A young indie vanguard finds new ways to tell the truth.
SAMUEL HYLAND
Earlier this month, about ten people littered the floor of DRKMTTR, a dingy Nashville venue that had forgotten—or neglected—to promote tonight’s performance. In a back corner of the room, the Brooklyn rapper DORIS talked giddily with Body Meat, an ex-rocker who imbues video-game music with punk energy, and Anysia Kym, a fellow ex-rocker who, two years ago, traded drumsticks for drum machines. A few months prior, I’d recognized a VoiceLive Play pedal on-stage with Porches, a band whose latest album layers gushy autotune over grungy guitar licks. Which was why tonight, upon seeing the same pedal up front, I assumed that DORIS had finally stopped shouting raw over his own tracks—loud incorrect buzzer. The VoiceLive Play sat untouched through his and Kym’s opening sets, peering out from a maze of cables. And only when Body Meat emerged, with all the trappings of fringe rock—a fog machine, a trench coat, an electronic drum kit—did it come out of hiding, scorching his digitized screamo with macabre, spiritually-charged angst. It was hard to tell which was more real: the raw performance he gave, or the small moments where he broke down its walls. “Are you guys happy?” he asked at one point, to awkward silence. “Doesn’t sound like it.” An audience member offered a wry “I’m scared.” Back from the stage, through a down-pitched, echo-heavy auto-tune that sounded slightly like Darth Vader: “Is it the fog? Must be the fog.”
In an old YouTube demo of the VoiceLive Play, an onstage pitch-correcting agent increasingly favored by moody types, a soft-spoken bald man breaks into a spirited rendition of Maroon 5’s “This Love.” Autotune, the effect he’s demonstrating, is a disputed boon for vocal ranges that struggle to accommodate roving imaginations. In the mid-2000s, it forged something of a crossroads within hip-hop, a genre in which rough voices had long been entrusted with rougher realities. On one side of the Red Sea, troubled futurists like T-Pain and Kanye West soaked suffering in a glitchy singsong; on the other, gruff purists denigrated their counterparts, trashing their trade as anathema that “fucked up music for real singers” — “real” singers being imperfect singers, wounded men who bore vocal blemishes like battle scars. This is precisely what makes the bald man an ideal, if slightly jarring, subject for the demo: he doesn’t sing like a deity; he sings like a dad on his sixth beer. He’s wearing a black shirt against a pitch-black background, which sort of makes him look like the evil hot sauce droplet from that one episode of SpongeBob. It’s difficult to hold eye contact with him, because in the rare moments where he glances at the camera, it feels like a cry for help. (Ever had a giddy aunt livestream your birthday party to her Facebook friends?) All of which, awkwardness aside, feels movingly authentic by 2024: a middle-aged man trying, failing, and consulting a device in order to succeed. Autotune is an admission—I Can’t—and over the past two decades or so, as rap has grown younger, it’s also grown more accepting of the ways one might choose to be real.
A counterpoint, and the reason why I’m binge-watching VoiceLive Play demos, is indie rock: a stronghold of raw sound, jellied over time by MPCs, DAW effects, and, now, a growing amount of pedalboard space allotted to pitch-shifting devices. In our era, a blur that’s ditched rock-as-genre for rock-as-attitude, it feels pedantic to be picky-choosy with who we grant rockstar status—when Playboi Carti calls himself a rock-star, you let him, because he’s savvy enough to effectively synthesize rock-star aesthetics. But in the annals of subgenre, where the concept of “Rock” grows more granular and splintered, this very process—of categorization by perception—is inextricable from literal sound: you can’t photo-dump your way between subgenres, because subgenres, life-or-death differences organized by ear, have superseded genres, clerical tools largely organized by algorithms. It feels like one of few barriers remaining, even if loosely, from a bygone time in which binaries were binding. And more than ever—especially in indie rock—the mode of permeating these boundaries is vocal-processing, liquefying one’s voice until emotion usurps meaning, let alone categorization. “You don’t know all that I am,” a fog-shrouded Body Meat roared in Nashville that night, midway through a wrenching performance of “Demons.” If rough voices are the vehicles of rough realities, inhuman voices seem increasingly like the vehicles of inchoate ones.
“It’s the same reason I don’t like to play digital keyboards. When you hit the key it doesn’t sound exactly when you hit it, and when you take your hand off it’s not exactly where you take your hand off. That’s very disturbing to me.”
Thus, a familiar moral conundrum: an inchoate reality shouldn’t negate one’s right to communicate it, even if the message is that words don’t quite suffice. What makes autotune interesting, if not controversial, in an indie-rock context, is the subgenre’s troubled relationship with brute force—a direct translation of dire conditions, sometimes considered antithetical to the prospect of technological aid. In a recent report on the indie boom’s post-pandemic trudge, Hearing Things cited a certain “get-in-the-van attitude” that, in the 1980s, seemed to define “indie”—as in “relentlessly independent”—for a generation. “You had all these old dudes,” Feeble Little Horse’s Ryan Walchonski said, “who were like, ‘When I was your age, I slept under my van and heated myself with the exhaust that was coming out of it.’”
For the current era of indie-rockers, many of whom grew up on the internet, “indie” doesn’t connote such firebrand individualism, anymore: now, it’s a collective push against a corporate beast, less about iconoclasm than recognizing, and addressing, a need for outsourced assistance in a capitalist desert. This is the very logic underpinning any one artist’s use of pitch-shifting effects: much like the bald man of the demo video, they’re coming to terms with Can’t-ness, consulting a boon in order to succeed. All the while, the movement’s tech-averse history might see this as a cop-out—inching towards an escapist product, at the cost of distancing oneself from honorable exertion. “I just don’t want to be alienated from my labor,” Steely Dan co-founder Donald Fagen told Tablet in 2021, midway through a sidebar about his distaste for reverb. (The conversation re-entered cultural consciousness a week ago, when a corner of Twitter erupted over one user’s fascist reading of shoegaze.) “It’s the same reason I don’t like to play digital keyboards. When you hit the key it doesn’t sound exactly when you hit it, and when you take your hand off it’s not exactly where you take your hand off. That’s very disturbing to me.”
Perhaps this is why last Saturday, a few days after Body Meat’s DRKMTTR stop, Fagen was nowhere to be seen at Market Hotel, a rickety loft venue that looks a bit like Guitar Hero’s concept of Bushwick. Dusty windows looking out on chugging J Trains, snazzy high-schoolers smooching in the front row, a lingering cloud of cigarette smoke and fog-machine discharge. In the audience: Dev Hynes, a bunch of crossfaded Supreme skaters, a few faces you’ve seen in Perfectly Imperfect before. Around 9 PM, four young men in streetwear barked rushy pardon-mes, lugging bulky duffle bags from the back of the room to the stage. Together, they comprised Blair, a scrappy outfit that, earlier this year, ditched punk abjection for freewheeling optimism, funnelled through rap verses and tons of autotune. Take “Beefnbrocs,” a Blair II deep-cut in which frontman Genesis Evans trades back-of-the-classroom bars with DORIS. When they played it tonight, the band’s two guitarists, Nico Chiat and Paulie Ocampo Zapata, lazily strummed single notes while hyping one another up. At times, they seemed to play their energies more than their instruments, which isn’t necessarily wrong: though a guitar still represents something, a callback to a certain lineage, the heart of rock’s freshman class doesn’t always fit neatly on fretboards, lyric sheets, or even linguistic frameworks. While Chiat and Ocampo Zapata flailed, Evans reached a point where he stopped sounding human, auto-tune overtaking his English like tongues in a Baptist church. The mosh-pit forming at his feet, all bouncing afros and arms draped around shoulders, seemed prostrate before the same power.
The final song on Blair’s setlist was “Day One Homies,” a distant predecessor to their new, tech-forward approach. Though this particular track doesn’t feature autotune, it was the sole moment where Evans—much to the absent Fagen’s chagrin—brandished a wireless keytar, pounding out notes while an Ableton Live set, aglow on a distant laptop screen, alienated him from the labor of his fingers. Five years since its release, it remains the most popular Blair single, perhaps because of its adoption by homie-happy skate movies, like the endearing (917) Video 2. But it might feel doubly resonant, now, because it’s entirely about admitting unsexy, unsolid truths—a thing more and more indie musicians seem, and sound, willing to accept. “I’ve never felt so weak,” Chiat sang in its chorus, to a sea of shaking, sweat-soaked manes. “I don’t know what to think… about anything at all.” It doesn’t have the answers, and that’s a profound answer in itself.
🧑🎤🧑🎤🧑🎤
“Bitch, I’m from the sticks where they barely can talk.”
If shoegaze is a lavish technological outpouring, then it might find a hip-hop analog in plugg, a young subgenre marked by gushy, maximalist soundscapes. By some metric, it feels like a spiritual dialect of the 2020s, the sound of a few hundred open tabs—YouTube, Wikipedia, Wayback Machine, SoundCloud—coalescing to inch, like liquid, towards catharsis. Translated into sensory overload, information overload doesn’t lose any of its incoherence. It isn’t supposed to. And in a medium that allows people to either address their circumstances or embody them, the latter feels, more than ever, like it makes much more sense: especially when we’re running out of words to do the former. Over the past few months, I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time with “Spin The Block Like A Fan,” an effusive single by the prolific rapper Sickboyrari (or Black Kray, or, like, a million other names). It’s impossible to pinpoint most words, which makes singing along—as I do every day, fumblingly, while putting in contacts—a gleeful exercise in cooing, humming, and snorting until the minute passes and you have to start the track over. Nonetheless, there’s a moment near the end, about 55 seconds in, where I think he says something profound. (Yes, I looked up the lyrics.) “She like, Rari, why your words so slurred?” he croaks, mockingly up-playing the slurring in question. “Bitch, I’m from the sticks where they barely can talk.” He isn’t speaking for a generation, but his sentiments have generational implications: we’re so inundated, in the 21st Century digisphere, that it’s socially stunting. We barely talk anymore, let alone to each other. This reality is murky, incoherent, and irreversible. Why wouldn’t the music sound like it?
“I’m livin’ out of phase with this plane of existence / Casting shadows in a cave as an act of resistance.”
Machine Girl, an ambitious electronic metal duo from Long Island, seem to see things in a similar light, even if from an opposite end of the rap-rock spectrum. This past fall, they put out MG Ultra, a searing project that synthesized a million influences—goth, punk, Death Grips, Suicide, Aphex Twin—into a cauldron of scalding angst, not unlike Body Meat’s omnivorous spells. “Obsession is a strong word,” founder Matt Stephenson recently told the Fader, and perhaps it’s an even stronger word now: sometimes, the internet feels bigger than the world, a lonely ocean where identity, let alone community, is a big thing you extract from the smaller things you’re fixated on.
This might have been a groundbreaking concept in the early 2010s, when hyper-online worldbuilders like Tyler, the Creator and A$AP Yams built entire brands off of the ephemera, like Adult Swim and Dipset, they found cool enough to re-appropriate. But we’ve progressed far enough beyond that time, by now, to witness its debris, a dystopia where decade-old tendrils—of digital trawling, and self-via-smartphone—have devolved into a solitary, solipsist, abyss. It seems apt that two of this year’s biggest rap songs, Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” and Nettspend’s “nothing like uuu,” are about establishing and policing borders: the former, between one megastar’s creed and the other’s; the latter, between one high-schooler’s main chick and the rest of the “fat butts” on his roster. Individualist as these songs may be, they’re buoyed by equally insular communities, each subsisting on a sort of definition by negation. Which is increasingly why, these days, a song like “Until I Die”—the lead single to MG Ultra—feels overwhelmingly universal, a fight-anthem for lost posters searching for belonging in a walled-off digital wasteland. “I’m livin’ out of phase with this plane of existence,” Stephenson bellows in the final verse, glitchy interjections spliced in as living proof. “Casting shadows in a cave as an act of resistance.”
Lonely as it may be, insularity can also breed innovation. The most shape-shifting rock subgenre of the decade is shoegaze, a decadent realm whose forebears are big bands who paid big money to run big sounds through big setups. Over the 2010s, its excesses waned into a certain radical minimalism, proffered by smaller acts—like the dream-pop duo Beach House, or the one-man-band Tame Impala—who still had the luxury of high-end studios. Fast-forward to 2024, though, and the term “shoegaze” largely includes teenagers in their bedrooms, pitch-shifting devices strapped to pedalboards they got for Christmas. Take deadAir, a young record label that champions new prodigies in old traditions. Jane Remover, one of its most inventive signees, often seems allergic to repeating the same idea twice. “I knew that I didn’t really want to do the whole chiptune, bitcrushed guitar, pop route,” she said in a 2023 conversation with underscores, a fellow indie stalwart, regarding her alienish LP Census Designated. “I told myself from the beginning, that every album I do should be in a different genre or style. So this is the noise rock album, I guess. But I guess the next one will be something completely different.” The more she expands her sonic palette, the more she consistently revises the boxes built around her old ones. And if “shoegaze” at-large follows suit, then that’s beautiful: genres contorting to individuals, instead of individuals contorting to outgrown constraints.
A counterpoint to all this auto-tune talk, and one we shouldn’t neglect, lies in raw vocals—particularly when, as is increasingly the case, they don’t entirely overcome their surroundings. The day I saw Porches in Nashville, I remember getting really into “usedmeusedme,” a raucous track in which Knylary and xaviersobased take turns battling bitcrushed, mega-distorted thumps. (Picture the giant from Jack and the Beanstalk with contact mics strapped to his boots.) A notable thing about this song, and what gets me every time, is that Kynlary—inextricable from his down-bad chipmunk squeak—offers a rare verse in his natural voice, something like a kid in the back of the classroom who’s always on a discreet phone call. You can’t always make out his words, because they only win out over the chaos occasionally. But when they do, the small nuggets that peek through the storm feel like they’re glaring at you—mini-moments of menace, making uncomfortable eye contact and holding it.
“Where is the light? Oh, the angels bleed… Why is it always the innocents?”
This represents an alternative, though equally apt, mode of relaying inchoate truths: shouting through reality’s noisy shards, rather than modifying one’s voice to cosplay the disarray. I’m reminded of Alan Vega, the deceased Suicide frontman whose latest posthumous release, this past summer’s Insurrection, pits him against a relentless chug-chug of loud, mechanized mayhem. Lead single “Mercy” doesn’t feature verses so much as loose moanings, hovering through bedlam like the ghosts of maimed soldiers haunting a battlefield. (Where is the light? Oh, the angels bleed… Why is it always the innocents?) The only effect modulating his voice is reverb, but the texture of his words feels physical: you can hear the phlegm lodged in his throat. Sometimes, it’s even more visceral than the horrific tale he’s telling.
I’m reminded, too, of DORIS, who despite notching the year’s most low-stakes 50-track album—all auto-tuned quips over looped samples—performs like a dervish gasping for thin air. Perhaps at DRKMTTR, where a DJ had just finished playing, it felt a bit more jarring to see him go up in front of ten people, no laptop nor drum machine mediating between artist and audience. Ten is a harder crowd than 1,000, because those ten people aren’t one mass: they’re ten individuals, each of whom has stopped talking, suddenly, to watch you plug your phone into an aux cord. Not that he cared. He screamed; they stood there, unsure of whether to take the spectacle seriously or dismiss it as performance art.
You can tell a set is provocative, I think, when everyone pretends to know where the beat is. Sometimes, they might nod their heads tentatively, ears perked for a rhythm they would commit to if only they could locate it. Other times, they’ll get into a sort of half-sway, this silent way of communicating that, yes: I get that this is good, but I don’t know why, so until I figure it out, I’m going to show you by physically responding. My favorite is the one where they just stare. Stare like they did tonight, when DORIS departed with an abrupt “Thank You,” and polite applause gave way to awkward murmurings. Truths aren’t easy to put into words. More often than not, the murmurings make much more sense.
