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

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Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Oo it's tense...

if you're gonna do that then i think its only fitting we read it in russell brand voice

Fair enough, but.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Who are the 2 utter cloth eared cunts who voted for Chelsea Dagger?

Decent top three, six even.

Loads with one, seems like every landfill has a punter that still loves them

“Can’t Stand Me Now” by the Libertines is better than any of these.

it is, and Up the Bracket is a great album, as various of us have insisted upthread

also, "landfill indie" is not a genre.

in conclusion, blood sausage is disgusting

Is it though

Who calls their band Pete and the Pirates? I mean really

still by my reckoning not in the top 5 worst band names here.

Is it though

No it isn't.

Indeed, it isn't

Might be an idea for a poll - best 50 UK indie singles from 2002-2010 (UK definition of indie only)

Does that include independent electronic labels like DMZ etc or are we talking guitar nonsense only?

guitar nonsense only, I'm afraid

Loads with one, seems like every landfill has a punter that still loves them

― Mark G, Sunday, 28 May 2023 11:30 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this is the ilx/landfill paradox, every poster on the site will distain landfill indie and yet every specific landfill track or band will have at least one poster willing to defend them, argue that they don't really count as landfill indie etc (maybe not the Pidgeon Detectives)

by far the best garage rock revival act was the exploding hearts though

I think they demonstrate how much better this era could have been if it leaned more heavily on '70s/80s power-pop influence.

Landfill indie is not a genre, nor is it specific to garage punk or the 2000s. It's just the nature of indie - there's no shortage of current non-garage indie bands that are landfill. It refers to the neverending garbage pile inherent in any indie subgenre.

Of course there were a few good songs from this era. The tracks that hold up don't really define landfill. The Strokes aren't landfill.

Might be an idea for a poll - best 50 UK indie singles from 2002-2010 (UK definition of indie only)

― the world is your octopus (Camaraderie at Arms Length),

sponsored by Carling

The Strokes are landfill. I'm pretty sure it's a genre now

lol no they're not

The Strokes are the backhoe loaders of indie rock, cascading soil onto the heads of the landfill bands in a manner both functional and unsightly.

You can't say the prime exponent of a genre isn't in the genre because it transcends it. And you can't say a genre isn't a genre because the label degrades the music - this has been going on since the Impressionist movement

Saying the Strokes aren't landfill is like saying Sisters of Mercy aren't goth and that goth is not even a real thing

it's not really like that though

landfill indie bands are British, that's one of their defining features.

In a way - and this is obv an insanely flattering comparison for both the Strokes and Landfill Indie - this is like saying Buddy Holly is an example of the British Invasion.

I've heard German Britpop bands

Strokes and Libertines get mentioned in the same breath all the time, and it's those two bands that really birthed this thing.

Sure the majority of the list upthread are pale imitators of something that was already pretty pale and imitatey, but I struggle to see why Strokes wouldn't be included in this genre, even if they weren't from the UK.

It's not as though it was a scene like Grunge where all the bands knew each other and shared rhythm guitarists.

whatever that picture upthread is, it's the worst transition timeline i've ever seen

Fuck it, I'm gonna throw in The White Stripes, the Vines and the Hives under this bus too, suck it

You haven't heard any German Britpop bands, because like landfill indie, Britpop is not a distinct genre of music.

whatever that picture upthread is, it's the worst transition timeline i've ever seen

― Kate (rushomancy), Monday, May 29, 2023 10:55 PM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

It's Pete Doherty of The Libertines / Babyshambles, having a bit breakfast.

Is there such a thing as a distinct genre of music though?

if you're going to call the strokes landfill then there's no point in calling anything landfill

strokes aren't landfill, they just dug the hole

Okay I'm happy with that

I think we've got to get over this idea that "landfill" as a word should be taken literally though. Plenty of legit genre terms come out of critically dismissive coinages

much like with goth, you know a band is definitely landfill when their fans vehemently deny that they're landfill.

whatever that picture upthread is, it's the worst transition timeline i've ever seen

― Kate (rushomancy), Monday, May 29, 2023 2:55 PM

lmao

I think we've got to get over this idea that "landfill" as a word should be taken literally though. Plenty of legit genre terms come out of critically dismissive coinages

It's way more interesting if taken literally though! The phenomenon of a group of bands being heavily pushed and no one biting over a relatively large period of time is interesting in what it says about the UK music industry of the time. Extending it to bands that were successful and not British means you've just got another term for 00's guitar music and that's not needed or interesting in any way.

tbf a lot of these bands were relatively successful at the time but they've been clogging up CD racks in charity shops ever since.

It's way more interesting if taken literally though! The phenomenon of a group of bands being heavily pushed and no one biting over a relatively large period of time is interesting in what it says about the UK music industry of the time. Extending it to bands that were successful and not British means you've just got another term for 00's guitar music and that's not needed or interesting in any way.

― Daniel_Rf, Tuesday, May 30, 2023 9:31 AM (forty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think it is interesting, and clearly proven, that people understand what's meant by "landfill", as a generally well-defined style of music from a particular era, rather than just a pejorative descriptor of "shit UK guitar music", especially when boosters (I think probably Steve Lamacq) tried to reclaim the term somewhat.

It wasn't too different from the post-grunge boom in the mid-late 90s - a glut of often sub-rate bands, maybe one or two diamonds in the rough (like Arctic Monkeys, Maximo Park etc), being signed and hyped-up beyond what they could deliver.

The NME tried to call this the New Rock Revolution or something daft. No one calls it that. But it's not as if "no one bited" - this stuff was hugely popular and there were definitely people I knew who listened to this kind of thing almost exclusively. Tune in to (popular commercial UK rock station) Radio X and it's like being transported to an alternative universe where Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds are one of the most important things to ever happen to music.

From a UK perspective, the Strokes were often mentioned in the same breath as the Libertines, the Hives etc. For a long time I assumed they were all British bands. They all had that similar "back-to-basics" rock sound, dressed similarly. And it's easier to lump The Strokes in with bands like The Libertines than other New York bands of the era like Animal Collective, or even the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Anyway, here's Wonderwall...

Well I've looked up the top5 results for landfill indie and every time the Strokes are mentioned it is as an influence - "landfill indie is British guitar bands trying to sound like the Strokes" (which, again, is closer to the Beatles trying to sound like Buddy Holly) and in one example "British guitar bands trying to sound like the Libertines who in turn were trying to sound like the Strokes". The moment you described I lived through as well and just feels completely separate from landfill indie - not because I think the bands of the garage rock revival were particularly great, but they were internationally successful on a commercial and critical basis, while no one outside the UK has ever heard of most of this landfill shit. Libertines at the time seemed like the tail end of that thing.

and clearly proven

yet to be proven on ILX I think

Not my perspective, so we can agree to disagree. Strokes/Libertines kicked it all off c2001 (they toured together), and that set the stage for the rest of it. Whether the following bands were objectively any good or how successful they were doesn't really matter to me because I never liked any of those kinds of bands

"Good Enough" is a single released by English Britpop band Dodgy. The single was released on 29 July 1996 and was the band's highest-charting single, reaching number four in the United Kingdom. In 1997, the song charted in Canada, peaking at number 20 on the RPM Top Singles chart.

As I remember it "landfill" came about as a term to describe the avalanche of quite faceless bands who picked up guitars in 2005-6, inspired by The Strokes previously but probably more so Franz Ferdinand, Libertines, Bloc Party, Kaiser Chiefs, that first wave who somehow had hits in 2002-4 and started causing a bit of excitement.

The landfill acts would have maybe one or two singles that did well or a quick writeup in the NME and disappear again. Your Pigeon Detectives, your Courteeners, your Paddingtons etc. A bit like the Dodgy / Northern Uproar / Menswear era of Britpop, direct copyists rather than similar acts being caught in a net.

The term has since lurched backwards to cover people who were also around in 02-04 who couldn't outlast their first brush with the charts, like Futureheads, Maximo Park, Mystery Jets, caught up in that vortex of Paul Epworth production/remixes, #9 hits, now horribly dated cutout graphic design. Maybe a bit more idiosyncratic, hence why they've run away with this poll. And outwards to include anybody else who was small-time and getting in the NME then, Pipettes etc.

Landfill is a fun shorthand but unless you want to dismiss literally anything any UK guitar bands did post-Strokes with a smirk (tempting I know, I've just had an interview with Hard-Fi land in my email inbox, what fresh hell etc etc) it isn't useful as the only term. Some of these would've surely been slogging away without hearing the Strokes/Libertines and immediately rushing out to buy a guitar, and they'd have constituted whatever UK indie became next without the hype, which means they can tell us something about where it was going anyway.

Even if where it was going was a bit shite.