Indietronica

The nature of musical genre took a dramatic flip around the turn of the millennium. In fact you can probably pin it down to June 1999 when Napster was launched, ushering in the everything-everywhere-all-at-once era of mass availability of all styles and eras of music to the curious listener. In the post-rock’n’roll second half of the 20th century, styles tended to be linked to revolutionary moments in time, geographical scenes technological or pharmaceutical shifts, and recognisable style tribes, and thus relatively easy to define – but now, suddenly definitions were loosened, development less linear, everything generally became mixed and muddled.

As the millennial generation began to navigate the new uncertainties, their music began to form less new genres than tendencies, for which we started having to come up with ad hoc names to signpost. I first used the term “indietronica” in reviews in the mid 00s to talk about British bands like Hot Chip, Metronomy, Django Django and The xx – who existed as a more thoughtful, sensitive counterpoint to the rowdy “nu rave” bands-with-electronics scene of the time – and oddballs on the fringes of folktronica like Psapp and Tunng. But by the time I first wrote a playlist feature on the term in 2013 with FACT magazine, it had expanded as a definition to intersect with a cornucopia of international micro-scenes, individualists and collaborations with no single common thread but a set of interweaving common aesthetic threads.

Since then, those same threads have continued weaving, and the indietronica sound has etched its way into mainstream and underground the world over. Via the somewhat slicker likes of James Blake, Tame Impala, Rex Orange County, Blood Orange and Little Dragon, influence has soaked through to huge names like Frank Ocean, Solange and Billie Eilish. But what is it? It clearly overlaps with post-rock, electropop, and various strains of dance music – though it’s rarely for dancing – and it exists in the interzones between mainstream and underground. We can single out sensitivity, melancholy, lyricism, a soft or cracked vocal style, lack of reliance on guitars. We can certainly point to certain precursors: a particular set of 90s genre-mashing individualists, most notably Beck, Radiohead, Björk and Tricky, or micro scenes like the German sounds of Tarwater, To Rococo Rot and The Notwist or the Birmingham bands Pram, Broadcast and Plone. There are echoes to one-off experimenters further back too: Arthur Russell, Cocteau Twins, “Berlin-era” Bowie, Chris & Cosey, Japan and David Sylvian, European “coldwave” synth pop. 

Those latter names aren’t just distant foreshadowing, though. They all to some degree re-entered the cultural circulatory system in the mass-availability boom of the 2000s, through mp3 blogs, AudioGalaxy recommendations and all the rest. So to many people at the time, as the indietronica aesthetic was coalescing, they were as new as the latest laptop producer. Thus 21st century genre coalesces: fluid in influences and telescoped-together temporally and globally – not exactly timeless, but certainly not possible to pin to a moment, and perfectly able to capture the subtler aspects of the confusions of an era of gigantic multicultural flux. And yet for all this fluidity this loosest of sounds definitely is a sound, although as with something like the Balearic aesthetic before it, perhaps everyone will have a different definition. Perhaps, then, the best way to explain it is to show, not tell – so here are some, mainly recent, records to open up an indietronic world for you.

Joe Muggs

Sundur

Pascal Pinon
Sundur cover

Icleandic twin sisters Ásthildur and Jófríður Ákadóttir began recording together as Pascal Pinon at the age of 14 in 2009, and as they’ve periodically returned to the collaboration they’ve gradually expanded the experimentalism of their productions. Their second album, the subtly anthemic Twosomeness, is their masterpiece, but its 2016 follow up Sundur is majestic too in an altogether darker, more subdued way. Pianos and accordions melt into subsonic rumbles and synth drones, and though the sisters’ vocal harmonies are as pure and beautiful as ever, some of the most compelling moments here are in desolate instrumentals like “Spider Light” and “Twax.”

To Know Where It's Going

áthos
To Know Where It's Going cover

It’s easy sometimes to think that bohemian individualism can’t exist amid the glut of digital culture – but then a record will come along like this one by Londoners Anthony and Demetri Kastellani. It’s not indie, it’s not classical, it’s not folk, it’s not “lo-fi,” it’s not Cypriot music, it’s not ambient… although it certainly nods in all those directions. The presence of sometime Arthur Russell collaborator Peter Zummo here gives us a hint of the world we’re entering, but really in the listening the album is more like a poem, or a breath of perfumed air, in the way it touches deep but then drifts away before you can grasp what it is. A thing of low-key but stunning beauty, that feels like it exists a little outside time and influence.

Close Eyes To Exit

Krts
Close Eyes To Exit  cover

Kurtis Hairston, a Brooklynite in Berlin, has explored huge ranges of electronic music over his sporadic releases – achieving great emotional depth, and managing to make his music politically charged in particular with what it means to be an African-American in an overwhelmingly white cultural milieu. But this 2016 album is something else: bringing his own and his friends’ vocals to the fore, adding high-drama, distinctly Radiohead-ish song structures, and bringing his production techniques to new levels, he delivered something that works on every level at once. Intellectual, emotional and bodily impact fuse together perfectly on this absolute masterpiece.

Día

Ela Minus
Día cover

The Colombian musician Ela Minus has a whole lot of punk energy to her music – she was a drummer in a punk band and a Black Flag fan from the age of ten after all. But sonically her debut album is a long way from those roots. It’s heavily electronic, has some pounding beats and big pop hooks, but it’s also plaintive, sometimes soaring, laced with the most beautiful echoes of indie forefathers like Cocteau Twins and The Cure in its melodies.

Zilla With Her Eyes Shut

Zilla With Her Eyes Shut
Zilla With Her Eyes Shut cover

Daughter of the Ivory Coast ambassador to Denmark and a chemistry professor who fled Guinea’s dictatorship in the 1970s, schooled in the Paris Conservetoire, it’s fair to say that ZWHES has got broad horizons, and her music is as ambitious as it should be given all that. On her debut album, she twirls and sneaks down the hidden spaces between R&B, classical, The Cocteau Twins, Kate Bush, musique concrete and hundred other styles and sounds in between. It’s high drama, it’s personal, it’s unique and it is fantastically innovative all the way through.

A Soft and Gatherable Star

Jabu
A Soft and Gatherable Star cover

The Mississipian singer-songwriter Jhelisa once described the Bristolian trip hop of Portishead and Tricky as a particularly British “version of modern blues, [with] a depth and darkness, something old and pagan that I heard in Thom Yorke and shoegaze, a different kind of ancient expression of feeling blue, of being dark”. It’s exactly this kind of deeper-than-melancholy feeling that the trio Jabu and their wider Young Echo collective – also from Bristol – tap into. On this, their fourth album proper, you can hear strung out echoes of postpunk, goth, industrial, dub, even grime, but way more than that it feels like an upwelling from the ancient foundations of the city.

6abotage

Dillon
6abotage cover

São Paulo born, Cologne raised Dominique Dillon de Byington is the epitome of a 21st century indietronic star: creatively self-produced, agnostic about any boundary between electronic and acoustic instruments, using space and abstraction to turn her introspective torch songs into environments that surround you. This 2022 album sees her returning to Berlin techno queen Ellen Allien’s Bpitch Control label — which launched her career — and diversifying her sound with heavier goth and hip hop elements to the rhythms, but nonetheless keeping a striking continuity with her previous work over the decade before.

No Rules Sandy

Sylvan Esso
No Rules Sandy cover

Sylvan Esso are the beating heart of indietronica. From their self-titled debut on, the husband-wife duo of Amelia Meath (formerly of North Carolina vocal trio Mountain Man, who doubled up as Feist’s backing singers), and Nick Sanborn (aka Made of Oak) had their own sound that touched on UK bass styles, electropop, folktronica, glitchy lo-fi but was ultimately about quirky, personal indie songwriting just as much as any indie band were. This, their fourth album, is probably their sparsest and most emotionally bare, but it recognisably draws from exactly the same compositional wellspring they’ve always tapped.

YIAN

Lucinda Chua
YIAN cover

There’s a great theme in 2020s pop and alt-pop of softness-as-strength. The highest profile and thus perhaps most subversive practitioner has been Billie Eilish – but easily as potent is the English-Malaysian-Chinese singer-songwriter-producer Lucinda Chua. Everything on her debut album is as soft and smooth as a sigh, and yet it hits really hard. Electric piano, Chua’s pure voice, wind instruments, layered clouds of synth tone are all put into the service of hugely memorable songs that dive right to the core of themes like identity, grief, loss and loyalty.

Lost in the Pressure

Dive Index
Lost in the Pressure cover

Everything about this indietronic record (think Junior Boys, Psapp, Music A.M.) is low-key, gentle, sometimes barely there — and with three different vocalist/songwriters you might think it wouldn’t hold together. But in fact the vision of producer/writer Will Thomas holds Dive Index together with such gravity (in all senses) that it makes for one of the most coherent albums in this style. Every song circles around intense human experience observing it from all sides, and the writing is world class — especially on the songs with Isiah Gage, which hint at what Coldplay’s Chris Martin might be capable of if he kept to the personal instead of always trying to reach for the universal, grandiose gesture. This is a shadowy, mournful, but beautiful — and endlessly revisitable — dream of an album.

Tourists

Psapp
Tourists cover

When Psapp arrived with their Tiger, My Friend album in 2004, they practically laid the foundations for indietronica – though you’d think on first glance that they were wonky foundations to say the least. Eerie, glitchy, twitchy, individualist, fond of toy instruments and other funny noises – but writing songs that cut to both the sweetest and saddest parts of human nature, and lodged in your unconscious and stick with you. Their albums have been sporadic ever since, but continued to be odd and deep, and while this, their fifth, is definitely more grown up and conventional in its production and arrangements, it’s every bit as strange and as recognisably them as their music has ever been.

The Sunset Violent

Mount Kimbie
The Sunset Violent cover

It’s kind of funny that of London indietronica bands of the 2010s, Mount Kimbie started as one of the most electronic – associated with the “post-dubstep” milieu along with friends like the Hessle Audio crew, James Blake and Scuba, whose Hotflush imprint released their early work – but very quickly became one of the most clasically indie, eventually adding drummer Marc Pell and keyboardist/singer Andrea Balency-Béarn to the original duo of Kai Campos and Dominic Maker to become a fully-fledged band. Thus their fifth album, which is heavy on the Joy Division and late 80s shoegaze influences, made particularly moody by extra vocals from Southeast Londoner King Krule – yet it remains resolutely modernist, and while nowhere near as digital as its immediate predecessor Mk 3.5 Die Cuts | City Planning, it still has an undercurrent of virtual strangeness.

Diamond Mine

King Creosote, Jon Hopkins
Diamond Mine cover

Jon Hopkins has always joined the dots from underground electronica to mainstream – producing for Brian Eno and Coldplay, and combining envelope-pushing synth experimentation with wide-skies romanticism suited to big festival stages in his own work. The equally prolific Kenny “King Creosote” Anderson, of Scotland’s Fence Collective, has always blurred the lines between folk, indie and other singer-songwriter traditions. After Hopkins produced an album for Anderson in 2008 they came back together for this small but perfectly formed 2011 collaboration. Hopkins doesn’t over-egg the electronics, but nor is this in any way trad: his ambient tendencies creating little frames for Anderson’s miniature, sweetly-keened stories.

Clearing

Hyd
Clearing cover

Austin, Texas multimedia artist Hayden Dunham’s first prominent musical incarnation was as the face — but not voice — of QT, a conceptual hyperpop project in collaboration with AG Cook and SOPHIE. It was as arch and fizzy as was generally expected at the time from the PC Music collective - however Dunham’s solo work as Hyd seems to be way more serious, sometimes intensely so. Covering Nick Cave’s “Into my Arms” in 2022 was something of a statement of intent when it came to darkness and songwriting chops, and this album from the end of the same year really follows through. It features production from SOPHIE (completed before her tragically early death), Jónsi, Caroline Polachek, PC Music’s Danny L. Harle and more but feels like an individual, coherent piece of work, shot through with goth bleakness and 80s pop balladry and even a hint Nirvana, with the PC Music deconstructed futurism still present but sublimated into the eerie moods.