pop, and electronic music. This turn remains controversial—whatever’s wrong with culture today, you can find someone tracing the problem back to the rise of so-called poptimism, the belief that mainstream entertainers were worthy of critical appraisal, not instinctive disdain. DeVille suggests—quite fairly—that indie’s poptimist turn was sneaky snobbery, reactions against the popularity of groups like Mumford & Sons. But the underlying truth is that, by the mid-2010s, a lot of “truly innovative and progressive” music wasn’t originating from bands. It was coming from genre-agnostic internet natives wielding software and a mic, like Frank Ocean.
The real reason that indie started to die, or at least felt as though it did, is Spotify. As streaming supplanted downloads and album sales, it automated music discovery. Instead of reading Pitchfork or asking a record-store clerk for recommendations, more and more people began to let algorithms suggest their next obsession. This had a variety of consequences. One is that it’s become harder than ever for challenging music—music that you need to listen to a few times in order to love—to gain a foothold. The prestige associated with doing something different has started to fade.
Streaming, with its paltry pay rates, also made living off small and passionate fan bases harder for artists to sustain. But the economics of indie were always tenuous. DeVille notes that the scene’s boom synced up with the brief few years when iTunes downloads drove music consumption—thereby allowing small labels to make bigger margins by focusing less on physical products. Corporate patronage, driven by the hype surrounding indie, also rained paydays on off-beat artists. But in a 2012 New York magazine feature, Grizzly Bear revealed that—for all of the band’s outward success—its members weren’t even making a middle-class income. The band’s music remained too outré to get played on commercial radio stations, which were still important drivers of mainstream success. A decade later, the band’s lead singer, Ed Droste, launched a new career as a therapist.
Still, Jay-Z’s quote about Grizzly Bear proved prophetic: Pop really did take inspiration from indie. Beyoncé’s rapturously acclaimed 2013 self-titled album was moody, adventuresome, dripping with hipster rhetoric: “Soul not for sale,” she sang. “Probably won’t make no money off this, oh well.” Indie veterans such as Jack Antonoff, Aaron Dessner, and Dan Nigro became era-defining pop producers by helping Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, and other celebrities make introspective, quirky, rock-adjacent anthems. Pop didn’t give up the prerogative to broad appeal. But indie’s values—valorizing authentic self-expression and sonic exploration—probably did shape the desires of a generation of listeners.
As for indie music itself, it’s still here. It just went back to being what it was in the first place: a niche, an underground, a restless creative philosophy. Every day, Pitchfork still champions some artist—in rock or rap or some entirely new genre—whom I haven’t heard of and who challenges my ears. Music nerds are, for example, currently digging into weirdos such as Geese (a Gen Z band whose songs have a polyrhythmic, semi-comic intensity) and Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band (imagine Jimmy Buffett doing eight-minute, science-fiction-inflected sermons). On Wednesday, Pitchfork even spotlighted a baffling hip-hop offshoot that refers to itself as … “indie rock.” The music of the margins is not likely to find the reach it did for a few fleeting years of the 2000s. But great things, indie insists, are made for their own sake.
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