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.