Landfill indie

Landfill indie
British indie rock band Razorlight performing in 2009, described as the embodiment of landfill indie.
Stylistic origins	Indie rock britpop garage rock revival post-punk revival
Cultural origins	Early 2000s, United Kingdom
Other topics
Indie sleaze microgenres

Landfill indie is a style and era of British indie rock. The term was coined by music journalist Andrew Harrison in 2008 to describe a wave of guitar bands that emerged in the mid-2000s that were influenced by the commercial success of the Libertines.

The landfill indie era has been retrospectively associated with the indie sleaze aesthetic, a term coined in 2021, to describe the fashion and visual style of landfill indie bands, New York's post-punk revival and electroclash scene, as well as early online blogosphere related music scenes such as blog rock and bloghouse.

Notable acts associated with the movement were Arctic Monkeys, the Wombats, the Cribs, the Kooks, Hard-Fi, Pigeon Detectives, Babyshambles, Scouting for Girls, the Vaccines, Razorlight, Milburn, Joe Lean & The Jing Jang Jong, the Fratellis, Courteeners, the Maccabees, Little Man Tate, the Enemy, Holloways, Mystery Jets, Sunshine Underground, The View, the Twang, the Rifles and Kaiser Chiefs.

Characteristics

The Guardian defined the sound of landfill indie to be that of: "angular, jangly guitars plus big riffs plus amusingly pretentious lyricism".

Music critic Simon Reynolds argued that the "landfill indie" era was characterized by an excess in indie rock bands in response to the popularity of the 2000s indie rock revival. According to Reynolds, what made the music "landfill" was not a lack of musical skill, but a proliferation of formulaic artists who were stripped from the naivety, innovation and authenticity that defined earlier indie acts such as Bogshed and Beat Happening, stating:

"[...] indie wasn't crappy for a purpose. In fact, it wasn't especially inept or ramshackle anymore, so much as drearily adequate. Instrumentally, there was just a sustained absence of flair in the playing. This guitar-based music didn't rock, but equally the songcraft wasn't sufficiently strong, or forcefully sung enough, for it to make the grade as proper pop music".

Reynolds later stated, "None of these 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". Furthermore, the BBC referred to the year 2009, one of the prominent years for landfill indie as "the year indie music died". 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 retrospectively labelled 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

See also: Post-punk revival, Garage rock revival, and Blog rock

The term "landfill indie" was coined by Andrew Harrison in 2008, while writing for the British music magazine, The Word. Harrison used the term to describe a wave of generic, formulaic indie bands that emerged following the success of the Libertines, who emerged out of the post-Britpop landscape of the 1990s British alternative rock scene. 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 addition, the term landfill indie would continue to be used as a pejorative as well as a label to describe this period of British alternative music.

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, Micachu and the Shapes, Gang Gang Dance, TV on the Radio, High Places, Foals, Vampire Weekend, Telepathe, Dirty Projector, Bloc Party, Arcade Fire and Death Cab for Cutie.

Although the style declined in prominence by the early 2010s, the landfill indie era went on to experience a gradual revival. This resurgence was first marked by the emergence of the hashtag #indieamnesty, created by musician Rowan Martin 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.

See also

• Indie sleaze
• Blog rock
• Indie rock
• Post-punk revival
• Microgenre
• Garage rock revival