How Four Elder Millennial Indie Artists Embraced Middle Age in 2024

The era of peak indie—roughly the decade between 2005 and 2015—already feels like a strange dream: Was there really a time when mainstream culture was so amenable to a bunch of young musicians reveling in a combination of college smarts, internet-bred eclecticism, and millennial ambition? This was when a group of nerdy Ivy Leaguers called Vampire Weekend came out of nowhere to score two No. 1 albums in three years with songs that critiqued American class structures while mashing up the Strokes and Afropop. When Budweiser paid the scrappy twee-pop collective Los Campesinos! a substantial amount of money to use their glockenspiel-flecked song “You! Me! Dancing!” in a commercial. When a body-painted mystic like Bat for Lashes could score an MTV Video Award nomination and a top five album in her native UK with conceptual synth-pop opuses that nodded to the eccentricities of Kate Bush. When an underground curio who went by How to Dress Well could parlay a death-obsessed brand of distorted R&B into a songwriting gig for Maroon 5 and the company of legit superstars. “I was in a room with Nicki Minaj and Rihanna and Ty Dolla $ign, and the producer was playing them [my 2010 album] Love Remains,” How to Dress Well’s Tom Krell recalled in a 2022 interview with music writer Larry Fitzmaurice. “It was like, ‘What's happening? How is this minimally possible?’”

Of course, that boom went bust. The mainstream generally sucked at the neck of indie culture before leaving it for dead. And amid an entertainment ecosystem still driven by the promise of everlasting youth, everyone got—gasp—older. Xennials, a cusp generation born between 1977 and 1983, along with a cohort diabolically dubbed geriatric millennials—who entered the world between 1980 and 1985, and of which I am a proud member—started entering middle age. We were the first humans who spent our teens online, who were promised the world wide web’s infinity, only to see the social media landscape we cultivated turn into a playground for fascists. Not to mention those financial crises. Income inequality. Boomers hellbent on clinging to power until their hearts stop. A corporate culture that treats its employees like content-creating machines—before replacing them with exactly that. Within a few years, the signature millennial whoop went from sounding like a life-affirming call to an echo from the bottom of a well.

Like so many millennials, the four peak-indie artists mentioned above strove for success at all costs, achieved it to varying degrees, experienced burnout, and were then forced to figure out what’s next in an economic landscape that exploded most blueprints for longevity. Over the last decade or so, they took breaks, or moved to smaller labels, or put out so-so records. Then, in 2024, they all returned renewed, with their most rewarding work since their wrinkle-less faces were driving a surprisingly large chunk of popular culture. They seemed to stop worrying—or at least worry less—and embrace the mix of obsolescence and profundity that often comes with entering one’s fourth decade.

Vampire Weekend leader Ezra Koenig, who turned 40 in April, has always sounded a lot wiser than his years, even if he’s always looked like a particularly boyish man. (I think I speak for every geriatric millennial when I say: Dude, drop the skincare routine.) “Wisdom’s a gift, but you’d trade it for youth/Age is an honor, it’s still not the truth,” he sang on “Step” from 2013’s Modern Vampires of the City, an instant inductee into the millennial music cannon. Like so many of Koenig’s lyrics, the words are skeptical as they dance along generational dividing lines. When he sang them at 29, he was a millennial prophet who could offer some guidance to those his age and younger as he poked at the boomers and Gen Xers who might feel threatened by, or wary of, his precociousness. Back then, he could have it both ways, and he did.

Then came a long break, the exit of key band member Rostam Batmanglij, and the release of 2019’s ranging Father of the Bride. That record also didn’t include the playing of bassist Chris Baio and drummer Chris Tomson, who were also absent from press photos. Ever self-aware, Koenig explained the decision to The Guardian earlier this year, saying, “I just had a feeling that going into the fourth album, seeing a picture of three guys in their mid-30s was kind of like: ‘This is gonna look like damaged goods.’” To be fair, the album is far from bad—and it topped the charts and spawned the band’s biggest tour—though you’d be hard-pressed to find a longtime Vampire Weekend fan who’d name it as a favorite.

For this year’s Only God Was Above Us, Baio and Tomson are back in the picture: They’re in the photos and on the album, which often plays like a tastefully psychedelic remix of their classic material. The three bandmates even launched a video series, “Vampire Campfire,” in which they shoot the shit around a fire pit. Do they look cool in it? Not really. But those types of concerns tend to fade away in middle age anyhow. Decade-long relationships in music are rare, and it was endearing to see these guys lean into their interpersonal and musical chemistry throughout the year.

Once again, Koenig is mindful of generations on Only God. He’s still sticking up for his fellow millennials, offering some wary comfort, hope, and understanding. On “Capricorn,” he sums up our condition with plenty of empathy. “Too old for dyin’ young/Too young to live alone,” he sings, “Sifting through centuries/For moments of your own.” The spiky “Gen-X Cops” is an indictment of our near-elders and a warning to millennials who are itching to police the ways and values of kids today. “Each generation makes its own apology,” he concludes, damningly. Can millennials break the self-defeating cycles that have lasted millennia? Probably not, but Only God confirms that through middle age and perhaps beyond, Vampire Weekend intend to be there, taking notes and nudging us toward our better selves.

How to Dress Well’s Tom Krell must be one of the most unlikely semi-stars of the peak-indie era, and also one of the most fascinating. He started out making elusive, supremely lo-fi, avant-garde experiments combining the worlds of noise and R&B. For a few albums, he veered closer and closer to legibility, cresting with 2014’s remarkable “What Is This Heart?”. That record had him singing candidly about his family, his shame, and his romantic relationships over a version of pop that was odd enough to feel unique. I wrote a cover story about Krell and the album at the time; I was one of many who thought it would take him to a rarified level of commercial success. It didn’t. He then put out a record that was too pop, with not enough of Krell inside of it, only to follow that one up with one that veered the other direction, sometimes smothering his melodic gifts under glitchy beats. This year’s I Am Toward You, his first record in six years, once again has him hitting the sweet spot as he reflects on the big things—love, death, memory—in the heady, freeform way that only he can.

The album comes after the 40-year-old, who also has a PhD in Philosophy, revamped his life so that he wouldn’t have to solely rely on music, or academics, to get by. In recent years, he started taking on work that he’s described as “corporate creative shit,” and his LinkedIn now includes roles with titles like “Senior Creative Strategist.” Not everyone can be in a band like Vampire Weekend; while Koenig sings of the millennial plight from the charmed perch of arena stages, most peak-indie artists are living alongside their other aging mortals as they try to muster some stability before the next global crisis takes hold.

Krell’s day job means that, for the first time in a long time, he doesn’t have to think about music in terms of dollars and cents. And he’s no longer forced to embark upon endless, lonely solo tours, which certainly don’t get easier on the mind and body in middle age. It means that he’s free to make a song like I Am Toward You’s incredible “Crypt Sustain.” The track was created as a way for Krell to talk to his brother Dan, a neurodivergent janitor who also made impressionistic works of visual art. “He just taught me a ton about art, life, the value of art separated from market value,” Krell has said of his brother. “He never made a single work with the aspiration of selling it.” The song switches back and forth between hushed verses in which Krell interrogates the historical concept of “disability” and lighter-ready choruses inspired by Dan’s love of metal. Tragically, Dan passed away at 46, just two days before I Am Toward You’s release in May. “​​It went from a way of speaking to my brother to a way of honoring him,” Krell said of “Crypt Sustain” in a July interview. The song is a moving tribute, a blast of distortion and double bass drums, and a reminder that the future is far from promised.

Bat for Lashes’ Natasha Khan spent the peak-indie decade on a major label, the same one that put out music by Coldplay, Radiohead, and Kate Bush, and came away from the experience disenchanted. “At times I felt like I was negotiating my art school philosophy of DIY,” she wrote of the experience in a 2021 Guardian piece. “I felt tolerated rather than supported.” After her first three brilliant albums—filled with theatrical pop of the highest order, music that abided by its own beguiling dream logic—the strain between her artistic vision and the industry’s appetite for hits started to show. Her next couple of records were met with diminishing commercial and critical returns, and she considered leaving music behind entirely.

In 2020, she had her first child, Delphi. (Koenig and Krell are now parents to only children, too.) Motherhood reinvigorated her, and this year she came back with her sixth album, The Dream of Delphi. Talking about making the record, she has said, “It was a little similar to giving birth, really—you don’t really have any power during it. It just happens, and you have to surrender to it. And the more you sort of surrender to knowing that you’re just like a little cog in the chain of something and that something’s been born through you, then you can make something more authentic and pure.”

Parenthood has a way of making people give up control and gain perspective. Especially for a generation squeezed for productivity, with blurry work-life boundaries, having a child can broaden one’s identity beyond their job—or serve as an escape from the horrors of the world. Lots of millennials had kids in and around the pandemic, a catastrophic event that forced everyone to reconsider their lives and make some serious decisions. For elder-millennial musicians, it also came at a time when Gen Z was beginning to steer music trends and discourse through TikTok—perhaps the first social media app that many millennials didn’t opt in to. The Dream of Delphi is anything but a TikTok album. Like the best Bat for Lashes music, it’s out of time, coming from an alternate dimension of flowing garments and moony declarations. It’s patient, meditative. Its conclusions are sparse and simple and clarifying. On “Delphi Dancing,” the 45-year-old Khan sums up her familial cocoon thusly:

Mid-life
Hold you tight
Softly hold me
And smile

Los Campesinos! leader Gareth David has never been one for peaceful quietude. “No children and no profession, walking dead at 37,” he sang on this summer’s All Hell, his band’s first album in seven years. (He’s 39 now.) Despite the face-smacking realness of that line, Los Campesinos! actually enjoyed their most successful time as a band in 2024. They played their biggest-ever show, and All Hell became their highest-charting album in the UK, reaching No. 14. They maintained a diehard fanbase of brainy, emo-adjacent millennials while inviting plenty of Gen Zers to the party. The band has never made anything close to a subpar album, but All Hell is their most ambitious in more than a decade, and also the first one that’s self-funded, self-produced, and self-released on the band’s own label. “Being on the chart is nice, and we wanted to achieve that,” Gareth told me earlier this year, “but success can mean many different things, and we’re successful in ways that aren’t quantifiable in terms of sales or popularity too.”

The group’s increasingly DIY bent mirrors the millennial generation’s fraught relationship with higher powers—corporations, governments—constantly letting them down and treating them like disposable chaff: If we can’t rely on the establishment, at least we can rely on ourselves. It’s a progressive, community-minded outlook that can seem naive to older generations, but Los Campesinos! aren’t just acting on their values, they’re making those values totems that like-minded fans can rally around. So their milestones this year are bigger than one band’s feel-good story—they expand outward, showing elder millennials and younger generations that there are viable, dignified paths forward amid a capitalistic society obsessed with youth and productivity.

All Hell is the album that meant the most to me in 2024 because, yes, the music is great and rousing and funny and sad. But also because it extended a hand and helped to convince me that starting a new music website alongside friends, at this point in human history, as I enter the wilderness of middle age, isn’t so crazy. Maybe it makes more sense now than ever before.