Suggestions
Suggestions
Indie is short for independent music, and the name is about how a record gets made rather than how it sounds: creative freedom, little money and a do-it-yourself habit that opened up once independent labels existed. It covers a spread of related styles rather than one, most of them guitar-led and most of them stepping away from mainstream convention.
Holy Pinto cut half the drums for an eighteen-track album in a boat warehouse in Wisconsin, then carried the record through a basement in Washington, a living room above a Milwaukee bar, a piano repair shop and a cathedral in Illinois, sitting with a laptop between rooms. Brooklyn duo Honey VHS pulled one song off its layered studio version and taped it again at the foot of the bed in the apartment where it was written. Robo Pumpkin made a whole album with no guitar on it, every melody and chord played on bass.
The sound is not one sound. Holy Pinto have worked the indie pop and emo edge of it for years, Vancouver four-piece Meltt work a slow, warm psych-pop, falsettos and synths over hazy guitars, and Honey VHS come at it from blues, folk, country and alternative without settling on any one of them. proun start their songs on a nylon-string classical guitar and build outward from there into telecaster twang and baroque basslines.