How Indie Transformed From A Sub-Culture Into An Aesthetic: A Conversation With Chris DeVille
For the second edition of Book Club, Pranav Trewn speaks to Chris Deville, the author of "Such Great Heights," e about how indie music transitioned from a real definition into a stylistic motif.
Art via Evan Solano
Pranav Trewn finds peace in his vinyl record collection.
“This song will change your life,” Natalie Portman, embodying the paragon of the heavily maligned “indie pixie dream girl” archetype, tells Zach Braff in his 2004 film Garden State, handing him a pair of headphones playing the Shins’ “New Slang.” It’s an immortal scene often memed, partly because in its now-cringeworthy sincerity is also a romanticization of an era when the right song at the right time really felt like it had the power to flip the entire plane of your spiritual existence.
Just as significant but not as popularly depicted is the experience of an album review shifting your sense of self. As a result of influential music blogs from the early 2000s, I once stopped listening to favorite bands fully based on Pitchfork pans. Artists I was initially repelled by became the basis for my personality once they were christened by the right outlet. Back then, many of those twists and turns in my music taste felt entirely natural, if not inevitable, but were really the result of several forces pushing an entire generation’s listening habits towards certain styles. Those listeners became such a sizable bloc, and then lucrative market, that the mainstream that much of this music was made in reaction against began ingesting it in their own image to broaden their cultural reach.
Chris DeVille, the managing editor at Stereogum – one of the last blogs standing from the golden age of “big indie” – had a particular close lens over the two-decade trajectory of indie music going from a real definition (music made by artists outside of major labels) into an ecosystem (of loosely lumped-together bands soaring onto national festival stages and minting a dime in Apple commercials) into an aesthetic (of hipster-chic that become commercialized by clothing companies and pop artists looking to siphon off some critical credibility).
It’s a journey likely familiar to folks who still routinely check the homepages of websites like Stereogum and POW, but it’s riveting to retrace the dynamic set of events that transformed the image of “indie” from Death Cab for Cutie and the Shins to folks like Grimes and Frank Ocean. Somehow we’ve landed in a world where Taylor Swift – the greatest commercial force of her generation – releasing an “indie” album isn’t an oxymoron.
DeVille’s excellent new book, Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion, chronicles how we got here. The story seamlessly weaves in his personal reflections as a representative “indie” fan alongside his journalistic insight and reporting on the 21st century disruptions in music distribution that made indie rock both less independent and less rocking. He draws parallels between Hollywood courting hipsters, rockists embracing rap music, and the establishment giving Grammys to Arcade Fire, fashioning something of a unified theory of how both the mainstream crashed through the gatekeepers and the gatekeepers gave in to the mainstream.
Speaking with DeVille was as insightful as reading the book, which is to say it connected several dots for me on the conditionality of fandom, “selling out” as a means of sustainability, and criticism being one of the deepest expressions of care.
The indie music journey you embarked on with the book is inextricably tied to music blogs. When you first became infatuated with music writing, how did you find yourself on the path to becoming a professional music journalist yourself?
Chris DeVille: As early as 2000, when I was in my junior year of high school, I was writing for the student paper and I reviewed Kid A. So it was quite early on that I was interested in writing and all of the trappings of music journalism. Including list making, which for better or for worse is where everyone starts. I was making year-end album lists just as a fan, before I had even gotten into independent music or anything. I'm pretty sure my first list was during sophomore year in 1999, and Californication was my number one album beating out Incubus – a shocking upset.
I was a huge music fan and the thought that there was a profession where my music fandom could be indulged like that – where you could get free CDs and get into concerts for free and talk to your favorite artists and get paid for it – I was like, wow that's amazing. Just the idea that there's a career where music fandom could be translated into a professional context, I was gonna pursue that very eagerly. Of course, doing so professionally now is becoming less and less of a viable option, and I'm lucky to still have a job doing it.
You’ve been doing this ever since, covering indie rock for a long and impactful stretch. As a journalist reporting as the genre was changing, what made you think that 2025 was the right time to do this book length retrospective?
Chris DeVille: I started seeing books coming out about the 2000s, oral histories like Meet Me in the Bathroom and Where Are Your Boys Tonight? So there definitely seemed to be a hunger for remembering this moment, but I felt like no one had really started carrying that story into the 2010s. It was a story that I was intimately familiar with, and one that people who followed indie music in the late 2000s/early 2010s probably know intuitively, but it had never really been organized coherently in long form. The changes in the music, changes in the media environment, changes in the festival landscape, and the way that the changes in technology and the web affected the genre.
It felt like a story that had been told via blog posts on blogs that no longer exist, or via scattered social media posts and message board posts. If this was a story that hasn't been told yet and somebody's going to one day tell it, it might as well be me. And it’s one that's been fascinating me for a long time too. If you go back, one of my very first articles for Stereogum in 2013 was about the 10th anniversary of The O.C. and indie rock gentrification. So it’s something that's been fascinating me for a decade plus at this point, and maybe had enough broader interest that a book could be an option.
You are also part of the story. Stereogum is a blog that had an influence; the website helped fuel some of these bands’ ascents – Vampire Weekend is a particularly notable example – and you also started “The Week In Pop” column, which was an early blurring of the media line between indie music and the mainstream. Did being both an observer and a participant shape your approach to writing the book?
Chris DeVille: Even if I was involved in it to some extent, I never really thought of my personal choices as being ones that turned any tides. I didn't feel like I was changing the storyline or anything by the choices that I made professionally. There is an aspect of the book where it goes from me being a high school kid obsessed with music to me being sort of enmeshed in that whole industry. But it's pretty far from a memoir. You get a couple of anecdotes about cool concerts I went to though.
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I suppose it happens in both directions, where you were riding a wave but also part of the force of that wave. Blogs might have already been moving in that direction, but “The Week In Pop” in my mind was early in the shift – that the blog I used to read about Arcade Fire and Wilco and the Rapture on is now covering Beyonce, and eventually Fifth Harmony and One Direction, and treating those subjects with a level of seriousness. It’s an interesting lens as a journalist, in that you're not fully on the outside looking in, but you're somewhere in a gray area within the center of it all.
Chris DeVille: One thing that I had to reckon with as I was writing was that if I'm talking about indie rock smoothing out its edges and morphing into pop, I am part of the audience responsible for that transformation. I came in as a middle class kid who discovered the genre through the internet, not with some kind of DIY ethics or progressive agenda or anything that you would associate with independent music. I came to understand those things later about underground music, but part of the book is me reckoning with my own complicity in that process. I thought about it less as the role I might have played as a journalist in the narrative and more as a fan – that people like me who were funneling into this indie rock world did so without the context and had to learn the context later.
I was doing this podcast where they were kind of clowning Vampire Weekend, clowning the National, as I was talking about how those bands are really indicative of some of the changes that happened in indie rock. But also those are some of my favorite bands! You can point to certain ripple effects from those bands, and we can debate whether they were good or bad in terms of the impacts they had on the big picture of indie rock, but one of the reasons those bands got huge is because they were appealing to an audience of people like me who were now tuned in to indie music. And I like the scuzzy, nasty, abrasive side of indie rock as well, but it's not lost on me that some of my more basic bitch tendencies are also reflective in the way that indie rock went.
A dominant theme of the book is that indie artists kept finding new ways over the last few decades to achieve this escape velocity – going from the hands of only the most tapped in to suddenly this broad cultural awareness. And for indie music fans, there is this inevitable feeling of “I was there first.” You've seen and covered these artists from both sides, so what do you think is lost and gained when they break into the general consciousness?
Chris DeVille: As a fan, you definitely lose the sense that this is “my special little secret.” And maybe you lose the chance to have that more intimate relationship with the artist. The artist literally goes from playing a small club where you can practically touch them to playing a larger venue. And depending on how the artist navigates the situation, you might also lose what you love about their music too. Maybe you liked that they were a little left of center, and now they are more center and it doesn't appeal to your taste as much anymore.
But I think as a fan the idea of your favorite artists hitting it big should have a positive side. That they are really making a go of it, and it might actually be sustainable. You might get more music from them, and they're not going to have to quit to become an accountant or a therapist or whatever. Or maybe they'll get to do both, you know? Like you want to see your favorites succeed. If you're an annoying snob, you want people to know that you liked it first, but aside from that aspect of it, it is validating to see people gravitate towards a thing that you like. It sometimes can be cool to see the general public have what feels like good taste for once.
I took an excerpt from James Mercer from the Shins where he talked to an alt weekly about the way that band’s original fans turned on them after they became too big and sort of a meme with Garden State. They ended up having a bigger fan base and a more sustainable career, but it was awkward that the OGs had left them behind. And I'm sure it was an awkward experience for a lot of bands, but I would wager that most of them would prefer being able to continue doing music rather than having to give it up. When a scene blows up large enough, it gives the bands the chance to continue for years and years.
The Stereogum comment section is full of folks who can't believe “Lose Control” is still on the charts, and are begging for it to fall down out of the top 10. But that's a level of interest in pop music that is beyond even what you talked about in the book, which is that we don’t just ignore the charts, but actively want interesting and exciting and boundary pushing music to get into these establishment spaces.
Chris DeVille: In the book, I used Steve Albini as the voice of the old school indie mindset. He took Sonic Youth to task for basically recruiting underground bands to major labels and bringing them into the mainstream. Albini felt like that was a corrupting influence. So there was an aspect where it's like, we've got this subculture and we don't want it to be tainted. We wanna preserve it. I think that there are probably still plenty of corners of underground music where that continues to be the attitude.
But within this sort of big indie space, I think there is excitement for when those artists blow up. I'm thinking about the attitudes about “selling out,” about licensing your music for a commercial, being on a major label, or changing your sound a little bit to get on the radio. Like those are things that were all really frowned upon maybe 30 years ago, and I think that there is some understanding that it's just getting harder and harder economically to be a professional musician, so people have to do what they have to do to get by.
I think some people would argue that it would be better to maintain the “purity” of the culture and of these indie institutions, and to have it remain a side hustle or a hobby rather than a career if that means that it could remain untainted. But then there's also the whole like poptimism side of it too, where people spent the last few decades re-litigating why we rejected particular kinds of music that happened to be extremely popular? Which in some cases became, this stuff is actually cooler than the “guys with guitars” archetype. That's a whole can of worms that I tried to outline in the book without making it into some sort of anti-poptimist screed. But that’s certainly a factor in everything that happened too.
There are some folks who maybe think this should stay as a passion to maintain its purity, but at the same time you think about the surrounding ecosystem of show promoters, journalists, and other folks who are involved in the broader music industry, who are not these corporate execs. The indie boom made those career pathways exist in a way that it wouldn't if those bands weren't able to capture the degree of attention that they did capture over the course of the last few decades. Because how much harder would it be for Stereogum to continue existing the way it does if a lot of what it covers got no attention or interest from a wider demographic of folks?
Chris DeVille: Right. I mean it's interesting because with Stereogum, we have a very loyal readership that wants to learn about new and obscure bands. They maybe even complain when we post about music that is too popular or write a news story that seems fluffy. At the same time we have huge amounts of traffic coming in over maybe a stupid news post about something that the guy from Puddle of Mudd did or Drake might have done. Those things do drive traffic for the casual reader, and there is an aspect of it where some of that fly by night traffic is able to underwrite the writing about real shit that our core readers care about. It would be very difficult even for us to exist now without taking some interest in the broader world outside of indie music and the fact that there are indie bands that do have an audience and are popular and are sort of legacy institutions at this point. That certainly helps us to be able to exist still with a focus on indie music.
A big focal point of the book is that artists’ relationship with criticism and music journalists was once pretty essential to giving them the careers that they have. But I feel like that relationship has soured over the years. I mean, we get a lot more artists these days who probably owe their career to music blogs getting mad about a Pitchfork review. The mutual benefit used to be better understood by both artists and journalists. Where do you think this animosity is coming from, and are there any signs of hope that we might one day restore that mutual respect that was once crucial to this industry?
Chris DeVille: It's tough because I think in general independent musicians appreciate attention. Artists that get mad at Pitchfork because they get a negative review, like it's funny because that has less of an impact now than it did 20 years ago. I don't think many artists’ careers are being destroyed by getting a negative Pitchfork review anymore.
But it's hard to get your music reviewed at all now, so when it attracts negative attention people are really touchy about it. Maybe people feel like this is going to be the only public record of my work, and it's negative. There's also an aspect of it where because of social media artists are used to controlling their own image. So any kind of journalistic endeavor that is not equivalent to a PR campaign is going to rub certain artists the wrong way. Some of that depends on how humble and mature the artists are, and it also depends on how responsible the journalist is too. Because obviously some people write some bullshit and we have to account for that. But we've just gotten to this environment where the biggest stars don't even engage with journalists. They just interview each other and they create their own content.
So most of the artists that are at a level where they really benefit from media attention are generally appreciative towards it, but everyone's just a little more sensitive about all of these things now because it feels just that much harder to make any of this stuff work with the way the economy has gone and the way that our culture is set up now. I understand why people would be touchy about a negative review that feels like it was just kind of fired off from a writer who wasn't thinking very hard about it.
But at the same time I know from experience that a lot of the writers who have faced blowback are thinking incredibly hard about it. And the reason that they might pen something unflattering is because they care so much.
The book catches up mostly to the present day, but where do you think indie goes next from here? If you were to write the first chapter of the sequel, where would the starting place be?
Chris DeVille: My friend who was reading the book said the next book should be called, “It falls apart, we all got work to do,” quoting MJ Lenderman. I like that. It does seem especially with the moves that are being made in the media landscape right now, that it's just harder and harder for anything to succeed as a mass movement. It's harder for your band to break through or your scene to break through. It's hard for even the ones that have some buzz and a small-scale DIY level enthusiasm around them to sell records and even break even on tour. It feels like something that has to exist underground by default, or for most musicians to get by without a day job.
A lot of the coverage for indie music is coming from Substack and newsletters now, from people who also have another job too. It’s somewhat stratified too, which is part of the problem. Like, it’s hard to imagine another entity coming along and building a coalition the way that 2000s Pitchfork did.
A “Pitchfork artist” is so much more of a nebulous term now than it used to be.
Chris DeVille: I mean, Pitchfork itself sort of ceded the role of being the arbiter of indie rock because they were trying to cover a larger scope of music and appeal to a wider range of listeners. I guess it feels like it's very difficult to predict the future, and it’s a lot easier to discern what has happened and try to make sense of why. But you just never know where lightning is going to strike. I would not have predicted that Lenderman and Wednesday would take off like they did, and I don't have a good sense right now how their popularity compares to The O.C. Era, Death Cab, and Modest Mouse. Those bands to me seem like some of the biggest artists in indie rock right now, and yet I don't have a sense that they are permeating pop culture outside of their little indie bubble, the way that some of these other artists did 20 years ago. So it feels like the ceiling might be a lot more capped than it used to be.
But at the same time, it certainly wasn't capped for Phoebe Bridgers. And I never would have expected Taylor Swift to make an album with people from the National or to invite Phoebe Bridgers on her album. There is going to be some sort of future glow up, I'm just not sure what it'll look like – and will it even sound like indie rock? It might be that we're witnessing the last generation of bands that are channeling the sort of classic indie rock guitar-based sound anyway. I think it's popular enough that there will always be some true believers carrying the torch for it, but it might be that the next underground music that takes the mainstream by storm won't be indie rock at all. Maybe it'll be something more on the Jane Remover side of music. I don't wanna say that's not indie rock at all – indie rock is definitely part of the equation there – but it's like there's so many vectors all converging in that music. And so it seems more likely to me that there's some sort of blogger friendly, critically acclaimed, hipster anointed type of music that blows up the way indie rock did two decades ago, it probably won't be indie rock.
At the same time, since there's such a cultural context for indie rock already, now that millennials are in the place that boomers were at when I was a kid, maybe the structures are in place in society for another nostalgic indie rock wave to catch on. I'm speculating rather than predicting because I just have no idea what's gonna happen next.