Indie rock
As the decade progressed many individual local scenes developed their own distinct takes on the genre: baggy in Manchester; grebo in Stourbridge and Leicester; and shoegaze in London and the Thames Valley.
During the 1990s, the mainstream success of grunge and Britpop, two movements influenced by indie rock, brought increased attention to the genre and saw record labels use their independent status as a marketing tactic.
Although distribution deals are often struck with major corporate companies, these labels and the bands they host have attempted to retain their autonomy, leaving them free to explore sounds, emotions and subjects of limited appeal to large, mainstream audiences.
[4] The lo-fi, experimental and art rock sound of the Velvet Underground[5] as well as late '70s punk and post-punk bands such as the Fall,[6] Buzzcocks, Wire, Television and Joy Division[7][8] would be influential to the genre.
[17][18] This inspired a DIY punk movement where bands like Swell Maps, 'O' Level, Television Personalities and Desperate Bicycles followed suit in pressing and distributing their own records.
Although the group was only around for a short time, their shows impressed the teenage musicians that came to see them, including a young Shayne Carter, who went on to form Bored Games, the DoubleHappys and Straitjacket Fits.
[29][25][30][24] The decade then saw the growing popularity of college radio stations, primarily in the United States, who would play independent artists of various genres, including alternative rock, new wave, post-hardcore and post-punk.
Instead, in the following years the Jesus and Mary Chain and Flying Nun Records bands like the Jean-Paul Sartre Experience morphed the genre into a slower, darker and more hypnotic style.
Intended to showcase the UK's current independent music scene, the album was made up of groups combining elements of jangle pop, post-punk and Phil Spector indebted Walls of Sound.
In the following years, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr. and Unrest began to release music on independent labels indebted to these bands, and soon too picked up the categorisation of indie rock.
Fronted by Pop Will Eat Itself, the Wonder Stuff and Ned's Atomic Dustbin, "grebo" was broadly defined, and was used more as a name for the Stourbridge scene than as a genre label.
In this period, the scene's bands became fixtures, sometimes headliners, at Reading Festival, sold millions of albums and were frequently featured on the covers of magazines like NME and Melody Maker.
The scene came to include the stylistically similar bands of nearby Leicester: the Bomb Party, Gaye Bykers on Acid, Crazyhead, the Hunters Club and Scum Pups.
[51] As a result, the term "alternative" lost its original counter-cultural meaning and began to refer to the new, commercially lighter form of music that was now achieving mainstream success.
New York magazine writer Carl Swanson argued that even the term "sellout" lost its meaning as grunge made it possible for a niche movement, no matter how radical, to be co-opted by the mainstream, cementing the formation of an individualist, fragmented culture.
[61] Spin writer Charles Aaron described Pavement and Guided by Voices as "the two bands that came to exemplify indie rock in this period, and still define the term in many people's minds".
[64] In the North Carolina Research Triangle, an indie rock scene was being spearheaded by groups enfranched Merge Records like Superchunk, Archers of Loaf and Polvo.
[69] Fronted by Blur, Oasis, Pulp and Suede,[70] the bands in the movement were advertised as being underground artists, as a means to compete commercially with the United States' grunge scene.
[73] Sunny Day Real Estate's debut album, Diary (1994), began a new wave of the emo genre, by incorporating elements of it into their indie rock sound.
[75] This style of emo broke into mainstream culture in the early 2000s, with the platinum-selling success of Jimmy Eat World's Bleed American (2001) and Dashboard Confessional's The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most (2001).
[77] The loosely defined Elephant 6 collective – which included the Apples in Stereo, Beulah, Circulatory System, Elf Power, the Minders, Neutral Milk Hotel, of Montreal and the Olivia Tremor Control – merged indie rock with psychedelic pop.
Gimme Indie Rock author Andrew Earles stated that the collective, namely Neutral Milk Hotel on On Avery Island (1996), "helped keep the genre artistically relevant while other bands defected and other underground styles rose to prominence".
[87][88] Feeder, who were initially more influenced by American post-grunge, producing a hard rock sound that led to their breakthrough single "Buck Rogers" and the album Echo Park (2001).
[89] After the death of their drummer Jon Lee, they moved to a more reflective and introspective mode on Comfort in Sound (2002), their most commercially successful album to that point, which spawned a series of hit singles.
[101] Influenced by the Clash, the Kinks, the Smiths and the Jam,[100] the band's style of tinny, high register, sometimes acoustic, guitar parts topped by lyrics of British parochial pleasures in the vocalists' authentic English accents became widely imitated.
[103] In this success, legacy indie bands soon entered the mainstream,[104] including Modest Mouse (whose 2004 album Good News for People Who Love Bad News reached the US top 40 and was nominated for a Grammy Award), Bright Eyes (who in 2004 had two singles at the top of the Billboard magazine Hot 100 Single Sales)[105] and Death Cab for Cutie (whose 2005 album Plans debuted at number four in the US, remaining on the Billboard charts for nearly one year and achieving platinum status and a Grammy nomination).
[107][108] Additionally, a second wave of bands emerged in the United States that managed to gain international recognition as a result of the movement included the Black Keys, Kings of Leon, the Shins, the Bravery, Spoon, the Hold Steady, and the National.
[115] The impact of the Strokes, the Libertines and Bloc Party led to significant major label interest in indie rock artists, which was then exacerbated by the success of the Arctic Monkeys.
[120] A 2020 Vice article cited Johnny Borrell, vocalist of Razorlight, 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' "desperate kinetic energy, mythologised love-hate dynamic and vision of a dilapidated Britain animated by romance and narcotics".
[126] The album also peaked at number one in Australia, Belgium (Flanders), Croatia, Slovenia, Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Portugal, and reached top ten positions in several other countries.
