| Landfill indie | |
|---|---|
 Britishindie rock bandRazorlight in 2009. | |
| Other names | |
| Stylistic origins | |
| Cultural origins | 2000s,United Kingdom |
| Other topics | |
Landfill indie (also known asindie landfill orThe Deleted Years) is a loosely defined style and era of Britishindie rock. The term was first coined as a pejorative label by music journalistAndrew Harrison in his 2007 review ofJens Lekman'sNight Falls Over Kortedala, where he used it to disparagingly describe the proliferation of formulaic and uninspired British guitar bands dominating the mid-2000s music scene.[4] The style dominated theUK charts in the 2000s and early 2010s.[5]
The landfill indie era has been retrospectively associated with theindie sleaze aesthetic,[6][7] a term coined in 2021, to describe the fashion and visual style of landfill indie bands and other contemporaneous developments inalternative music.[8][9][10][11][12]
Notable acts associated with the movement wereArctic Monkeys,[13]the Wombats,[14][15]the Cribs,the Kooks,Hard-Fi,Pigeon Detectives,Babyshambles,Scouting for Girls,the Vaccines,Razorlight,Milburn,Joe Lean & The Jing Jang Jong,the Fratellis,Courteeners,the Maccabees,Little Man Tate,the Enemy,Holloways,Mystery Jets,the Sunshine Underground,the View,the Twang,the Rifles andKaiser Chiefs.[5][16][17]
The Guardian defined the sound of landfill indie to be that of: "angular, jangly guitars plus big riffs plus amusingly pretentious lyricism".[18] The phrase was used disparagingly to describe the proliferation of formulaic and uninspired British guitar bands dominating the mid-2000s music scene.[19]
Music criticSimon Reynolds argued that the "landfill indie" era was characterized by an excess in indie rock bands in response to the popularity of the 2000sindie rock revival. According to Reynolds, what made the music "landfill" was not a lack of musical skill, but a proliferation of formulaic artists who were stripped from the naivety, innovation and authenticity that defined earlier indie acts such asBogshed andBeat Happening, stating:[19]
"[...] indie wasn't crappy for a purpose. In fact, it wasn't especially inept or ramshackle anymore, so much as drearily adequate. Instrumentally, there was just a sustained absence of flair in the playing. This guitar-based music didn't rock, but equally the songcraft wasn't sufficiently strong, or forcefully sung enough, for it to make the grade as proper pop music".
Reynolds later stated, "None of these groups could honestly be described as pointing the way to any kind of future; there was little about them that would have been incomprehensible to, say, aSmiths fan in 1985".[19] Furthermore, theBBC referred to the year 2009, one of the prominent years for landfill indie as "the year indie music died".[20] However, publications like theNME championed many landfill bands at the time by frequently placing them on the front page.Metro Magazine later claimed that the 2000s landfill indie era was a time when "the NME ruled a new saviour of rock music seemingly every week."[21][13]
Vice magazine retrospectively labelledRazorlight'sJohnny Borrell as the "one man who defined, embodied and lived Landfill Indie" due to his forming of a "spectacularly middle-of-the-road" band despite his close proximity to the Libertines.[5][22][23]
The term "landfill indie" was originally coined byAndrew Harrison in November 2007, in his review of Jens Lekman's albumNight Falls Over Kortedala published in the British music magazineThe Word.[4] In the review, Harrison off-handedly used the term to describe the British indie music scene at the time:[4]
Maybe it was general weariness at English bands’ method depravity and tunelessness that madePeter Bjorn And John’s whistle-drivenYoung Folks into one of the tunes of last year. That single opened a window to let in the light, air and general bracingness ofSwedish pop, which resembles an alfresco health farm next to our own blighted landscape of landfill indie.
The phrase was later applied to a wave of 'generic' British indie bands that emerged following the success ofthe Libertines, who themselves came from the post-Britpop[19] landscape of the 1990s British alternative rock scene.[4][18] In America, their variant of the landfill indie era was nicknamed "The Deleted Years" or encompassed by the "blog rock" movement.[3][24][25][26]
In the early 2000s, theNME coined "the New Rock Revolution" to describe a wave of emerging rock bands, spurred by the success of American acts such asthe White Stripes andthe Strokes, with the former spearheading the 2000sgarage rock revival movement whilst the latter led the New Yorkpost-punk revival.[27][28] Bands like the Strokes went on to inspire influential British groups across the Atlantic, such as the Libertines, whomNME described as "the bed-haired Brit version of [the Strokes] almost as soon as they appeared."[29][30][31]
In August 2020,Vice magazine published a retrospective on the era which stated "Somewhere between the 'indie rock revival' of the early-2000s and the emergence of 'poptimism' in the early-2010s, theUK charts were dominated by a procession of homogenous bands making a type of music that has come to be referred to as: 'Landfill indie'".[5] In addition, the term landfill indie would continue to be used as a pejorative as well as a label to describe this period of British alternative music.[32][33][34][35]
In a 2009 article forthe Guardian, journalistPeter Robinson cited the landfill indie movement as dead, blamingthe Wombats,[36]Scouting For Girls,[37] andJoe Lean & the Jing Jang Jong by stating "If landfill indie had been a game ofBuckaroo, those three sent the whole donkey's arse of radio-friendly mainstream guitar band monotony flying high into the air, legs flailing."[38] The initial success of the movement was beginning to subside, leading commentators to discuss its decline as a phenomenon and argue that it had been overtaken by the more musically and emotionally complex music of indie rock bands likeAnimal Collective,Wild Beasts,Micachu and the Shapes,Gang Gang Dance,TV on the Radio,High Places,Foals,Vampire Weekend,Telepathe,Dirty Projectors,Bloc Party,Arcade Fire andDeath Cab for Cutie.[39][19]
Although the style declined in prominence by the early 2010s, the landfill indie era went on to experience a gradual revival.[31] This resurgence was first marked by the emergence of the hashtag #indieamnesty, created by musician Rowan Martin[18][40] in April 2016, and later by the launch of the Instagram account @indiesleaze in 2021, curated by Olivia V, which documented and celebrated the visual aesthetic of the era, which was later labelledindie sleaze.[41] Some sources credit theCOVID-19 lockdowns[42] as contributing to a collective nostalgia for the landfill indie era.[43][44][7][45][46][47]
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)| Components | |||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Genres by decade of origin (sub-subgenres not included) | |||||||||||||
| Regional scenes |
| ||||||||||||
| Radio formats | |||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
| Related | |||||||||||||
