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.