Genre
Not a sound but a condition: records made outside the majors, with whatever was to hand. Everything else changes decade by decade.
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Genre Indie
Hamburger Schule
L'Age d'Or
A concert series in Altona turns into a record label at the end of the eighties. Around L'Age d'Or a generation goes back to singing in German, then spends ten years arguing with the name somebody else gave them.
Selection Indie
Grunge
Nine records
Nine records made between 1986 and 1991, lined up by session date rather than release date. Sorted that way they show something the sleeves keep quiet about: nearly all of them came out of one room, a triangular building in Seattle that used to be a grocery shop.
Selection Indie
Shoegaze
Ten records
Ten English records released between 1990 and 1993, grouped by label instead of by year. Sorted that way they show something the titles hide on their own: half the scene came out of one office, and the catalogue numbers prove it.
album Indie
Thurst
Reasons To Dye A Log
Eleven songs written in 2017, released on 17 February 2026. Back in 2017 Thurst were three people with a studio in Topanga and three reviews in one week. The new record's credit line has two names in it.
Song Indie
The Voidz
In 2014 the Voidz led with a single of almost eleven minutes, built on a sample of Mozart's Requiem. Underneath it is a bereavement that is never named.
album Indie
Tasha
Eleven songs written between Chicago and New York and recorded in Los Angeles. Quick!, which gave its name to the preview released three weeks earlier, is the one that closes them.
Indie is short for independent, and it originally described a contractual fact rather than a music: who pressed the record and who distributed it. The UK indie chart started in 1980 and measured exactly that, distribution, not style. Things that sounded nothing like each other sat side by side on it.
It stopped working as a definition fairly quickly, but something survives: small budgets, decisions taken by very few people, the freedom to hand in a record that is slightly wrong. We use the label for what it still means, a way of working, and we apply it to people doing that now even when the sound has nothing to do with 1985.