The Top 50 Greatest Landfill Indie Songs of All Time (2020)

OTM and (xp) OTM.

So was this stuff ever dubbed ‘landfill’ before the print version of the NME started being given away for free back in 2016? Or did the demise of this stuff lead to the demise of the NME?

I'd never heard the term until the mid-2010s. But the NME did ultimately suffer from the bubble bursting. Those bands were recognisably 'NME bands' whereas the only new groups I can think of that came later with that term attached were like Temples, Swim Deep, Superfood - bands of varying success but whose media vehicles were uniformly subtler than the landfill groups (or so I'd say anyway).

ach, nae! young knives do not belong in the landfill

It appears that every non-significant band of the times has been retrospectively branded landfill

tbf only in retaliation for me being rude to the entire Midlands

My Vitriol had potential, but they vanished into the ether so quickly. I don’t recall them getting any kind of traction on modern rock or college radio in North America, but Q had an article on them every month for at least half a year (2002?)

My Vitriol are such a weird one to me. I seem to know several people who think they were amazing and still yearn for a second album. At a friend's stag do about ten years ago, I met another friend of his who said they were his favourite band. I don't remember them being that good at all.

I only remember them by name. Weren't they more of a Kerrang-style band?

I was thinking maybe slade were partial progenitors of the sound, but noddy has a voice, there's the violin, and they had some degree of idiosyncrasy that the landfill studiously avoids. i get the "hear my song" urge, but i don't get the "hear my enervated "1015 on a saturday night" half-ska plod with attempted motown horns borrowed from a madness record but that sound like grimethorpe colliery brass band on a rainy bank holiday monday" urge. pork pie hat. dick van dyke. guys with weller-cuts talking slightly racist, slightly homophobic, about "proper music". how do you shoehorn a dave gilmour guitar solo into "doing the lambeth walk"? avvin it laaarge. three lions on his shirt. makes my blood boil.

and any excuse to post this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClcwKgxu2wk

lol yes. that's more a Stone Roses zing, but ofc the Stone Roses underpin a lot of this (the mellower end of it at least)

i voted for the hounds of love cover

i like it

I've been thinking about this and it's like UK indie music with all the last vestiges of punk/post-punk removed so you're left with a bunch of incurious hacks who are fully onboard with the Beatles/Stones/Zep classic rock/ proper music canon.

all my pals at uni were massively into this stuff and we went out every other week to an indie disco for it. I liked my pals as people and I liked the ritual of getting ready with them in various flats but wow was this stuff hard to enjoy even when full of booze with likeable people. I took up smoking because it meant I had an excuse to go outside when the worst of it was happening.

that said, I can never truly hate "She's So Lovely" purely because it is featured in the greatest British movie of all time, which is Angus, Thongs & Perfect Snogging

I forgot how much landfill is in that film, bend it like beckham predates this shit so the sountrack is way better

I've been thinking about this and it's like UK indie music with all the last vestiges of punk/post-punk removed so you're left with a bunch of incurious hacks who are fully onboard with the Beatles/Stones/Zep classic rock/ proper music canon.

― Maggot Bairn (Tom D.), Tuesday, 23 May 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Judging from that British Sea Power thing at least the Stones and Zep loved the Blues and really wanted to get that sound right. Those guys show no desire to do even that.

It's like trying to make a sound that's nice to keep in the background as you revise for your exams.

Fascinating how bad it is.

There's a lot on this list I'm not really familiar with. I do like the Zutons a lot. But the one band that really stands out for me is Guillemots, who I find truly special and any chance to back them, I'll take. Frontman Fyfe Dangerfield released a series of broadcasts in 2018 on his Channels May Change website called Birdwatcher, which consists of amazing new songs embedded within soundscapes and strange character storytelling, which is one of my very favourite music/art things ever.

Yeah I think he's a true, underappreciated talent who I suspect was a bit too clever for the time or even for his own good. Lumping Guillemots in with the other cheeky chappie landfill droogs feels unfair

Landfill does not discriminate. Anyone can fall in. Anything.

Gaze into the landfill and the landfill gazes back...

I've been thinking about this and it's like UK indie music with all the last vestiges of punk/post-punk removed so you're left with a bunch of incurious hacks who are fully onboard with the Beatles/Stones/Zep classic rock/ proper music canon.

Libertines at least were I think v much into trying to emulate punk. It's just the version of '77 these bands suscribe to is a very decadent, rock mag revision of the moment, amounting to "every ten years a new batch of bands has to come along and play simple guitar music to remind ppl of the power of ROCK".

it's like UK indie music with all the last vestiges of punk/post-punk removed so you're left with a bunch of incurious hacks who are fully onboard with the Beatles/Stones/Zep classic rock/ proper music canon

that's definitely a fair bit of this stuff, but plenty of it (i'd even say probably most of it?) is just worse takes on the post-punk revival that was big at the time.

noisey have also cast the net so wide here that there isn't that much consistency in the list, it's just nearly all the less notable uk indie acts from the 00s + arctic monkeys thrown in for some reason

& yeah the less post-punk end of this stuff was still mostly at least vaguely into punk

Yeah I just cued up the first four tracks on this list and half of them are def trying for punk more than they are boomer rock.

I always thought that throughout the 2005-2015 period (probably starting earlier and perhaps ending later) the world was swamped with bands who mostly took (all the wrong) cues from the Clash and the Jam. Comparisons to either of those acts might be the quickest way to make me lose my interest in any band I don't know.

did not know abt the guillemot guy's birdwatcher things - listening now & enjoying - thank you valentjn.
clash/jam - yup no worse a turn off
"incurious" nails it

See, I became properly obsessed with 70s/80s new wave and post punk around that time by way of the SReynolds book, but I never heard the link between these bands and that stuff at all. Not even the Libertines or the Strokes - LCD Soundsystem and The Rapture, yes very much so, but not those mid-brand outfits.

To me it was just the long long tail of the Britpop era and the Gallagher brothers' proclamations about "rock-'n'-roll" endlessly recycling itself with diminishing returns.

90s Britpop was always accused of pastiching and romanticising the 60s and 70s, but landfill felt stultifyingly present-based, neither looking forward nor back, just staying in its own little spot with barely any room for experimentation or innovation. It was self-referential

Scouting for Girls weren't 'indie' enough but they were VILE

Comparisons to either of those acts might be the quickest way to make me lose my interest in any band I don't know.

A mix of the Clash and the Jam with the swagger of Oasis

Yeah I just cued up the first four tracks on this list and half of them are def trying for punk more than they are boomer rock.

Probably true but I'm sure they all doff their hats to the Beatles and shite canonical boomer rock in general.

... Clash, Pistols, Jam.

Does anyone know the name of the band, maybe five-six years ago, who did a video presentation saying that when they were growing up everyone was listening to shit like busted and mcfly whereas these special lads were listening to proper music like the arctic monkeys. Had me laughing in a depressed 'oh no we're at this stage' way but I've never been able to find it since.

Not even the Libertines or the Strokes - LCD Soundsystem and The Rapture, yes very much so, but not those mid-brand outfits.

the libertines are definitely the sort to not really draw on much past the clash/the jam, but the strokes were pretty obviously heavily influenced by television

could probably plot most of this stuff on a spectrum from garage rock revival to post-punk revival because most of it ended up somewhere in-between

I just don't hear the Television / Strokes connection beyond they are NY bands with guitars

i always heard the libertines specifically as like a third rate knockoff of the jam. like they played the songs that the jam ditched because they realized the material was drab. libertines had zero quality control, so why not toss out any old shit, as long as it was mildly reminiscent of something "cool" right?

also took personal offense when any of these bands were considered similar to/influenced by television. that's like saying the doors influenced x, on account of them both being la bands. just lazy.

(although i was amused by the marquee moon shoutout in the mystery jets song on this list)

Ray Manzarek did produce X’s first album (which included a Doors cover).

and mick jones produced the libertines. what's your point?

My point is that ppl didn't say that solely "on account of them both being L.A. bands"; there was more to it. (X also later covered another Doors song, again with Manzarek producing; and Robbie Krieger played on some of their reunion stuff. I think it's safe to conclude there's an affinity there!)

FWIW, I don't hear much Television in the Strokes... but if Richard Lloyd had produced their debut, and they had covered "Prove It" (which actually may have sounded cool!)...

apparently casablancas actually denied having even heard television before he wrote is this it, but the comparison is all about the guitars - the interplay, some of the tones, the solos. obviously all streamlined in comparison to television though - like if you got them to make a power-pop record

i don't really think the strokes sound that much like most of the other 'garage rock revival' bands at all, way too new wave compared to all those. not that any of these uk acts really picked up on that though

tbh i always thought the first strokes record -musically anyway- sounded a lot closer to three imaginary boys than any of the og nyc punk/new wave they were likened to.

The Libertines repeatedly, catastrophically failed at tunes. As boring as I find the Strokes I can appreciate what people hear in Hard to Explain or Last Nite, but any melodic warmth the Libertines may have had was snuffed out by the sloppy playing, indifferent production, the presence of Doherty's horrible singing. A few tracks - e.g. Can't Stand Me Now - might have become pop in someone else's hands but in the Libertines its all in lowercase and dirgey.

This is one of the many, many reasons there are to hate on Fuck Forever. The song is nothing but a title, and Doherty thinks that's enough to go on for an 'anthem'. Sadly, so did so many others. The lazy Beatles security cliches of All Around the World seem Olympian in comparison.

The Libertines repeatedly, catastrophically failed at tunes. As boring as I find the Strokes I can appreciate what people hear in Hard to Explain or Last Nite, but any melodic warmth the Libertines may have had was snuffed out by the sloppy playing, indifferent production, the presence of Doherty's horrible singing. A few tracks - e.g. Can't Stand Me Now - might have become pop in someone else's hands but in the Libertines its all in lowercase and dirgey.

― you can see me from westbury white horse

The only Libertines songs that sound listenable to me now are the few that Bernard Butler produced. Songs like What A Waster and Don't Look Back Into The Sun sound so polished and so much more competent than anything on the albums. Bernard admitted he ended up playing a bunch of the guitar parts on them. When they re-recorded I Get Along for the album, they seemed to deliberately sound much worse than the single/Bernard version just so it would fit with how bad the album sounded.

I still like the first Libertines album, I agree that it sounds like they were deliberately going for that shambolic sound, "might have become pop in someone else's hands" is what they were aiming for, the romance of indie groups where part of their appeal to people is that you have these songs that could be in the canon of universally acclaimed classic pop songs alongside but recorded in a self-sabotaging way where everything sounds like it's on the verge of falling apart. I think Doherty used to talk about Television Personalities in interviews, and I think they were maybe trying to sound like them but weren't really good enough?

Maybe a not entirely successful attempt to combine the ladishness, communal aspect of the Jam with the eeriness and frailty of the TVPs

"don't look back into the sun" is easily the best libertines song yeah. "can't stand me now" is also decent but pretty much just a rehash of that

Xposts yeah Bernard's productions I like, Mick Jones' less so.

I always found both these bands to sound very flimsy-sounding and uncreative. I've no problem with rock qua rock, but if you're going to shout about rock music then you've got to, you know, rock, right?

Whereas for the Strokes and the Libertines "rock" seemed to mean just sounding like some pretty okay local band.

There was very little about this music that was transportational or exceptional - it just felt very "tools of the trade" or something

And it's not like I don't get what soref is saying either - I'm a huge fan of new wave / post punk / slightly shambolic pop-rock in general - I even played in a band and wrote songs in that vein - but these guys just didn't really have that weirdness that made bands like Television Personalities so appealing.

What's quite amusing is that I really really like Ought/Cola - that is until my housemate heard me playing the Cola album and remarked on how much it sounded like the Strokes, which I guess it does, but there's something more poetic and anti-rockstar about those lads which I really like