The nostalgia cycle has been flirting with the mid-noughties for so long that it’s almost passé. In August, it will be the third anniversary of this Vice listicle on landfill indie which absolutely dominated conversation on Twitter for about three days during the first year of the pandemic. This wasn’t the first time Twitter had an outpouring of conversation about landfill indie - a couple of years earlier there was the #indieamnesty hash-tag - but this was the most comprehensive journalistic reckoning at that point. Three months after this, the Instagram account Indie Sleaze was born, which documents the alternative and indie scene of the noughties from a more transatlantic and frequently fashion-centric angle; the creator of the account is now a semi-regular contributor to 6 Music. All this time, a great deal of energy has been spent on rehashing the same critical tropes: nostalgia for a pre-austerity youth, earnest re-appraisal of the music and style of the time, or outright rubbishing of the notion that there was anything of value happening.

By now, ‘landfill indie’ is used to describe UK guitar music from the mid-noughties very broadly, to the point where it is confused for a style in and of itself. While the original article has been lost to time, I’m not sure it was ever intended to become any kind of substantive genre label. Coined by the music journalist Andrew Harrison, the point was to describe the deluge of guitar bands flooding the market in the middle of the noughties. The ‘landfill’ part refers to disposability; of how many bands’ records were consigned literally to the landfill as supply quickly outstripped demand. Ironically, much of the time it wasn't indie labels doing this, but mostly major label subsidiaries. As a phrase, it immediately sets the terms of discussion before anything else can even be said: it’s impossible to talk positively, or even neutrally, about a sub-genre when it’s synonymous with rubbish. In fact, I'd go as far as to say it undermines any attempt at serious discussion before it even begins. Why bother trying to evaluate or understand something if we've already agreed it's worthless?

Although it’s usually acknowledged that landfill indie happened because of the financial opportunity presented by the sudden popularity of indie music in the early noughties, it’s only a fleeting reference before the business of revisiting the songs themselves. The same host of bands appear in more or less every article: Razorlight, The Ordinary Boys, Good Shoes, to grab a handful almost completely at random. For most of them, the royalty cheques probably aren’t enough to make up for being disparaged extensively every other year. This feels particularly uncomfortable when it’s also broadly accepted that this was the last point in time there was a significant representation of the country outside of London in the music press, not to mention any sense of possibility for working class (or even just not insanely posh) musicians.

But at the end of the day, while they were responsible for the music itself, it’s extremely misguided to attribute the cultural dominance of ‘landfill indie’ to musicians alone. In a retrospective for the Guardian, the journalist Simon Reynolds wrote of the time: “All these bands! Where did they come from? Why did they bother? Couldn't they tell they were shit?”. This sentiment overlooks that historically, it's not been primarily up to bands to know whether they’re mediocre or not. In every medium, there's an infrastructure built around the acceptance that a creator isn’t well-placed to evaluate their own work. In music, that’s been the remit of record labels and the press, and that’s why it’s so frustrating that they’re effectively let off the hook in these conversations. Underwhelming bands have always existed; the problem with landfill indie was that so many of them were elevated beyond their merit because there was a chance to make a profit quickly.

It would be impossible to talk about landfill indie without discussing the music, and a listicle of the top 10 A&R executives of landfill indie wouldn’t muster quite the same social media response. However, it’s fascinating to me that I still see cultural critics strongly aligned with the left drop the names of the bands themselves as lazy shorthand for a myriad of cultural sins - as if, as soon as music is involved, the understanding that the people responsible for making the product in the first place aren't the ones with the power under capitalism immediately vanishes. Again, that becomes even more disconcerting in the context of how deeply exploitative the industry was throughout this time period.

When we talk about the phenomenon of landfill indie, it tends to be either a mode of mindless nostalgia or hard-headed cynicism. I’m profoundly disinterested in either of these; what interests me about this phenomenon is that it was arguably the last time period where being a full-time musician was viable, and when the UK's live music scene was healthy outside of festival season. Having said that, I understand why no one wants to take it seriously. We’re currently in a cultural climate where there’s so little capacity for having fun when talking about pop culture. There are valid reasons for this, such as serious reckonings with pervasive sexual violence, every conceivable form of discrimination, and industry exploitation; there are also elements of this tendency to be more suspect about, such as how social media discourse cycles about pop culture have cynically become an marketing tool in and of themselves. It makes sense why current millennials don’t want to extend this behind us, and why we are all drawn to collective points of reckoning of a time where it didn't feel like everything was simply a bellwether for how shit the world is.

The Vice landfill indie article discussion was one of my favourite days on Twitter. At the height of the first year of the covid pandemic, it was the most I spoke to anyone apart from my partner for 6 months. When landfill indie originally happened, I felt intimidated by music forum culture, so I never really got involved. This time around, though, I had some really thoughtful conversations, and it reignited a love for talking about music I hadn’t felt in a very long time. But what’s stuck with me since then is the sense that after all is said and done, we still continually fail to meaningfully reckon with anything about the noughties as a period of cultural history. At best, we’re bonding over memes based on our collective memory, and at worst we are relishing in nothing more than bland value judgements. The reactionary, glib ways in which we talk about the recent past only serve to say more about who we are now than who we were back then.

Thanks for reading! Here's a song that should have been on that Vice piece instead of the Guillemots track. How were Franz Ferdinand too arty but not Guillemots?!