Landfill indie is a style and era of British indie rock. The term was first coined by music journalist Andrew Harrison in his 2007 review of Jens Lekman's Night Falls Over Kortedala, where he used it to disparagingly describe the proliferation of formulaic and uninspired British guitar bands dominating the mid-2000s music scene.[1]
The landfill indie era has been retrospectively associated with the indie sleaze aesthetic,[2][3] a term coined in 2021, to describe the fashion and visual style of landfill indie bands and other contemporaneous developments in alternative music.[4][5][6][7][8]
The Guardian defined the sound of landfill indie to be that of: "angular, jangly guitars plus big riffs plus amusingly pretentious lyricism".[15]
Music critic Simon Reynolds argued that the "landfill indie" era was characterized by an excess in indie rock bands in response to the popularity of the 2000s indie rock revival. According to Reynolds, what made the music "landfill" was not a lack of musical skill, but a proliferation of formulaic artists who were stripped from the naivety, innovation and authenticity that defined earlier indie acts such as Bogshed and Beat Happening, stating:[16]
"[...] indie wasn't crappy for a purpose. In fact, it wasn't especially inept or ramshackle anymore, so much as drearily adequate. Instrumentally, there was just a sustained absence of flair in the playing. This guitar-based music didn't rock, but equally the songcraft wasn't sufficiently strong, or forcefully sung enough, for it to make the grade as proper pop music".
Reynolds later stated, "None of these groups could honestly be described as pointing the way to any kind of future; there was little about them that would have been incomprehensible to, say, a Smiths fan in 1985".[16] Furthermore, the BBC referred to the year 2009, one of the prominent years for landfill indie as "the year indie music died".[17] However, publications like the NME championed many landfill bands at the time by frequently placing them on the front page. Metro Magazine later claimed that the 2000s landfill indie era was a time when "the NME ruled a new saviour of rock music seemingly every week."[18][9]
Vice retrospectively labelled Razorlight's Johnny Borrell as the "one man who defined, embodied and lived Landfill Indie" due to his forming of a "spectacularly middle-of-the-road" band despite his close proximity to the Libertines.[12][19][20]
The term "landfill indie" was first coined by Andrew Harrison in November 2007, in his review of Jens Lekman's album Night Falls Over Kortedala published in the British music magazine The Word. Harrison used the term to disparagingly describe the proliferation of formulaic and uninspired British guitar bands dominating the mid-2000s music scene. The phrase has since been applied to a wave of generic indie bands that emerged following the success of the Libertines, who themselves came from the post-Britpop[16] landscape of the 1990s British alternative rock scene.[1][15] In America, their variant of the landfill indie era was nicknamed "The Deleted Years" or encompassed by the "blog rock" movement.[21][22][23][24]
In the early 2000s, the NME coined "the New Rock Revolution" to describe a wave of emerging rock bands, spurred by the success of American acts such as the White Stripes and the Strokes, with the former spearheading the 2000s garage rock revival movement whilst the latter led the New York post-punk revival.[25][26] Bands like the Strokes went on to inspire influential British groups across the Atlantic, such as the Libertines, whom NME described as "the bed-haired Brit version of [the Strokes] almost as soon as they appeared."[27][28][29]
In addition, the term landfill indie would continue to be used as a pejorative as well as a label to describe this period of British alternative music.[30][31][32][33]
Although the style declined in prominence by the early 2010s, the landfill indie era went on to experience a gradual revival.[29] This resurgence was first marked by the emergence of the hashtag #indieamnesty, created by musician Rowan Martin[15][36] in April 2016, and later by the launch of the Instagram account @indiesleaze in 2021, curated by Olivia V, which documented and celebrated the visual aesthetic of the era, which was later labelled indie sleaze.[37] Some sources credit the COVID-19 lockdowns[38] as contributing to a collective nostalgia for the landfill indie era.[39][40][3][41][42][43]
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