Indie music is obsessed with the past - but why is its sense of nostalgia so melancholic?
There exists a strange dichotomy in how indie music is perceived, particularly in its relationship to rock music. Throughout its history, indie rock and its various siblings, cousins, and offshoots have enjoyed the image of being on the outer seams of what rock music does. In the 80s, it was the cutting edge - the Alternative - picking up the torch from new wave. In the 90s, it was the music seemingly every popular band was influenced by; a landscape unto itself of bands too weird, abstract, experimental for the mainstream. In the 2000s, indie music became part of a vanguard tossing the legacy trends of rock music out of the spotlight, as bands picked up synthesizers and arpeggiators and became “hip”, eventually transcending rock music as a base altogether as they blurred the line between underground and mainstream.
These perceptions are sticky, but they obscure an underlying truth: indie music loves the past. Where people saw indie music as the Alternative in the 80s, indie musicians were mining 60s pop music for its jingle-jangles and simplistic writing. Those 90s bands that felt inaccessible to the layperson recorded on old, rapidly-depreciating equipment and rehashed ideas pioneered by bands like The Velvet Underground that existed on the cusp of the avant-garde decades earlier. The 2000s may have been the most egregious of all, immediately thrown into the “New Rock Revolution” - a term which ironically was used to describe bands which “revived the spirit” of classic rock - and gleefully pilfering 60s garage rock and psychedelia, 70s and 80s electronic, and even earlier indie music, which had made its way around the nostalgia cycle and was now pleasantly hip to imitate.
To come to the defense of indie music, I doubt most of these bands would have masked these influences. Hipsters and indie kids love flexing their knowledge of the past, and the best indie music is adept at finding real meat to dissect in its re-exploration of trodden ground. One of my favourite indie records - and indeed, records in general - is Phoenix’s 2009 classic (is it too soon to call it that?) Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix , a record which attempts to bottle the sound of a distant memory of a semester abroad or summer holiday spent in Paris into a warm, poppy, and yet distinctly melancholic sound that fluidly darts between propulsive post-punk grooves and saturated electronica, never entirely acoustic or electronic. While the melodicism is joyous and the arrangements playful, the lyrics themselves regard the past with a strange cynical love. On “1901”, frontman Thomas Mars speaks from the perspective of an early 20th-century Parisian, deriding the Eiffel Tower as “material” and “overrated” in the midst of a song he himself declared to be about his preference for this era of Paris’s existence. The album’s most poignant image comes on “Rome”, where he finds a moment of quiet reflection to mourn that “two thousand years remain in a trash can” in an analogy for time’s inevitable erosion of love.
For their part, Phoenix (along with contemporaries MGMT and Cut Copy, amongst others) helped inspire a whole wave of synth-friendly indie bands who weren’t afraid to go full-on pop. The explosion of mainstream indie in the early 2010s can in many ways be credited to Wolfgang 's breakout success. But time, as always, marches on, and what was once cutting edge becomes yesterday’s nostalgic aesthetic. What happens when indie returns to cannibalize itself once again?
Porter Robinson has, at least as far as his post-house DJ career, always traded in indie nostalgia. 2014’s Worlds was a more contemporary elevation, attempting to find a middleground between festival EDM’s euphoric maximalism and mainstream indie’s shimmering soundscapes and pop melodies dragging along blippy fakebit synths and Ocarina of Time samples to keep one foot firmly planted in the past even beyond what this era of indie typically entailed. 2021’s Nurture looked even further back, tributing 2000s publication indietronica textures and production tropes along the way, but 2024’s SMILE! :D is the first that, for the most part, genuinely sounds like it could have come from the era it draws from, diluting and at times even dropping the more contemporary elements of his sound. The album is notably more rock-informed than previous outings, spending almost all of its runtime in a light, melody-driven pop rock sound that alternates between synthier upbeat dancefloor tracks and subtle Death Cab for Cutie-esque ballads.
This shift in sound is fascinating to me, because it underscores a record that unequivocally could not have been written by a Porter who was not more than a decade deep in a career nobody could have imagined would have been anywhere near as big as the mainstream DJ career he threw away to pursue it. Every Porter album has been introspective - Worlds explored depression and loneliness as well as his disillusionment with EDM in abstract terms, while Nurture saw him reckon with self-doubt, imposter syndrome, and the process of healing - but SMILE! :D advances his lyrical oeuvre by fashioning itself as a deconstruction of the mindset of someone with an honest-to-god fanbase, a team, a media presence. It certainly reflects on similar themes to his previous records at times; “Russian Roulette”, for instance, addresses suicidal ideation and is particularly Nurture -esque. But where Worlds was about Porter Robinson as a young musician disillusioned with his own path, and Nurture was about Porter Robinson as an adult and a person learning to reckon with decades of individual expectations placed on himself, SMILE! :D is a deconstruction of Porter Robinson as a celebrity, someone who has found himself surrounded by people expecting things of him, and who feels unequipped to deal with that responsibility.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence, either, that Porter chose such an intimate, retrospective sound to qualify his dissection of his own stardom. If anything, the album gleefully flaunts this disconnect; its most 2020s sounding songs - “Knock Yourself Out XD”, “Kitsune Maison Freestyle”, “Perfect Pinterest Garden”, “Mona Lisa” - all revel in propulsive arena-pop grooves and walls of contemporary production, synthesizing elements of a post-hyperpop, post-pop punk revival (both themselves revivalist styles) pop landscape. At the same time, these songs present Porter at his most sardonic, almost gleeful in his self-portrait: incompetent, materialistic, and possessing an adversarial and destructive relationship with his fanbase.
It’s not that the other songs on the album don’t explore these same flaws, but the tone is entirely different. The subtle, acoustic-driven “Year of the Cup” sees him recontextualize his relationship with his loved one and his team as a relationship with himself, reflecting on how his inability to see past his own flaws causes him to lash out and unduly burden everyone around him as a way to self-punish. “Everything To Me” acknowledges an understanding that, even if his fans don’t know him personally, they’ve still been a part of his life for most of it, and the connection they have is not trivial. Some songs even take time to contradict themselves; “Cheerleader” spends its acoustic bridge exploring a similar theme of Porter’s reliance on the support of his fans, and “Kitsune Maison Freestyle” pulls the same musical trick while hammering home its own point about the hollow satisfaction promised by designer fashion and the pursuit of self-perfection. Throughout the album, he makes a very proactive choice to associate these moments of reflection and bittersweet acknowledgement with the least futuristic stylistic aesthetics he’s ever used.
I think that, at the core of it, good indie music understands that being stuck in the past is usually not very happy. It is, inherently, escapist. You can channel older sounds in a way that joyfully celebrates them, but the act of looking backwards always comes from a desire to not look forwards, because forwards is the present and the present is stressful and unknown; it is the source of our current worry. While more reactionary art will glorify the past, mature art will recognize that inherent emotion and find value in it. SMILE! :D understands this implicitly and utilizes its sense of nostalgia as a vehicle to reexamine Porter’s own values and image of himself; its reflection on that era of indie music and Porter’s personal reflection are one in the same. It neither rejects nor accepts the past as an ideal; it views the past as a necessary component of reflecting on and understanding the present, and of moving forward.