Still Warm

There was a monthly torrent—I genuinely can’t remember where I found it—that reliably surfaced fifty new indie rock songs, mixed together, no labels, no genre orthodoxy enforced. That’s how I found Interpol and Blonde Redhead and Modest Mouse, and for a few years that music felt like it had been made specifically for whatever mood I was always in. It was the genre. Hip hop, electronic, even pop existed, but they felt peripheral to whatever was happening with guitars and reverb and voices that refused to be pretty.

Then what happens to every genre that gets big happened to indie rock. Hundreds of bands, then thousands, all running the same mid-tempo chug, the same slightly detached vocal delivery, the same keyboards sitting underneath everything like a safety net. By 2007 it had peaked. By 2012 it was genuinely embarrassing to still care about it. The kids moved into dubstep, then rap, then micro-genres that didn’t have names yet.

Cycles run in rough ten-year arcs if you squint at them long enough. Lindsey Jordan—born in 1999, which means she grew up entirely inside the aftermath rather than the moment itself—started releasing music as Snail Mail around this time. Her song Heat Wave has the quality the genre had before it collapsed under its own weight: young, uncertain, capable of embarrassing sincerity, and not remotely interested in performing cool. It doesn’t sound nostalgic. It sounds like it was made by someone who wasn’t there the first time and therefore had no need to replicate or reject what came before.

That’s usually how genuine revivals work. Not the veterans trying to recreate a moment, but someone young enough to encounter the era as old music and take only what they want from it. Jordan was two years old when Turn On the Bright Lights came out. She doesn’t owe that period anything.

Whether Snail Mail ends up being the start of something or just a single vivid exception, I can’t say. The cycle suggests start. The music suggests the question doesn’t quite matter.