On this blog, I have several times compared bands to All Girl Summer Fun Band, which I guess makes sense as their name implies a concept as much as a sound. Croutons (“a female power trio from West Seattle”, according to their label Lost Sounds Tapes) certainly follows the same concept, but also fits very tightly in the musical box that has AGSFB written on it: cute, dreamy tweepop songs with girl-group harmonies. Mountains of Blue is the opener of their recently released self-titled debut album (cassette!) and my favourite song, but it is well representative of the whole album.

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Never too old to learn something new, I only very recently figured out that Ladytron is from London, not New York. In my defence, I associate Ladytron with the early 2000s blogosphere when London and New York (and Paris and Munich) seemed to be one thing. I also learned the band is still making music, its eighth album Paradises released last month. I like it, not in part because it’s not very different from early Ladytron, where “a clubby version of Saint Etienne” is the best description I came up with. It certainly applies to this catchy I See Red.

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Some time in the late 1990s, I saw US band Fuck play a show in front of a few dozen people. They had put wind-up toys between them and the public that moved around during the show. Now that’s how you create an intimate atmosphere. It matched the band’s quiet 90s indierock really well: listening to Swinger almost three decades later – someone mentioned the band on instagram and I dug up my favourite songs – I can still picture all those toys doing their thing while the band was playing behind them. Calling this music ‘Fuck’ is the real punk.

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Several albums in, on Tidal, my music streaming platform of choice, Miscellaneous Owl has one fan: me. That’s the true bedroom-indiepop spirit. Miscellaneous Owl is the solo project of Huan-Hua Chye of Madison, Wisconsin, who also sings in the Allo Darlin’-esque Gentle Brontosaurus. In her very prolific solo project she sounds more like a bedroom version of the Magnetic Fields. I really loved her latest album The Wanting Chemical, with this Aspect, Tense probably my favourite. I get Tidal’s message that it’s not everyone’s thing but if you’re into this kind of music, like I am, it is really good.

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I only really like one type of pop music (the simple pop song), but then I hear that in a lot of different kinds of music. Such as in this Falling by Xylitol, the alter ego of British DJ and producer Catherine Backhouse. It’s the final track on an album (Blumenfantasie) filled with jungle and drum & bass (or, as she herself describes it, ‘mitteleuropean melancholy’) that works well for me as background music but my pop-sensitive ears get only really excited for this song, that resembles early 1990s eurohouse. But really, it’s just pop music. 

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I am of the opinion that Yo La Tengo, a pretty fine band in general, would be better if they had Georgia Hubley sing more songs. It’s those more laid back indie songs with female vocals that Yea-Ming and the Rumours reminds me of. The Oakland quartet around singer Yea-Ming Chen (she also sings in Ryli) will release its next album, Residue, in June on local Dandy Boy Records; this lovely Paper Doll, with a subtle country twang, has been released digitally as a teaser to keep us busy and patient.

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I once saw British singer-songwriter Vashti Bunyan play at a music festival curated by Belle & Sebastian. It was a reminder of the influence folk singers like Bunyan had on contemporary indiepop. But there are also more direct heirs to the likes of Vashti Bunyan. Such as New York singer Dagmar Zuniga, who just released an album (with the appropriately poetic title in filth your mystery is kingdom / far smile peasant in yellow music) of quiet folk songs (think candle in the bedroom, not people around the campfire), of which I find this Plenty For All The Masses particularly beautiful.

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My experience living in France was, at best, mixed, but I do really like the language, which seems made for romantic pop songs. Doggy, from the central French town of Limoges, describes itself as a “un groupe d’indiejanglepop” and though influenced by British and American indiepop, thankfully resisted singing in English. I particularly like this Pristine Creusée, with its keyboards and trumpets, but all of their new Un jour parfait album makes for some really pleasant listening. Oh, it is a love song about a garden pool, but in French you can get away with that sort of thing.

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“Bard rap”. Thus describes Hen Ogledd singer Dawn Bothwell her approach to making music. It certainly describes this Scales WIll Fall (from their recent DISCOMBOBULATED album): an 8-minute folk song that refers to many protest movements past and present. Towards the end of the song – not even the longest on the album – It’s hard not to end up singing along to the polyphonic chorus. And you’ll probably have joined them on the barricades too.

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The inspiration for Neutrals’ Steven Proctor, Bus Conductor is an old newspaper article about a Scottish bus driver who gambled away the day’s collections. The song is quintessential Neutrals: Bay Area postpunk-indiepop that recalls Television Personalities or – if anyone remembers them – Milky Wimpshake, with the vocals very prominent in a storytelling way and the songs’ subjects often Scottish/British (their singer is unmistakably Scottish). It is also a really good song: my favourite from their 2024 album New Town Dreams (released, obviously, on Slumberland), which itself remains one of my favourite albums of the post-Covid era. 

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I am currently in a part of the world where it is pretty much impossible to buy or even order new music, making me grateful for places like Bandcamp and Tidal. Those weren’t around two decades ago and I remember searching for years for records by Small Factory of whom I knew some songs from mixtapes. When I finally found their records I wasn’t disappointed: all three albums are good and represent early 1990s US indiepop well, with this Friends still my favourite. Not on Bandcamp (yet?) but it is on Tidal and Spotify for us to enjoy.

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More than three decades after bands like My Bloody Valentine and Ride discovered their own footwear, there is a lot of shoegaze being released. I am not complaining and I am certainly a fan of the dreampop variant that I feel I refer to in every third song I write about. Philadelphia, PA’s Nothing is more noisy than that. On their album they sound at times like Radiohead – that’s nightmare material for me – but this Cannibal World, where the noisy shoegaze is accompanied by a breakbeat rhythm, is welcome to visit me in my dreams.

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I’ve been really into Slippers lately, a Los Angeles band around singer-drummer Madeleine BB. That singer-drummer combination isn’t very common: there’s Genesis, of course, and in indiepop the legendary Lucksmiths. Those are not many miles off, musically, from Slippers: catchy and slightly edgy indiepop with a lo-fi feel to it. For its second album, out in June, Slippers has signed with what feels like its natural home, K Records. Until then, here is the addictive Guess I Started a Band, a non-album single that was released a year ago and could easily serve as the band’s theme song.

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The Pains of Being Pure at Heart recently played in Jakarta, Indonesia and not even for the first time. It makes sense: the country has long had an active indiepop scene. Meraung, from the Jakarta suburb of Bogor, is one band from this scene and their dreampop suggests they have listened to POPBAH more than once. Smile Like The Sun, from the recently released five-song Change EP, is a sweet love song that shows the band sounds as good (and perhaps a bit more confident) as on earlier work, where they sang in Bahasa. “Together, forever, your hand in mine”.

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I was young and eager in the mid 1990s and really into indie rock coming out of the US at the time, but the name Korea Girl (San Jose, California; active 1996-1999) didn’t ring a bell. And I probably would never have discovered them if one of their songs, this Reunion, hadn’t become very popular on TikTok, which helped Tidal recommend it to me. I love the TikTok generation (they did the same to Heavenly, for example) and I really love this sad, reflective indie rock song about an upcoming school reunion.

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Of the Spanish bands in the very international catalog of Madrid’s Elefant Records, La Casa Azul is probably the most popular. It’s not hard to see why, given their happy disco synthpop (that Wikipedia, rightly I think, compares with Japanese Shibuya-kei) is really catchy and sounds many miles more confident than most other indiepop bands. They also do (or did, when I saw them) exciting live shows. It’s never a punishment to listen to their songs. This one, perhaps thanks to the lyrics “Y entrar pletórica a lo Barry White / Una auténtica superstar”, is my favourite.

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I wouldn’t think that “indierock with a country twang” is something that would get me excited but here you go: I absolutely love the 99 seconds of (Crying In The) Sportsbook by Chapel Hill, NC’s Entrez Vous. True, it helps that there is a bit of punk here and even a hint of indiepop, but most of all it is just a very catchy short song. Come in!

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I’m really excited about new ‘classic twee’ bands, such as The Cords, forming and old bands in the genre, such as Heavenly, re-forming. But I’m also excited about the ‘laptop twee’ trend of bands that interpret the genre of cute, playful pop songs with a serious undertone in a new, more electronic (and heavily influenced by electroclash) way. With this dreamy electronic Going Home (“I’m gonna walk when I want, gonna walk when I have to”) London duo Bassvictim fits seamlessly into the box I had previously put Worldpeace DMT and The Femcels in. It’s a very precious box.

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My favourite US power pop song for this month is Bug, by Philadelphia’s Remember Sports. Power pop not a very innovative genre and it’s not even a genre I find myself listening to a lot, but all the way back to Magnapop’s Merry (a personal all-time favourite), it’s a genre that once every while produces songs where everything falls into the right place. And Bug is one of those songs. “There’s more to life than cleaning up my room” after all.

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Portland, Oregon’s The Autocollants are one of so many 1990s indiepop bands who have re-formed to make new music. In this case, an upcoming split 7” with The Cat’s Miaow. That’s also the main musical reference, as both bands make fragile, sweet but sad indiepop songs, with the lo-fi recording making the songs feel very intimate. I’m too impatient to wait for that 7” to be released in May so here’s a three-decades old song (that also recalls Galaxie 500) from an outtakes compilation that I’ve been playing on repeat for weeks. “You are perfect just the way you are”.

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