Indie music has grown to include so much. It’s not just music that is released on independent labels, but speaks to an aesthetic that deviates from the norm and follows its own weirdo heart. It can come in the form of rock music, pop, or folk. In a sense, it says as much about the people that are drawn to it as it does about the people that make it.
Every week, Uproxx is rounding up the best new indie music from the past seven days. This week, we got new music from Jane Remover, Julien Baker & Torres, Model/Actriz, and more.
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Model/Actriz – “Cinderella”
When Cole Haden was a kid, he briefly entertained the idea of dressing up like Cinderella for his birthday party. Although he soon dismissed the thought for fear of judgment, Haden finally gets the party he wanted so long ago on Model/Actriz’s latest song, “Cinderella.” The lead single for their sophomore album, Pirouette, functions perfectly as the soundtrack for the noise-rock band’s ball. A syncopated dance beat, rumbling bass, and rhythmic guitar harmonics accompany Haden’s spoken-word erotica: “The way you speak it makes me want to cry / Velvet jacket lined with satin resting on your thigh.” It’s by no means a conventional party, but Model/Actriz is by no means a conventional band.
Jenny Hval – “To Be A Rose”
Even the faintest scents can conjure the most powerful memories. On “To Be A Rose,” Jenny Hval recalls all the cigarettes her mother smoked. Invoking Gertrude Stein, the Norwegian artist sings “a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose is a cigarette.” In Hval’s world, natural, floral smells turn into chemical vapor. As the lead single for her ninth album, Iris Silver Mist, it’s a potent reminder that nothing is what it seems in her surrealist universe. It’s a construction of her own making, where anything can be anything, where olfactory stimulation induces self-reflection.
Panda Bear – Sinister Grift
Noah Lennox cannot be stopped. Following a renaissance with his band Animal Collective and several collaborative records with Sonic Boom, Lennox has shared the first Panda Bear solo album in six years. Sinister Grift plays like an amalgamation of his variegated career, such as the dub-inflected “50mg” and the Beach Boys-channeling opener “Praise.” It hammers home the notion that Panda Bear is as far from a monolith as you can possibly get.
Cloakroom – Last Leg Of The Human Table
Cloakroom’s last album, 2022’s Dissolution Wave, was a concept record centered on an asteroid miner lost in the vast nothingness of space. It may not come packaged with a sci-fi narrative, but Last Leg Of The Human Table, the Indiana trio’s new record, conjures similarly gloomy visions of a society on the brink of total collapse. Concise, dreamy, and noisy, Last Leg Of The Human Table is the group’s best work yet. Their varied influences, from shoegaze and doom metal to new wave and dream-pop, come together on an adventurous record that both expands and crystallizes their core sound.
Deafheaven – “Heathen”
2021’s shoegaze exercise Infinite Granite marked a first for Deafheaven: clean vocals. Although the black metal band has gone back to their heavier, punishing sounds for the forthcoming Lonely People With Power, its latest single, “Heathen,” shows that Deafheaven haven’t completely done away with melodic singing. The song opens with George Clarke’s soft voice in the verse, but by the time that first chorus comes, he unleashes his signature curdling screams. Wielding ugliness and beauty in tandem is one of the band’s most compelling tricks, and Deafheaven pull it off with aplomb on “Heathen.”
Momma – “Bottle Blonde”
Momma’s next album, Welcome To My Blue Sky, is just a month away from release. But the Brooklyn band, led by songwriting duo Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten, have given us another glimpse of what’s to come. “Bottle Blonde” concerns itself with the sometimes arduous, sometimes fun lifestyle of a touring musician. When 2022’s Household Name garnered Momma a significantly larger fan base, they traveled from city to city, again and again, to play show after show. Despite the manifold demands of touring, Momma perseveres and comes out the other side, reinvigorated.
Jane Remover – “Dancing With Your Eyes Closed”
The last time we heard from Jane Remover, it was through their sprawling post-rock side project, Venturing. Now they’re fully back in Jane mode with “Dancing With Your Eyes Closed,” a digicore anthem for the ages. Their dizzying production, from aggressive sidechaining and beat switch-ups to glitchy chiptune synths and noisy drum machines, remains one of the best qualities of their music. Taken from the forthcoming Revengeseekerz, “Dancing With Your Eyes Closed” hints at a record guaranteed to be among the best of the year.
Jim Legxacy – “Father”
On 2023’s Homeless N**** Pop Music, Jim Legxacy invoked his father on “Call Ur Dad,” in which he chastised him and asked in a pleading falsetto: “Why would you leave me in this house to burn down? We were a team and you abandoned all our dreams.” On his latest single, “Father,” he revisits the difficulties of growing up without a dad, and he meets a woman with a similar story of abandonment. “She said she grew up all alone, had no father / She’s independent, wanna spend my money on her,” he sings in the chorus. Incorporating a sample of George Smallwood’s “I Love My Father,” Jim Legxacy flips the source material on its head to present his own contextualization.
Julien Baker & Torres – “Tuesday”
Indie rockers Julien Baker and Torres (AKA Mackenzie Scott) are diving headfirst into country with the forthcoming Send A Prayer My Way. It’s something of a reclamation, a reminder of women’s contributions to country music and how they have gone long overlooked by larger institutions like Nashville and commercial radio. On “Tuesday,” its latest single, Scott takes the lead, regaling us with a tale of sapphic love and a homophobic mother. Although the relationship eventually turns sour, Scott does get the last word, appropriately at the track’s end: “If you hear this song, tell your mama she can go suck an egg.” End of discussion!
Mdou Moctar – Tears Of Injustice
Mdou Moctar’s Funeral For Justice was the sound of a ferocious revolution, one that railed against settler colonialism and upheld the virtues of the Tuareg people. Whereas the Nigerian quartet’s 2024 record was a forthright condemnation and call to arms, its re-recorded acoustic version, Tears Of Injustice, wrestles with the sorrow inherent in cultural erasure. “Sousoume Tamacheq,” for instance, takes on new shades of meaning; on the original album, Moctar sounded angry at how French has usurped Tamasheq as Niger’s predominant tongue, but here, he sounds lamentful. The penultimate “Oh France” transmutes its fury for the titular country’s “lethal games” into grief for Niger’s denizens. Similar to its source material, however, Tears Of Injustice shows that sadness and rage are often closely linked.