Jeans are getting tighter, their waistlines dropping lower and lower.
Your Brandy Melville-worshipping little sister is dangling a digital camera from her wrist, giving a nod of approval before blowing a white flash in your face. “Very Brat, very indie sleaze,” she tells you.
The middle-aged columnists on Vogue are saying it, the girls on TikTok are saying it and Google Trend Analytics is saying it. It’s back. Indie sleaze is back.
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The general consensus is that the term ‘indie sleaze’ is bestowed to the grungy, dishevelled style popularised in the mid-2000s to the 2000s – think hedonistic party pictures taken by Cobrasnake or the voyeuristic camera flashes of Terry Richardson before the American Apparel Helvetica font is applied.
Post the 2008 global financial crisis, millennials pulled on their golden disco pants, neon bangles and shoes that looked like they’d been run over by a truck, not out of irony, but perhaps because it was all they had. Raw, energetic beltings of MGMT, LCD Soundsystem, Crystal Castles and M.I.A bellowed from the speaker of every Bushwick hipster second-hand Toyota.
More than a decade later, the world has changed astronomically with the proliferation of social media, the internet and rapid consumerist centralised trend cycles. Everything needs a genre to be defined by, from the categories “boy-pretty” and “girl-pretty” beauty to personality, fashion and music.
This phenomenon also birthed the term ‘indie sleaze’, a name that didn’t even exist until 2021 to fit current artists and music into an aesthetic pastiche. With a trend that supposedly encourages participants to engage with the present, could it be authentic when the cultural references are largely retrospective?
To understand the resurgence of thre phenomenon, I solicited the opinions of emerging Australian artists and producers that loosely fit the genre: London-based Nuum and Sydney-based Mona Mule.
To Nuum, indie sleaze is a “heavily imaged-based resurgence of 2000s electro-pop core music” which includes the iconic “skinny jeans and leather jackets” and indifference to “pissing people off”.
Sharing this sentiment, Mona particularly emphasises the “attitude” of the original movement that is “irreverent, impulsive and punky” shared by the partying youth getting filthy. She explained that the sound largely sprouted from people “using cheap music equipment out of their homes” and learning to make music from eight-track recorders, cassette tapes and Korg synths – equipment that was essentially easy to use.
Nuum and Mona agree that the figureheads of this resurgence include The Hellp, Snow Strippers and The Dare. Acknowledging that although these artists are different sonically, they are still grouped in the same indie sleaze genre which could be attributed to their similar audiences.
Frustrated that mainstream Australia will only interpret the movement a “billion years late”, Nuum predicts that the music industry will attempt to capitalise and mimic the overseas wave after it has happened. However, Mona upholds an optimistic perspective, naming biblemami and Lucy Lamb as local examples of homegrown indie sleaze.
Cultural critic Frederic Jameson once noted that under postmodernism, cultural products of the past are reconstructed for present consumption without their original substance and depth. This applies to the nostalgia-ridden indie sleaze movement, yet Nuum and Mona are confident that it will transcend beyond imitation to foster genuine cultural innovations.
“I feel comfortable about the genre,” Mona tells me. “Attitude is a great thing for creating new things.” She believed that in an “experimental and fun” environment, new artists can “feel like they have a place” while recognising that it’s always fundamental for artists to look back for inspiration, just as the hipsters were inspired by the mods in the 1960s, with girls cutting bobs and donning miniskirts as symbols for liberation.
Nuum reminds me that while everything is derivative, it is not necessarily bad. After all, doesn’t every artist grow up discovering music through their parents and repeatedly listening to songs that make them feel seen?
By the time you read this, The Dare would’ve completed his debut Australian tour. Wedged between sweaty bodies, ironic tees and iPhones, there will be kids who have never heard of The Metric, Suicide, CSS and the countless other influences that paved the way for the viral audio clip of Girls circulating on their TikTok ‘FYP’ page.
But from a movement that championed reckless self-expression, one must believe that the youth will do what they’ve always done: launch off from this springboard and create something truly meaningful and beautiful, or at least fun.
So maybe I’ll see you there, dancing with The Dare.
