Indiecast - WTF is Sombr? Plus: Yay or Nay on Freak Folk

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

Steven and Ian begin with a quick conversation about living in a time of political violence and horrific videos popping up freely on social media feeds (0:00). From there, they do a hard pivot to a conversation about the recent MTV Video Music Awards (which continue to exist for some reason) and the rapid ascent of the pop-rock singer Sombr, whose recent LP I Barely Know Her dropped last month (5:45).After that, they do a "yay or nay" segment on freak folk (26:13). They also find time to finally dip into the mailbag, where they answer emails about the best "day" bands (32:02) and whether it's okay to wear a band T-shirt to that band's concert (39:33).In Recommendation Corner, Ian talks about emo band Algernon Cadwallader and Steven goes for the Michigan rock outfit Liquid Mike (45:30).New episodes of Indiecast drop every Friday. Listen to Episode 256 here and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. You can submit questions for Steve and Ian at [e-mail], and make sure to follow us on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) for all the latest news. We also recently launched a visualizer for our favorite Indiecast moments. Check those out here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Indycast is presented by Uprocks's indie mixtape. Hello everyone and welcome to Indycast. On the show we talk about the biggest indie news of the week, review albums, and we hash out trends. In this episode, we talk about somebody or something called somber, and we, yay or nay, freak folk. My name is Stephen Hayden, and I'm joined by my friend and co-host. I hope he wasn't on social media accidentally watching horrific videos like I was this week.

Ian Cohen, Ian, Ian, how are you? I swear this isn't even a bit, but I was going to talk about at some point on this podcast how I've watched the video for Slipknot's duality, maybe 20 times this week. It's so good. I think that percussion was perfected with hitting a baseball, like hitting a beer keg with a baseball bat. If you haven't seen, I think you might like that song. It's pretty radio rock. Yeah, you know, that wasn't the video I was referring to, but I'm glad you brought that up because it is a moment of levity and a thing that I feel like we have to. knowledge, like the craziest thing that happened this week, which is right-wing influencer

slash podcaster, Charlie Kirk, was assassinated basically. Like, I think it was in Utah this week. And, you know, like a lot of people, I logged on to a social media platform innocently, and I looked at my feed, and I was like force-fed this video of him being killed. and it's incredibly graphic and incredibly disturbing and horrific. And I don't want to get into the weeds about Charlie Kirk. You know, I don't know how people out there feel about him. It's very different opinions.

That's a whole other issue. I just want to just acknowledge 2025 being, and we've talked about this already in relation to the music business and other things. A weird year, man. Very dystopia type year. You know, we've had multiple instances of political violence. We have video of these events. I'm thinking about the killings that happened in Minnesota this summer of state representatives.

There was one woman who was killed in her husband, another one who was wounded. This is like 10 miles from my house, so it felt very immediate to me. And there's just something about these videos where it feels almost like they're, being staged for social media. You know, the guy in Minnesota that wore that weird mask. Did you see the cook, like when he would be at someone's door trying to get in, he wore that like weird, you know, face-like mask? And it just looked like something from, like a movie or something.

And this thing that happened this week, there's something hyper-real about it and also just, I don't know. You can't even believe that it's happening. And it just adds to like, it's like that movie Strange Days that came out in 95, Catherine Bigelow, I never seen that. But, you know, it's like, that's like a future dystopia. And it's talking about, you know, murder being turned in entertainment. And not that there's anything entertaining about this video,

I'm just saying that the way these things are forced fed into our lives, you know, you see a tweet about, you know, the VMAs. And then all of a sudden there's like murder right after that. And then it's like another VMA's tweet. And then it's like murder after that. It's just a, it's a crazy year, Ian. I feel very, I just feel disturbed. I feel like I'm living in the future every day now.

This feels like the future now that we're in right now. It's the present, but it feels like the future. The future, the dystopia that we were, you know, fearing. It feels like it's here now. And I'm not normally like this. I'm not a pessimist. I'm not like a doomsayer. or anything, but man, it's

every day of fresh horror here, Ian. Yeah, like Slipknot said on wait and bleed, everything is three-neigh blasphemy. You know, it always comes back to Slip-Noe. You just bring it back to Slip-Nut. You say you just want to talk about Slip-Nod. I do. Maybe that would be a better thing to talk about. Yeah, hardcore maggot fan base. Yeah, like, some of the videos I had seen

for the thing yesterday, there was one, I believe it's like, yo, it's your boy, Elder TikTok. It's someone who did like a TikTok Kind of like a typical TikTok Except they're like live casting it And then I think they stole all the merch And tried to sell it. It looks like a Conor O'Malley clip.

It is from the event. Yeah, from the event itself. Yeah, I saw that too. And it's crazy because when he was shot He was talking about school shootings. Yes. So there's something very scripted about that in a way. Like if you just thought,

oh, someone made a video of this to put out as a TikTok video, as content, you would have this staged in a way that he would be talking about that at the moment that he was horrifically killed. I don't know, man. It's, uh, I just feel like we're living in the AI simulation here.

Like, who knows what's real? Who knows what's fake? That's not a very deep statement. I'm rambling about this, but it's a very disturbing, time to be living in, I would say. And the only thing we can hope for is that, like, Maddie Healy is not trying to write a song about this.

Well, you know, we'll see. I don't know. This could be a good segue, actually, into our next topic here. Let's do a hard pivot out of this. Because you mentioned Maddie Healy. And there's this guy right now who kind of looks like Maddie Healy, who has become overnight, seemingly. I know it's not literally overnight.

We'll get a little bit into his story, but it feels like it's overnight. I feel like I've only heard about this guy, like last week. Again, I was on a social media platform because that's all I ever do. And I saw photos from like some magazine layout of this guy. And I thought it was the guy from, for a second I thought maybe it was Maddie Healey. Then I thought, oh, it's the guy from the leftovers. Dominic Sessa, who kind of looks like, Maddie Healy.

And then I realized, no, it's this guy. It's a 20-year-old kid. Let me look this up. His name is Shane Michael Boose, 20-year-old from New York City, and he goes by the name Somber. No-e either. Yes, we must say it. It looks like a cookie or like one of those like psychiatry apps.

Yes, yes. It's somber, no-e at the end, lowercase. And this guy's huge. I looked him up on Spotify, 57 million monthly listeners. To put that in perspective, that's 12 million more than Olivia Rodriguez, who I think we would all say big pop star that we have all heard of by now. Several albums. Yeah, several albums.

Somber put out his debut album last month on August 22nd. It's called I Barely Know Her. it's his debut album. It comes after years of putting out singles that did really well online. He first broke out in 2022 with a song called Caroline, came out when he was 17 years old. And if you've heard that song, it's basically the template for every other song by this guy. It's like a pop rock song where he's pining after a girl that doesn't want him, even though he's like a very good-looking young man.

And a lot of the songs on I barely know her have the same type feel to it. His biggest song right now is called Back to Friends. That is closing in on 800 million streams. And this, we're talking about it today because this guy was just on the MTV Video Music Awards, which for whatever reason still exists. I'm always amazed every year when this comes back. Apparently it aired on CBS this year. Yeah, it means I could actually watch it.

Because we somehow have like Peacock and Paramount. So it's like the first VMAs in maybe a decade I'm able to watch. Well, at MTV as a channel, does it even still exist? Is it just like ridiculousness all day long? It's been like that for years. So they have to move it to CBS, even though MTV still exists as a brand. This guy, he was on the show. He sang the song Back to Friends.

And he's saying another song called 12 to 12, which is more of like a disco rock song. But I don't know, Ian, it's, I'm not, like I said earlier, I'm generally an optimist, I'm not a doomsayer or doom scroller. I don't really subscribe to conspiracy theories typically. Like, I'm not a guy who's going to accuse people of being an industry plant or, you know, you're being astroturf to popularity. Mainly because I don't think the music business is capable enough to do that. I think there's too many incompetent people in the music business to, like, create a pop star out of a whole cloth. But this somber dude, I don't know, man. This is me, maybe, this is going to be a thing that turns me into Oliver Stone, I think, with pop music.

57 million, like, monthly users. Is that statistic just meaningless now? Like, that sounds like made up at this point. Like, how does he already have that many monthly listeners? If you listen to his music, I kind of get why he's popular, but it's not... it doesn't seem like a zeitgeist type moment. He's part of this lineage right now. Maybe we'll get into this in a little bit.

I mean, I feel like he extends from Harry Styles. Like there's this whole lineage right now of like guys who are popular that are triangulating this market where, you know, the first quadrant is you're like visually harkening back to like rock stars of the 20th century.

So like, you know, Harry Styles had like his David Bowie costume. play. Benson Boone, who's like another one of these guys. He's like doing like a Freddie Mercury meets born in the USA, Bruce Springsteen. This somber dude is like kind of like 90s alt pop cross with like back to rock 2000s era strokes the killers, like some of that kind of thing. So you have that, you have like some indie rock aesthetics a little bit. And then you have just a totally kind of wholesome, like kind of bland image. And those three things together, that's how you get this guy, Benson Boone, Alex Warren, that Teddy Swims guy.

But Somberg, this guy's really come out of nowhere. And he kind of seems like he's going to be the biggest one of all. Is that possible? Yeah. Like when you're describing these guys, I'm thinking of that Simpsons bit where Lisa is reading the magazine, non-threatening boys. And out of the two of us, how am I the one who thinks, you know, this really looks like 2001 Pete Yorn? You know what I mean? Oh, yeah, he's got the jersey on the cover.

He's wearing a jersey. That's kind of a Ryan Adams gold type look, too. Yeah, it's, you know, he's definitely cut from that, you know, brunette guy with like the wavy hair aesthetic, which we haven't had in a while. But definitely some Pete Yorn, some early 2000s Ryan Adams. I'm not going to say Julian Casablanca, he looks more like Nick Valenci from the strokes, the second guitar player.

Looks a lot like him. But he loves that Julian Casablanca's vocal filter. That was the thing that really surprised me about this album. This did not sound anything like I expected. Because, you know, we talked about like the new pop guys, I guess. Like, it's not as fun to say as like pop girlies.

Like, I'm not sure, like, do these people have standbases? Like, who are the boonheads? the like what are their fan bases named it's got like 57 million people i mean i do wonder but i'm thinking stands like the sort of people who like create their entire personality of their fandom kind of the same way that like people like with addison ray or Sabrina carpenter or are they just like kind of like eye candy which is interesting because it's like a real kind of flip on things but um yeah i would i i figured just based on the way he looks that the you've mentioned like uh you know the kind of more wholesome types but then there's also at the vm.a like young blood and coning gray who have been around for a lot

longer they're like kind of like you remember the neighborhood right like the band that like they were kind of like the bravery to the 1975s the killers and i think they ended they were kind of like more influential in a way it was sort of like the 1975 if like g easy was the front person um and maybe that but so we got like kind of the darker guys but we got the wholesome guys so we're really in like a golden age of like harmless pop guys. And when I was like Youngblood is like Russell Brand of this. Like if Harry Styles is the template and we're all sort of operating off of that and we're taking like elements of what Harry Styles does, like Youngblood would be, yeah, if you injected Russell Brand into Harry Styles, you would end up with Youngblood. Or like the new remake of The Crow.

Right. Well, Youngblood was also on the VMAs because he did tribute to Ozzy. Osborne with Steven Bettancourt and Nuno Bentancourt from which again like

the VMAs is a separate conversation we could talk about that in a minute I do wonder like what like who in the hell is this for because I think there was a moment where people

looked at the VMAs as like a hipper version of the Grammys and you would go to the VMAs to see like what the kids were into but then at the VMAs this year they're doing like a big tribute to Ozzy Osbourne and like I think the show opened with like Jack

Osbourne and Kelly Osborne addressing the audience and I'm like are 14 year olds into this kind of thing do they want to see weathered Joe Perry like you know being propped up next to young blood doing Mama I'm coming home like who what I don't understand mom coming home like who who was like who was I mean look I remember see a billion times I love that song that was a billion times I love that song that was Like, that was 91 Ozzy. So that was like when I was a teenager. No more tears, yeah.

No more tears. But I'm a 48 year old man. And maybe that's who this is for. Maybe it's for 48 year old music writers. Because like I did go on Blue Sky and where a lot of those people now are. And it was interesting to see like who's still live tweeting the VMAs. Like who's still doing that in 2025? It's like the soldiers wandering the Japanese like, you know, countryside after the

after the war ended, and they don't know the war's over, and they're still there, like, in the early 50s, like, those soldiers, like, that's, like, the music writers still watching the VMAs and, like, live tweeting the VMAs in 2025. Because, like, what are we doing here? Like, what does this thing even mean? Like, what does it represent? Like, what, you know, like, the VMAs in the 90s and the 2000s, you could say, like, oh, there's a coherent audience that this is speaking to.

Yeah, like, in your books, how much, like, how many, like, formative moments, are taken from the VMAs, whether it's like, you know, the fight between guns and roses and Nirvana. Like, there was moments, you know? And it continued into the 2000s, I think. I wonder, like, what, like, what was the last coherent, relevant VMAs? You're asking the wrong guy. It's got to be at least 15 years ago.

Because once the channel collapses, like, what is the point of this show? There was a time, I think, where, you know, you would watch the VMAs because you watched MTV and you knew what was popular. on MTV in a particular year, whether it's an alt-rock year, or it's a teen pop year, or it's a new metal year, and you would watch the show and you would see all the artists that were big on the channel at that time, and it made sense. It was like a marker for a particular era. And now it's just like a grab bag of TikTok favorites and YouTube favorites and Joe Perry and Stephen Tyler with Youngblood. Like, I don't know. Aside from being unwatchable, it just seems totally

insignificant and incoherent. Did you watch the rock? Did you see the rock category? This is amazing. The best rock category is Colplay, Evanescence, Green Day, 21 pilots, Lincoln Park, and Lenny Kravitz.

I'm going to guess you've not heard any of these songs. Which of those six do you think won? I forgot all the ones you said, because my mind was glazing over. Once you said 21, I have no idea. It was Coldplay. All my love. I just did a cold play rank.

banking out, and I don't remember this song. So the Grammys are dunking on the VMAs, is what you're saying. Yeah, pretty much. Are now the cool kids on the block. Just to get back to Somber here for a minute, I do feel like in a weird way, he's the most palatable for me personally out of these pop boys that are coming out, the type of guy type pop stars. Right now, the sons of Harry Styles or the cousins of Harry Styles.

Like, I listened to his record, and... That big song Back to Friends, I think it's a totally decent pop song. You mentioned the neighborhood in 1975. It does remind me of like a song where if the 1975 were trying to be as big as cold play, like they would record a song like Back to Friends. That makes sense. And like it has some of the same attributes sonically that a 1975 song has, but there's none of the sort of subversion or attempted subversion that Maddie He

Healy brings to the table. Like if Maddie Healy were lobotomized and we're just like, we just need a curly haired guy to wear leather pants on an award show. Can you do that? I think that's how you end up with somber. The album itself, what it made me think of, it's like when I was listening to it, like, it wasn't that, oh, this is good. It's like, I can enjoy this.

It reminds me of like when I was working in Alt Rock Radio in 2000, 2002 or whatever, where you would see like a four-star review in Rolling Stone of like this pop person he never heard of. And it's like, oh, I'll check that out. Sounds interesting. You know, like, room for squares. I have like distinct memories of that. And it's like, this could be something from like 2001, you know? Right.

That's what I was thinking. It reminded me of a CD you would buy for $7.99 from Best Buy. Hell yeah. We've talked about that before on the show. Just like, yeah, like a, when Robbie Williams, Millennium, like, like, That album got really good reviews for like a minute. And you're like, oh, yeah, I'll give this a shot. It kind of sounds like Oasis, but it's more of a pop record.

That could be cool. Oh, it's only $7.99 at Best Buy. Yeah, sure, I'll pick that up. And then you listen to it like once or twice and file it away. Yeah, that's how I feel about this record, too. I do think it's interesting that it was co-produced by Tony Berg, who is this music industry veteran who's been around forever. I mean, he worked on replacements records in the 80s.

he produced the Tony Bennett unplugged album that won a Grammy for album of the year. And more relevant to this conversation, he worked on the last few Phoebe Bridgers records, especially Stranger in the Alps. He was the co-producer of that, and I think he also was a contributor to Punisher. So it just goes to show this guy's got some big guns behind him. Like Tony Burke, total, just industry pro. If you're going to be priming the next big thing, deals like he's always lurking somewhere in the background.

So he comes in and works on this record. And I mean, my only thing with this album, I don't mind it, I think there's some kind of cool things to it. It is a little shocking to me, again, getting back to the original point of just how big this is, seemingly out of nowhere. I mean, he has had a buildup over a few years that viral hit from 2022 being the beginning.

But the 57 million monthly listeners, Like, I can't get my head around that. Is that real or is that fraudulent? Like, do we have some ballot stuffing going on here? Should we just totally disregard these? It makes me feel like I should, because I'll sometimes cite that in a review just to, because you can't talk about record sales anymore.

You're just looking for a way to quantify someone's popularity, so you go to streams. But seeing that, I'm just like, I don't know if I buy that. This guy's big. but that seems like way out of whack. I know he's got on a lot of playlists and that's probably how he built this huge listenership,

but I don't know, man. There's something fishy going on here. Anytime I like read a story about pop and, you know, the current day, I just know none of the characters. You know, it's not even like baseball where you see the MVP like ballots and I'm like, I recognize one of these guys,

but I don't remember when this person came up but it's still the same sport. This feels like a completely different sport. I feel very, I don't know, relieved that I'm not one of those blue sky people like in their 40s or 50s who like are required by their job to write about the VMAs. Like I, this stuff is just escalated so quickly. I don't know how you can like honestly do that. This is like so much more demoralizing than watching the same people tweet about like the Grammys or like the Super Bowl halftime show because at least those are, you know, quasi monocultural events. but doing so for the VMAs, man.

That's like, ugh, scraping the couch for quarters, man. Well, I just wonder if this is like the late 90s in baseball and how, you know, people were so excited about all these home runs being hit. And you look back and you're like, why weren't people questioning this? Like, there was no way this was real. There was something going on here that was just turning Mark McGuire into like the Jolly Green Giant, you know, or whatever. Or that Barry Bonds' neck is like the size of like a 747 now.

I mean, Saumber does kind of look like Brady Anderson if you think about it. But I just like with some of these numbers and the way it's used to justify the coverage sometimes that these people get, I don't know. I just wonder, are we going to have someone come out in five years and go, oh yeah, these were inflated with bots or some other chicanery going. on and this thing that was treated as a zeitgeist moment actually was totally fabricated. Yeah, not saying that that's the case here necessarily, but I don't know.

It's very strange to me how, you know, how things get big on TikTok and then all of a sudden the media races to catch up because we feel like, oh, we got to like shoot photos of this guy. We got to put them on the cover of a magazine that doesn't actually exist because physical magazines are going away. So we have like the digital cover, which I always like laugh up like the digital cover. I'll never forget when I interviewed Gene Simmons on this note. And it's like, hey, this is Ian Cohn from Rolling Stone. And then Gene Seven says rollingstone. This was 2012. Right. Exactly. But just like that distinction between print and online, which like some publicists even now still care about, which blows my mind.

But, you know, this thing of like kind of holding on to a holy 20th century media creation, a magazine cover, you know, and treating that as an item of prestige when, you know, obviously that means something to people like you and I, but I think about my kids who, I guess they get highlights magazine or they did when they were younger. But other than that, they're not having no experience with magazines. The idea of being on the cover of the Rolling Stone being a cultural bellwether. I mean, that is something that doesn't mean anything anymore. Now when they go to the dentist, they can just be on their phone instead of like leaving through people and highlights or whatever.

We're losing recipes with that, man. Yeah, I don't know. But there's nothing that's replaced that either. Phones. I know, but like in terms of like the significance of it. Totally. Like the go-to, like, oh, I'm on the cover of this thing. I've made it.

or I've sold, my album's gone platinum, or I've had a number one hit. You know, we still talk about this stuff a little bit, but it's like, it's like when a new album from a big pop star comes out and they say, oh, there's 12 of their songs are in the top 20. And it's like, well, what does it even mean? You know, what happened with deaf tones and the hard, like, all of them made like the top hard rock list.

But like they were kept out of number one by Lincoln Park. And I'm like, what the hell is that mean, you know? But it's like, yeah, like they have more top 10 hits than the beat. Well, okay, but it's not the same thing. Maybe we have to retire this as a rubric for measuring success, and maybe there is no way to measure success anymore. I don't know, but it's somber's world and we're just living in it, I guess, at the moment, until someone else comes along and says that it's a shell game and it didn't really exist.

Well, let's do another hard pivot, Ian. We're doing hard pivots big time. We're going to go from murder on social media platforms to somber, which I guess that is a somber topic. Somber with an E, the first topic. Let's go now to Freak Folk. We're going to do our yay or nay or next segment for all the kids on Instagram and TikTok. This week on a genre that was really big when Ian and I were in our 20s back in the early 2000s. It was the movement known as Freak Folk.

It was a type of music that was looking back, I guess, to the Laurel Canyon folk of the 60s and spiking it with a heavy dose of like Charles Manson style, like aesthetics in terms of just like a cult-like vibe to it. But a lot of beards, a lot of beads, a lot of like white flowing robes being worn by people. I feel like this is a genre, you know, we, when we talk about it. about it. We're thinking about Joanna Newsom. We're thinking about Animal Collective, Akron family, Vedever Woods, and also Devendra Banhart, who's the reason that we're talking about that this week. His album, Cripple Crow turns 20. I think as of today, or maybe this weekend, I think it turns. Well, I know at least the 20th anniversary album is being released this week. So, yeah, we're celebrating it

because it, yeah, I think it's like a triple LP 20th anniversary we issue. And it did come out on September 13th. So yeah, it's the 20th anniversary and the 20th anniversary reissue. So let's talk about it. Freakfolk, a visionary scene of outsiders or a bunch of hipsters pretending to be hippies. Freak folk, yay or nay? Yeah, it's a good thing this genre existed at a time when I was like peak pitchfork pitchfork pill, because on its face, this would probably be the most emphatic nay in yay nay history because I tend to be a pretty anti-explicitly retro movements in rock music like when they not just recreate the sound but also the look of things and freak folk takes everything laughable about like hippies and laurel canyon but applied it to indie rock

um I've often heard it described as a reaction or like a cultural reaction to 9-11 like a that kind of going back and do like a childlike sense of wonder All that thing being said, DeVendra Banhart, rejoicing in the hands. I learned to love that album. And also shout out to him. He did a lot of air time in the Joan of Arc documentary. He loves Tim Kinsella. Yeah, I like some of Cripple Crow.

It reminds me of the white album if it was like at least 50% Ringo type songs. He also made a song called Shabop Shalom, which needs to be heard to be believed. But otherwise, you know, you mentioned bands like Vettiver and Woods and Akron family. Akron family rules. I don't know if they've ever like nailed it album on like a whole album but a lot of their songs are awesome they kind of did more of a jam band thing

Espers did kind of this kind of like Gothic like not got but gothic freak folk thing six organs of admittance there's a lot of good stuff in there and of course like Joanna Newsom might be to freak folk what deaf tones are to new metal just kind of transcending it

yay in the music that happened at the time but with the cabbivet be out that I never ever ever want to see this again. So I'm a pretty strong yay. I feel like Freak Folk was a scene that at least aspired to be a counterculture, which is not something you really see in indie rock anymore. You know, whether it succeeded at that is up for debate. But there are artists in the scene who position themselves outside the mainstream by making

like willfully weird music. And I think the best records from that scene like really hold up, you know, obviously the Milk Guide Mender by Joanna Newsom or Song Tongues by Animal Collective. Those are both classics that people revisit all the time in 2025. Clearly, there were excesses to freak folk, and there's all the stereotypes that you could mention. You know, again, the long hair, the beards, the sheets, the sort of Charles Manson cosplay that you saw in some of the groups. And that really carried over, I think, later on, to artists that were not freak folk, like Edward Sharp and the magnetic zeros. I mean, that was emulating freak folk while basically having none of the properties that made freak folk interesting.

But at its best, I think Freak Folk was this idealistic and adventurous scene that mixed experimentation with some surprisingly catchy melodies. Like that album, Cripple Croll by DeVenture Banhart, a lot of good pop tunes on that record that you don't have to be into Freak Folk to enjoy. So unlike you, I'd actually would be down for a Freak Folk Revival because I think that spirit of outsider music is solely lacking right now and it would be nice to see people who just like want to be weird for the sake of being weird. And there are some artists that I think are waving the freak folk flag here in 2025. Jessica Pratt, for instance, comes to mind as an artist

who I think was adjacent to that scene early on and she's moved on from their sense, but there's still the seeds of that music and what she's doing. So yeah, I'm all in. Bring Feefork back. I'm a strong yay. Okay, so cut that and we'll go to the Instagram with that and get tons and tons of likes, because I guess that is a way to measure popularity in 2025. Yeah, I mean, it's doing numbers. I get also, like, I always get notifications on my Beach House albums ranking list. So these do do numbers. Oh yeah, my Oasis concert thing. I still get people chiming in about that all the time. So thank you for the Instagram and TikTok people out there. Let's do a mailbag segment this week, Ian. We haven't done one in a while. We've been a while. We've run long on some of our other episodes.

we've had to cut the mailbag out at the last minute. But let's catch up on some of our emails here. It's always great to hear from our listeners. If you want to hit us up, we're at Indycastmailbag at gmail.com. This first email is pretty fun once you read this one. Yeah, this is a fun one. So this comes to us from Jeff in Enfield, Connecticut, and it's about the best day bands.

It would be fun to hear you guys rank these bands. Happy Mondays, till Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, the Sundays. Thanks, Jeff and Enfield, Connecticut. Medicaid. Wow. Yeah, I love this question. It's interesting. Are there not any bands called Friday or Saturday? So I'm thinking on a Friday, you know, that's the pre-Radiohead Radiohead band, right? That's right. Okay. Yeah, and Saturday, kind of a quasi-recommendation corner, Saturday's at your place. They're a, they're kind of like an emo revival revival band that is dropping a new album today. So, yeah, I would say those two. But other than that, yeah, I don't have a lot.

lot of trouble thinking of them. Yeah, you would think that the two most rock and roll days on the calendar would have the most bands named after them, but apparently that's not the case. So in terms of ranking these bands, I feel like our rankings are going to be pretty different. Because I have a feeling I know it's going to be your number one. I think you're going to put Happy Mondays in number one, right? Yeah, yeah, I gave Thrill's Pills, and Bellyakes a 9.5 in a Sunday review. And I love Happy Mondays because they were, They were kind of the oasis of the Bad Chester scene, which, you know,

Oasis grew out of. They were rowdies for like in spiral carpets. But Happy Mondays understood that bands of that ilk, they just, their priorities were, one, doing drugs, two, looking cool. And if they made great music, that's just the bonus. After you're done with this episode and you need to pick me up, go watch the video for Happy Mondays, Kinky Afro. There is no better example of a band looking cool.

No bands ever looked cooler than that video. You don't think it's the Stone Roses, though? I feel like they are the Oasis. I mean, they are the Oasis precursor band. I guess so, but I think that the Stone Roses did not lack for self-belief. You know, they ended that album with I Am the Resurrection. But, yeah, I think that, like, Happy Mondays were funnier. I think that's the difference.

Like, Stone Roses were unintentionally funny. Anytime you see an Ian Brown picture nowadays, he just looks like ridiculous. Whereas, you know, Happy Mondays had a guy dancing on state. Like, Bez, he was, that guy was awesome. I mean, I'm going to disagree on the Ian Brown thing. I think the Stone Roses look pretty cool.

I would say that Oasis. They look cool as fuck, but they weren't funny like Oasis. Yeah, Oasis is almost like, musically like the Stone Roses and attitude like the Happy Mondays. It's almost like bringing those two together into one package, which I appreciate. They're like my number three band here. I'm putting Wednesday at number one for me.

And then I'm putting till Tuesday at number two, just because Voices Carey is an amazing song. And I think I like that one song more than any Happy Monday song. Because Happy Mondays to me, ultimately, like the fictional version of them and 24-hour party people is like my favorite version of them. Like, that's who I think about. Like, I think about them giving rat poison to birds and the birds just falling down on that, you know, that scene in the movie, 25-hour party people. Yeah, that rules. Or like when they're like saying, yeah, we're going out to get a, we're going to get a Kentucky.

They're talking about like Kentucky fried chicken. And in their day, that was like their slang word for heroin. But in the movie, they actually get Kentucky fried chicken. And then they like hold their, uh, their tapes, the tapes for their new record hostage. And don't they end up like giving up for like 50 bucks? Yeah. Or something like that. And then they get the tapes and it's just like the same sounding instrumental over and over again.

There's like no vocals because. as Sean Ryder messed up his voice like smoking crack and Barbados and so like this is this is all stuff that really happened

and they had like two memp they had I think Chris and Tina from the happy not from the talking heads there to produce the album

they like sold all the furniture to buy drugs and they came back with it the album itself is fine but yes

it's just one of the most unbelievable store like lore that you can imagine the Happy Monday's rule can we do a shout-out to 24-hour party people because I wrote a column this week on my favorite

musician biopics of all time. And I'm not going to say where 24-hour party people landed, but let's just say it's extremely high on the list. I feel like when people talk about biopics, they don't remember that movie because it's primarily about Tony Wilson, but it's also like a Joy Division movie and then a Happy Monday's movie. It's like a one hour. It's like the first hour's joy division, the second hour is Happy Mondays.

And there's also like a separate Joy Division biopic that came out after that movie, but I don't know. I think it's like one of the best rock movies of all time. No question. It's like a documentary, but also like a mockumentary at the same time, especially when it gets into the Happy Mondays part

because this whole scene was just so ridiculous. Well, and just like Steve Coogan too is great. Who looks and sounds nothing like the real Tony Wilson, but is amazing in that movie. Yeah. All right. So you got Wednesday till Tuesday. My number two, of course, is Thursday. You know, Jeff Rickley, it's my dude. I've had a long, whining relationship with that guy. Love him as a person. Yeah, I don't go as deep as somewhat expect with this band. They were, they kind of kind of after like my peak involvement in emo music. And my favorite album of theirs, which is a really unpopular opinion, is a city by the light divided. That was the one that they put out in 2006. It was, uh, on island records sort of like war all the time but it was produced by dave friedman it got a one and a half star review in rolling stone and in uh dan ozies sellout like you just hear from all the label people who think it's uh you know it's a crap record i love it it rules um second like like you know would be

uh full collapse of course war all the time i find to be pretty impenetentiful and i also like the last album they did with dave friedman uh in 2011 wednesday i'll put it number three um i like i i like I don't love them as much as I think I should, but, you know, they're up there till Tuesday. I'm going to put over the Sundays. I mean, I haven't heard another song there's besides voices carry, but the Sundays, I think they're a better band, but they are one of those bands, sort of like Massey Star, that you see referenced by so many boring bands nowadays that they kind of get nicked by association. So like I said, I had Wednesday at number one, till Tuesday at number two, mainly because

of voices carry. Although Amy Mann, I'm going to group her solo career until Tuesday, so they get credit for that. Three happy Mondays. Number four, I had the Sundays, basically because I like their cover of Wild Horses. So that's mainly one song from the Sundays. And then Thursday I put it last just because I haven't really listened to them. So no disrespect to them. I just have heard them the least out of any of these bands. So they're at number five. All right. So let's get to our next email here. This one comes from Penelope, who's originally from Pittsburgh, and she currently lives in the research triangle in North Carolina. I don't know what that means. It's like Raleigh-Durham area, UNC, Duke, cool place to be. Chapel Hill, cool place to be. And it's known as the Research Triangle.

to do a lot of research there? Yes. Okay. Yeah, a lot of universities. Pretty cool place in North Carolina. Well, Penelope, we should be asking you questions because you're doing all this research. So you probably know more about everything than we do. Anyway, Penelope, I wanted to ask you guys for your opinions of the alleged music fashion rule

that says you shouldn't wear a band shirt to their concerts. Personally, I think the fashion rule is just a bunch of snobbery and unhelpful gatekeeping or an arbitrary dividing line between a so-called real-fessional. fans and so-called posers. I guess in this, the people that wear the shirt of the band to the show as a poser, I guess would be in the, in the binary that she is disputing. I wore a Metallica shirt to a Metallica concert and a U-2 shirt to a U-2 concert and kids of other fans did likewise. Besides, I'm pretty sure bands don't think it's lame when fans wear their band shirts to their concerts. What are your thoughts? So this is a question that comes up periodically. Can you wear

a shirt of the band to that band's show. My question is, is this a thing that only exists in the universe of PCU where Jeremy Piven says that line? I don't think that this comes up in real life ever as so much as like people parodying that one line in an obscure college movie from the 90s. But yeah, I don't think I've met anyone who actually cares, but I could be wrong about that. No, that's the, I think it's the, I think it is the PCU thing. Okay. I don't know if they invented that, but that movie, which like you said, is relatively obscure. I don't know if anyone could really say anything else about it, although I'm sure we'll hear from people that are PCU heads.

It's got George Clinton and like John Favro, like looking nothing like, like, nothing like you'd ever seen him. Like a member of Sublime, basically, he looks like. Even before Sublime was popular. he goes on this rant or maybe he makes fun of someone who wears the shirt of the band to the show. And I've heard other people say that. I actually wrote a column. Yeah, I wrote a column about that once where someone else asked me if it was okay to wear a shirt of the band to a concert. And just to begin with, like, who really cares?

Like what someone else does? Of course you can do whatever you want. But is it a fashion faux pa to do that? And I think it's interesting because if you look at certain scenes, I would say the opposite is true. Like if you go to like a metal show, like she mentioned Metallica, I feel like you see lots of people wearing Metallica shirts. Or if you go see Slayer.

You're going to see like a lot of Slayer shirts. And typically people are trying to like wear shirts from other tours. And it's almost like a sign of pride that like, oh yeah, I've been a fan since like the 86 Master of Puppets tour. I go all the way back to, you know, metal up your ass, like 1981. You know, and you see that in jam band circles too. Like if you go to a fish show, you're going to see a lot of fish shirts. And it's going to be like a lot of tour shirts. So I don't think this even exists in like a lot of different scenes out there.

It probably is maybe more of an indie rock thing. I think indie rock is like a very self-consum. conscious genre. Although I don't even know if that's true anymore. There's like a certain kind of like record store guy maybe that would make fun of you for this. But this really is, I think, a bygone opinion at this point. Yeah, I wonder if bands would be more upset when you're wearing other people's merch.

It's like, yo, you're coming. Like, what are you doing wearing this band shirt like at our show? And for me seeing, I mean, I think it's one of the, one of the always interesting thing. It's just like a consumer of culture. see okay what kind of band shirts or other like you know fans also like sort of thing and then it's demoralizing because like it seems like 50 to 60 percent of the shows I go to you find at least two or three idols t-shirts so yeah yeah I would imagine in the emo world you're gonna probably see some even though idols aren't emo but uh there are j I think emo a lot of emo people will probably

age into that you know you don't see the green turnstadding the hyena hoodie like you did throughout the entire 2010 but yeah you see a lot of ice you see a lot of I mean, I guess the argument would be that you're treating music like sports. Yeah. You know, so you're wearing the shirt like a fan of sports would wear like a jersey to a show and that's lame. Again, I don't really get it. You know, like especially at this point. I mean, I'm a guy who's nearing 50 years old. I know nothing about what's cool. So I would never judge anyone for what they're going to wear. But, yeah, I don't know.

I think you'd have to go to, like, a pretty snooty, like, old-school indie rock show. Like, maybe if you go see this Bell and Sebastian tour and you wear the Bell and Sebastian shirt, maybe there, there would be, like, some horn-rimmed glasses type, like, the last horn-rid glasses type roaming in the wild, who would, like, secretly judge you to his non-existent friend. Yeah, or maybe they just have, like, a dress code where you got to wear, like, the button up, you wore it like your C-suite executive job. We've now reached the part of our episode that we call Recommendation Corner where

Ian and I talk about something that we're into this week. Ian, why don't you go first? All right, I want to talk about Slipknotts, 2001 masterpiece Iowa. Finally, I was waiting for this. But no, yeah, if you know me and you follow me on Twitter and whatnot, you know this week, Aljancappwalter, I had to actually look up how to pronounce that name again. They are putting out their new album, their first and 14. years called trying not to have a thought. I interviewed them for Pitchfork. You can go see that.

That debuted a couple months ago. So this is the band that more or less started the Emo revival in 2008 with their debut, some kind of Cadwell Otter. They said, we sound like Cap and Jazz in an interview, and that things took off from there. And they've been one of the more popular and influential bands of that era, especially the part like before people like me started covering it. Parrot Flies came out in 2011. That was like kind of more jammy. And, you know, gave an indication of how Joan Reinhart, the guitarist, would sound when he started playing with Hopalong. They reunited in 2022 and like so many bands of this ilk. They reunited and sound so much better than they did when they were actually an active band because, you know, they learned how to play their instruments.

They sound tight. They sound refreshed. This album, I don't know if I can say it's like their best album because their debut is pretty influential and iconic. but I would call it on a comeback album on the level of like MBV or slow dive for this genre. It is incredible how good this album is. It might be my favorite of the year. They can describe it as a combination of cap and jazz and pavement, and that's like pretty accurate. It has their basement show energy, but it applies it to the thousand cap rooms that they're playing now.

It's more politics, more adventurous, more everything. I can't ask for more. This is such a gift, the album. So check it out today. So I want to talk about a band called Liquid Mike. They have an album out today called Hell is an airport. You might remember me talking about this band last year. Their 2024 record Paul Bunyan Slingshot was one of my favorites of that year. They made my top 10. I think it might have made my top five. Really good record, really hooky rock music drawing on a lot of 90s rock influences, a lot of Weezer, a little bit of

Everclear. You got some super drag and super chunk in there, as well as guided by voices. Lyrically, also, they bring a lot to the table. This band is from Marquette, Michigan, which is in the Upper Peninsula, small town, although a big town for that part of the state. And they write a lot about small town life, wanting to break out of your town, but also still feeling connected to it. Songs about, like, substance abuse, alcohol, drugs, things of that nature. Things that if you've ever lived in a town like that, you will recognize.

It's, again, all wrapped up. this really punchy, tuneful rock and roll package. There's 14 songs on this record. They fly by in 27 minutes. It's just really, really good rock music being performed with a lot of skill and effectiveness, with, again, that lyrical element that I think adds humor as well as a real sense of melancholy

to the songs. So this is a band I really like a lot. This album isn't reinventing the wheel for this band by any means. if you liked Paul Bunyan's Slinghot, you're going to like this record. It says more really good rock songs. Again, the band is called Liquid Mike,

and the album is called Hellsend Airport, and I recommend it. That about does it for this episode of Indycast. We'll be back with more news reviews and hashing out trends next week. And if you're looking for more music recommendations, sign up for the Indie Mix Taped newsletter. You can go to uprocks.com backslash indie,

and I recommend five albums per week, and we'll send it directly. to your email box.