Dean Wareham has a Google Alert set for his first full-time band, Galaxie 500, named after a friend’s vintage Ford. With Wareham as its guitarist and lead singer, the band lasted a little over three years — from 1987 to early 1991 — and made just three albums for an indie label that went bankrupt.
Galaxie 500’s biggest headlining gigs were appearances for only club-sized audiences. Its music never reached the American album charts. And Wareham and the other two band members, the bassist and singer Naomi Yang and the drummer Damon Krukowski — who are married — haven’t spoken or been in the same room since 1991, when Wareham quit the band on the verge of a tour of Japan. (They deal with Galaxie 500 business via email.)
But decades later, Google Alerts for Galaxie 500 keep arriving.
“Sometimes it’s a car for sale, but a lot of times it’s a review,” Wareham said in a video interview from his home studio in Los Angeles. “And yeah, every week there’s a review of something that thinks it sounds like Galaxie 500. There’s a lot of that. But they don’t, really.”
This Friday, the final remnants of Galaxie 500’s brief but luminous studio recording career will be released as “Uncollected Noise New York, ’88-’90.” The new album adds eight previously unreleased songs to a group of non-album tracks that were included in 1996 as part of a Galaxie 500 boxed set, then reissued separately in 2004 as the album “Uncollected.”
“When we made these records, if you had told me that 30 years later, 35 years later, people would still be excited about them, I would be most surprised,” Wareham said.
The added tracks reveal how rigorously Galaxie 500 judged its music, even from the beginning. “I think we were good editors. I still think these were the right tracks to reject,” Krukowski said by video from his and Yang’s home in Cambridge, Mass. “I don’t think it’s hidden gems. It’s more like telling the story in a different way. It’s a narrative thing, which I think is why we were all OK with it.”
Galaxie 500 might have been the ultimate collegiate indie-rock band. Its three members met at prep school — Dalton — and Wareham and Krukowski played in bands together as undergraduates at Harvard. Yang and Krukowski, a longtime couple, formed Galaxie 500 with Wareham while they were Harvard graduate students: Yang in architecture, Krukowski in comparative literature. And Galaxie 500 emerged as a sterling example of what beginners’ luck, ambitions, limitations and instincts could create.
“We knew what our goals were, really clearly,” Krukowski said. “But our chops didn’t live up to it.”
Wareham said, “Not quite knowing what I was doing on the guitar in some ways helped. I mean, there’s always people who go to school and they can play anything. But it doesn’t mean they’ll play anything interesting.”
In the late 1980s, an era when pop sought booming, larger-than-life sounds and rock was pushing toward the muscularity of grunge, Galaxie 500 was decidedly different: soft-focus and probing rather than blunt and noisy.
The trio was clearly influenced by generations of bands that had used a few chords, drones and hypnotic repetition: the Velvet Underground, the Modern Lovers, the Feelies, New Order, Spacemen 3, psychedelia and 1980s neo-psychedelia. But Galaxie 500 ended up seeking its own sound, one that was equal parts plaintive and obstinate.
Most of its songs circled patiently through just two or three chords. Wareham sang — in a voice that his 2008 memoir, “Black Postcards,” describes as “high and loud and scared” — about everyday events that were also infused with deep longing. Then he unspooled lead guitar solos that could wander or implode, while Yang and Krukowski explored bass countermelodies and rhythmic crosscurrents.
Galaxie 500’s albums — particularly its second one, “On Fire” from 1989 — have been recognized as cornerstones of a style that was applied to the band in retrospect, a term its members wouldn’t have chosen: dream-pop. For one thing, Galaxie 500 was never a pop band.
Loosely defined, dream-pop involves slow tempos, diffident vocals and plenty of reverb, encompassing bands like the Cocteau Twins and Mazzy Star. It maintains a spacious simplicity and an inward-looking, contemplative tone, even when the music crests with volume and distortion.
Galaxie 500’s songs evolved in rehearsals and on tour, taking on gusty, unpredictable, dramatic contours. “We had a cheap rehearsal space,” Yang recalled from Cambridge. “We were spending so many nights a week just playing these two- or three-chord songs over and over. And they’d change, they’d develop.”
Galaxie 500 found its initial following around Boston, but went to New York City to record at the producer Kramer’s Noise New York studio in TriBeCa. They liked the drum sound on a Half Japanese album Kramer had produced, and studio time was just $35 an hour.
“I recall them making it clear to me right away that they had no idea how to work in the studio or how to make a record,” Kramer said in a phone interview from his home in North Carolina. “I said, ‘If you don’t know how to make a great record, you play the songs and I’ll make the record.’”
Kramer liked to work fast, recording the basics of each song in just a few takes, Krukowski recalled. “We didn’t have the chops to be grand improvisers, but you still react to the moment. So things happened that we didn’t plan,” he said. “And Kramer kept them all. He loved them, and he would highlight them in the mix and he would re-emphasize them with further overdubs. He really pushed us to use those. By doing that, he complicated our own more limited sense of what a song could be or what our arrangement could be. So he pushed us to incorporate those mistakes.”
Kramer went on to tour with Galaxie 500 as sound man and occasional guest musician. What he heard in live performances informed the band’s later album productions. This year, he’s producing Wareham’s next album.
The new collection of recordings “opens up more about what was in our ears at the time, what we were aiming for and what we were trying and failing at,” Krukowski said.
It begins with three previously unreleased songs — “Shout You Down,” “See Through Glasses” and “On the Floor” — that have “faster tempos in there than we ever released, and we rejected them,” Krukowski said. “We figured out that we sounded more original when we slowed down and did something different.”
Internal tensions broke up Galaxie 500. Wareham grew frustrated with being constantly outvoted and overruled by the unanimity of Yang and Krukowski. “We’ve never repaired our friendship, “ Krukowski said. “But we have a very comfortable working relationship, and that’s what we need.”
After Galaxie 500 split up, all three continued to make music: Wareham on his own and in groups including Luna and Dean & Britta, his duo with his wife; the others as the duo Damon & Naomi. (Krukowski and Yang also run a small press, Exact Change, that reissues out-of-print books about avant-garde art movements.)
Galaxie 500 made indie-rock in indie-rock’s last innocent years of music for art’s sake. Very soon after the trio broke up, the commercial breakthrough of bands like Nirvana and Green Day changed everything about what had been a small-scale, sustainable movement.
“It was like a money bomb was dropped on our scene,” Krukowski said. “You take a scene that was so full of misfits and eccentrics and punk-rockers and people that come out of all kinds of places — from Daniel Johnston to Sonic Youth, right? And you dangle money in that scene, and everybody reacted somehow. A lot of the reactions were really ugly. And then a lot of the reactions were really tragic.”
Through adroit legal maneuvering, Galaxie 500 was able to buy back the rights to its catalog after its label, Rough Trade America, went bankrupt. And its music has lingered: through reissues, individual rediscoveries, soundtrack placements and cover versions. “The songs are easy to play, deceptively easy,” Wareham said. “And they’re easy to play badly. But they appeal to teenagers in their sadness and their anger.”
The band members have a measured assessment of their final release. “They’re not all our best songs,” Wareham said. “But it’s still interesting to see how people stumble onto a sound.”
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