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

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.

I asked on facebook the guy who created the 'Indie Landfill' term and he says the strokes are definitely not Indie Landfill.

wtf of course they're not ffs

this fuckin thread

i don't think the strokes have anything to do with it. not even as an influence.
primary influences being: beatles without the fannying around, oasis, small faces, oasis, chas n dave, oasis, madness, oasis, the jam, oasis, the who. british suburban claustrophobia & lack of ambition writ large in conservative "proper guitar music" overweight guys with quadrophenia parkas & union jack guitars.
strokes were an entirely disconnected phenomenon from another continent with a louche retro NY iggy/television/pretenders vibe which pretty much none of the british bands were going for or were capable of plying. "landfill" as i always understood it extends further back into the charity shop bins and encompasses garbage like ocean colour scene, feeder, and the farm.

Okay, fine, maybe the Strokes were just shite then

they are for different folks.

i mean, the landfill bands sound more like the Strokes than Garbage, come on

^one of the better reading comprehension fails of recent ilx

To me, The Strokes don't sound anything like Television, and just because they were from NYC and wore leather jackets. If they'd been from the UK and made exactly that sound, we wouldn't be making the comparison

And the only thing "landfill" about Garbage was the name

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100048520886600

Just remembered that the best-selling rock album full stop during the landfill period was Kings of Leon's Only by the Night. At 10x Platinum. I don't think any rock album has sold nearly as much since.

Dreadful band

Kings of Leon are absolutely the non-UK band who most feel like they belong in this list.

Kings Of Leon were landfill

when i say the strokes kinda sound like television, what i mean is that the strokes love to do stuff like that sounds like the intro to "venus", especially the last bit of that (although i guess they really only leaned into that sound from room on fire onwards) and generally love guitar syncopation. television of course were way looser, jammier, less pop etc., it's not that close overall

when i first encountered the 1975 i thought they were yet another shit british band in the vein of two door cinema club, the more pop later end of this stuff etc. - very glad to have been wrong there in the end

Kings of Leon don't count at all. the whole point of the term is it signifies loads of disposable copies of other recent stuff. not just music that people think is shit now. like it or not when the Kings of Leon came out they were distinctive, annoyingly so

were they though

oh sure they don't count, but they match the sound of late 2000s uk indie rock more than the other bands suggested.

You could argue that every band in that list above had something "distinctive" going on.

I'm listening to Room On Fire album for the first time and it really does sound like it could have been made by any of these UK indie bands. Even matey's singing voice slips into a sort of Manc yowl

No Americans allowed in the pit. And if you were around before 2005 you're not allowed in the pit.

I brought KoL up not as an example of landfill but as a reminder of how one record - similar enough in sound and barely heard now outside two songs - towered over it all and everything else since, sales-wise.

that people understand what's meant by "landfill", as a generally well-defined style of music from a particular era

well which sound is that exactly because with that vice list the net's already been cast so wide as to be useless by any metric - what are guillemots doing there for instance, they have more in common with like, arcade fire than anything else much in this whole area.

do you just mean the dominant sound of 00s uk indie being 'garage rock revival' and 'post-punk revival', which obviously had a whole lot of overlap but there's acts which are pretty clearly just drawing on one or the other. but if you're going to call that whole thing 'landfill', even non-uk bands, where are you drawing the line? early yeah yeah yeahs were definitely lumped in with garage rock revival. the white stripes & the black keys of course. the killers weirdly outlasted all the other post-punk revival bands and finally made a very good album over a decade later. kings of leon are what happens if you give one of the lesser of these acts real arena rock ambitions.

but then like, are the rapture landfill by that whole metric? it's not too far from them to bloc party etc. really lol

the whole point of the term 'landfill' seemed to be about the lesser bands that just got briefly hyped by nme before being quickly abandoned, or were too shit even for nme to like much, or even just the bands that didn't quite make it to the same level of popularity as the bigger names. i think daniel_rf is pretty otm but an important point is that even though some of acts termed landfill did have a fair bit of success, they weren't hip at all.

well which sound is that exactly because with that vice list the net's already been cast so wide as to be useless by any metric - what are guillemots doing there for instance, they have more in common with like, arcade fire than anything else much in this whole area.

I agree Guillemots have less to do with this than KoL and the Strokes.

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.

― like the vengaboys with music degrees (Matt #2), Monday, 29 May 2023 20:25 (yesterday) link

you can pretty much extend this sound to any 00s/early 10s indie act that was primarily part of the garage rock and/or post-punk revivals, while excluding anyone who got too far away from the guitars to keep out the wrong sort of dance-punk acts i guess (like i don't think anyone would argue for lcd soundsystem regardless of opinions on their quality)? but idk what the point of lumping all that together as landfill would be - then what do we call the shit end of it?

anyway want to hear some australian landfill

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukNOaKeUEQY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n4gdGRM_iY

the san cisco song is still distinctly one of the worst songs i have ever heard

yeah this is what I was trying to say before. if you call the whole genre and anyone lumped in with it the nickname used to describe its dregs and shit imitators, you've got nowhere to go.

to use a Britpop adjacent analogy it'd be a bit like calling somebody like Super Furry Animals "Noelrock"

But... like, what other name are we going to call it? I'm not calling it New Rock Revolution

Isn't there a rich history of genres and art styles in general originally being coined as pejorative that eventually turned into the defacto term?

Can we please have a name for early-mid 2010s NME Next Big Thing comic strip characters like Spector, Temples, the Strypes, Superfood, Swim Deep, Palma Violets and Drenge. None of these bands are necessarily alike other than they all live in the same part of my brain and only in that part. I want a less unwieldly name for them than the 'early-mid 2010s NME Next Big Thing' bands.

the farm built the pit, tho
despite peter hooton's "all together now" encouragements,all that dodgy did was stand around in hi-vis vests smerkin tabs & drinking warm cans of tetley's

i think the early 10s nme next big things are just the very tail-end of landfill? never even heard of most of those though

what other name are we going to call it

post-punk revival and/or garage rock revival? 00s uk indie?

should i run a strokes poll soon y/n

they don't have enough material for a ballot poll

Can we please have a name for early-mid 2010s NME Next Big Thing comic strip characters like Spector, Temples, the Strypes, Superfood, Swim Deep, Palma Violets and Drenge. None of these bands are necessarily alike other than they all live in the same part of my brain and only in that part. I want a less unwieldly name for them than the 'early-mid 2010s NME Next Big Thing' bands.

― you can see me from westbury white horse,

Viva Brother were probably the low point from this era/scene.

Viva Brother are now quite possibly the worst band to have been mentioned in this entire thread which is saying something.

post-punk revival and/or garage rock revival? 00s uk indie?

― ufo, Tuesday, May 30, 2023 3:00 PM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

There was very little post-punk about the majority of these bands. I'd attribute "post-punk revival" more to bands like Savages, Ought, Algiers and that recetn spate of "talkie" bands. Garage Rock Revival, maybe but pfff... that could be anyone really. That could be, I dunno, Guitar Wolf or whatever. 00s UK indie is fine, if a bit broad, and hardly rolls off the tongue.

Thing about pejorative terms becoming de facto terms is the examples of it that exist are descriptive - impressionism was meant as a diss sure but it also does evoke quite well what those paintings are like, bollywood while mostly quite bad term does at least vaguely suggest "Indian cinema". In those terms "landfill indie" doesn't really give you anything except "indie music that record execs thought would sell loads, but didn't".

Anyway the fact that no one ever came up with a good name for that Strokes/White Stripes/Hives/Vines moment is one of the funniest things about it (in addition to New Rock Revolution the NME also once tried to float "no name"), and a very apt end of history kind of situation, where the cycles of retro recycling had churned on for so long that there wasn't even the energy to come up with a name (only the Hives truly fit in as pure garage rock revival, from those four I've cited). Why would you want to ruin that by slapping on some unrelated brand.

This music sounds like a bunch of plant machines and seagulls squawking, so it's apt in more ways than one

Just remembered that the best-selling rock album full stop during the landfill period was Kings of Leon's Only by the Night. At 10x Platinum. I don't think any rock album has sold nearly as much since.

― you can see me from westbury white horse

Kings Of Leon were one of the few band from that era who seemed to have a good 2008/9. I remember there was this period where all the bands who had done well with their first and second albums suddenly had albums out that under-performed compared to their previous ones. Kaiser Chiefs, The Kooks, The Zutons, The Fratellis, Razorlight, Automatic, The Enemy, Bloc Party, Maximo Park, Keane and The View all had a major decline in album sales despite a couple of those bands still managing to plop out one last hit (The Kooks had a top three single but a second album that sold a quarter of the first one). It even seemed like Arctic Monkeys were faltering too with Humbug. It was quite entertaining seeing all these bands drop off one by one.

bloc party & franz ferdinand were very into post-punk and they're pretty central 00s uk indie acts. a fair few of the acts on the landfill list had the bass-driven sound with angular guitar lines - editors, maximo park, the cribs, futureheads, and so on, and they certainly didn't get that from oasis. maybe you can argue some of them got it from the strokes, but then where did the strokes get it from?

the strokes have six albums and half of them are great, that's enough to poll if people are interested.

even the weaker strokes albums have some worthwhile stuff going on & there's solo casablancas too who's probably better on average, somehow

xp kitchen person. That was the final act of landfilldom settling in.

I do remember thinking it odd at the time that the Kaisers' and Bloc Party's third albums arrived so quickly. In hindsight it was probably wise as the moment was fleeting. I was a keen album chart watcher at the time and expected Razorlight's to do well after the huge predecessor but it didn't even make the top three. But I remember even then the mid-2008 returns of the Kooks, Zutons and Fratellis seemed to accompany the writing on the wall (also the Feeling - not indie but promoted similarly).

The Feeling is another good example for sure. Along with Kaiser Chiefs, Kooks and Razorlight they were one of the few bands where the first single indicated there wasn't a problem. It was only when they all had second singles that did nothing that it was clear things were turning for them. Razorlight's drop off was so quick. That second album was bigger than the first and the lead single (which I still remember someone accurately describing as The Boomtown Rats covering Horse With No Name) did quite well. That album chart position was a disaster in comparison and they never recovered.

I'm alarmed that my brain remembers all these things without having to look them up. Why do I remember chart positions for Kooks singles when I can barely remember what I did at the weekend?

I'm alarmed that my brain remembers all these things without having to look them up. Why do I remember chart positions for Kooks singles when I can barely remember what I did at the weekend?

You and me both, on both accounts.

I seem to remember quite liking Wire to Wire in theory - perhaps because less obviously built on Cure or U2 interpolations - but my distaste for JB typically got in the way. Never Miss a Beat, Take Back the City, (especially) I Thought It Was Over and (especially especially) Spiralling were all better. The only time I ever heard the Feeling's major flop follow-up to ITIWO was on Now 70, on which it was inexplicably included.

If there's an American band that belongs in this category, it's probably the Bravery.

There is the potential here to do a UK 2008 equivalent to the commercially disappointing major label rock/alternative albums of 1996 poll except the amount of actually good albums would be much lower still.