Landfill indie

Characteristics#

The Guardian defined the traits of landfill indie bands as having “angular, jangly guitars plus big riffs plus amusingly pretentious lyricism”. Reynolds later professed his belief that " n one of the groups could honestly be described as pointing the way to any kind of future; there was little about them that would have been incomprehensible to, say, a Smiths fan in 1985". However, publications like the NME championed many landfill bands at the time by frequently placing them on the front page. Metro Magazine later claimed that the 2000s landfill indie era was a time when “the NME ruled a new saviour of rock music seemingly every week.” Vice magazine dexcribed Razorlight’s Johnny Borrell 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.

History and etymology#

The term was first coined as a pejorative label by music journalist Andrew Harrison in his 2007 review of Jens Lekman’s Night Falls Over Kortedala, where he deployed it to disparagingly describe the proliferation of what was represented in the term as the formulaic and uninspired style of British rock bands in the mid-2000s, akin to the excess of a landfill; the album’s style was contrasted with this trend. In America, their variant of the landfill indie era was nicknamed “The Deleted Years” or encompassed by the “blog rock” movement. In the early 2000s, the NME coined “the New Rock Revolution” to describe a wave of emerging rock bands, spurred by the success of American acts such as the White Stripes and the Strokes, with the former spearheading the 2000s garage rock revival movement whilst the latter led the New York post-punk revival. Bands like the Strokes went on to inspire influential British groups across the Atlantic, such as the Libertines, whom NME described as “the bed-haired Brit version of the Strokes almost as soon as they appeared.” In August 2020, Vice magazine published a retrospective on the era which stated “Somewhere between the ‘indie rock revival’ of the early-2000s and the emergence of ‘poptimism’ in the early-2010s, the UK charts were dominated by a procession of homogenous bands making a type of music that has come to be referred to as: ‘Landfill indie’”.

Decline and revival#

In a 2009 article for the Guardian, journalist Peter Robinson cited the landfill indie movement as dead, blaming the Wombats, Scouting For Girls, and Joe Lean & the Jing Jang Jong by stating “If landfill indie had been a game of Buckaroo, those three sent the whole donkey’s arse of radio-friendly mainstream guitar band monotony flying high into the air, legs flailing.” The initial success of the movement was beginning to subside, leading commentators to discuss its decline as a phenomenon and argue that it had been overtaken by the more musically and emotionally complex music of indie rock bands like Animal Collective, Wild Beasts, Micachu and the Shapes, Gang Gang Dance, TV on the Radio, High Places, Foals, Vampire Weekend, Telepathe, Dirty Projectors, Bloc Party, Arcade Fire and Death Cab for Cutie. in April 2016, and later by the launch of the Instagram account @indiesleaze in 2021, curated by Olivia V, which documented and celebrated the visual aesthetic of the era, which was later labelled indie sleaze. Some sources credit the COVID-19 lockdowns as contributing to a collective nostalgia for the landfill indie era. In 2026, Pitchfork described acts such as Darwin Deez, Grouplove and Cults as “post-landfill-indie bands”.

See also#

• Music used in The Inbetweeners