The other day, I was talking on Bluesky with Slumberland’s Mike Schulman about the Just A Taste compilation of early singles from Australia’s Summershine label he released back in 1995. All excellent jangly indiepop from down under despite no household name among them, not even for most indiepop fans, though I mentioned The Sugargliders here before. My favourite song on the compilation is 1,000 Years, a beautiful jangly love song by Perth’s The Rainyard. That version isn’t online, this version called 1,000 Days is and I am glad I can share it.

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In the early years of this century, I was pursuing a career in mathematics. At one of many seminars I attended, I may have run into Dan Snaith, who was doing the same, in a similar field (unlike me, he did finish his PhD). Now Dan is, according to Wikipedia, a “composer, musician, and recording artist”. He does so under various names, with Caribou probably the best known. I love Cabirou’s indietronica – indie in spirit, techno in body – and this Broke My Heart in particular; it was one of my favourite songs from 2024. 

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I saw earlier music by The Paranoyds (of Los Angeles) described as “synth punk”. That seems accurate, but on this song (from a just released EP) the synths are less prominent. Punk it still is, but more of the cute indiepop variant (there are ooo ooo backing vocals!), the one that I could imagine being released on K Records. If this kind of music is making a resurgence (this month only, I wrote about Josie, The TSG and Heather the Jerk, all of whom sound vaguely similar), then I’m all for it.

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I often forget what an incredibly unique band Young Marble Giants were. Active for just three years, they released only one album (1980’s Colossal Youth). On Bandcamp they self-identify as ‘post-punk’, a label that is fitting (the prominent bass line in particular), except that this is post-punk stripped down to its minimalist core, creating very intimate music. It makes you understand why generations of indiepop bands mention the Welsh band as an influence. Just like minimalist punk may be the best punk (Beat Happening, anyone?) minimalist post-punk is the best post-punk. And YMG were so good.

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I’m not necessarily proud of it, but these days I find myself regularly singing “Fighting makes you feel strong / Killing really turns you on”. From a song called Death Destruction Mayhem. Huh? My excuse: it is a really catchy song by hardcore punk band Ceremony, from just north of San Francisco. Like, really catchy, showing that hardcore punk is just pop, except sung with a bit more anger. The band has a history on Matador Records, so are no strangers to the indie world, but this song is from an upcoming album on Relapse, which feels a more natural home.

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I am – I may have mentioned this – very song-oriented and with a song comes someone singing. Or rapping, or mumbling even, but still: a human voice. John Girgus (he was in Sarah Records band Aberdeen) has a human voice, I know from some of the other things he released under the name Legendary House Cats. But under that name he also put out three albums with instrumental songs, of which Out Of Reach is my favourite. Field Mice-y synthpop where you expect someone to start singing any moment, except at the end you realise you never missed it.

(After writing this blog post, I discovered there is a non-instrumental version of the song too. Oh well.)

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I have never been to Peru, but I read atlases so I know the country has a huge coastline. I guess people surf. I know for certain there is a band that plays surf garage rock. Manganzoides they are called and they just celebrated their 30-year anniversary with a compilation Dosis completa on local Buh Records (who are worth following if you’re into heavier indie from Latin America). With its catchy reverb going straight back to Dick Dale, this Musaraña, originally from 2001, is my favourite. You might like it too.

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No matter in which order you put the words ‘indie’, ‘pop’, ‘garage’ and ‘punk’, it applies to Heather the Jerk: raw, simple, lo-fi and full of energy. Heather the Jerk is the solo-project of Heather Sawyer from Madison, Wisconsin but because it is 2026 you can sound like a full band on your own, including ooo ooo ooo background vocals. Heather the Jerk released a full-length cassette in February of this year, but those five months since count as fifty punk years, so here is 74 seconds’ worth of new song, just released as a digital single.

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The girl from Broken Social Scene’s 2002 song Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl (“Used to be one of the rotten ones”) will be in her forties now. Time goes fast like that. The song by the Toronto collective (who are still making music, even though it never again got this good) is timeless though. Dreamy, mesmerizing and the right kind of repetitive – the one that makes you play the song again and again. “Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me”. And so on.

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“SEO wet dream”, @ (pronounced: ‘at’) describes itself on its Bandcamp. That is true, but I did end up finding that Bandcamp so we’re all good. We’re also good about the music: a duo making acoustic folk-pop whose influences go all the way back to that folk duo from sixty years ago, but whose more eerie songs could also have been released on K Records. And on this Autosmile, which was just released as a single, they remind me a bit of The Softies. I love this. Don’t @ me. Or maybe do.

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The TSG is a new band fronted by Taylor Stewart, who also plays drums in The Tubs. The latter have gotten reasonably popular recently (reviews on Pitchfork, a Wikipedia page, that kind of stuff), which you’d expect from their fairly polished janglepop. The TSG is not that: raw, simple punk pop that focuses more on making it to the end of the song than on colouring within the lines. And if I’m honest, that’s how I often like my music best. They just released their debut 7” single on London’s Gob Nation of which this Ramones-y Alright is my favourite.

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My favourite Rolling Stones song is Mother’s Little Helper (which is about, to quote Wikipedia, “the popularity of prescribed tranquilisers like Valium among housewives”) but whenever I listen to it, I can’t help thinking of Cresoxipropanediol En Capsule by the late French actress Ginette Garcin, which I like a lot more. In it Garcin, who died in 2010 aged 82, lists a series of fictional medications with long names that she takes whenever she isn’t feeling well. In a glass of sugar water and, probably, with a strong french r.

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Pa pa pa pa pa pa. If you start a song like that, it can’t really go wrong. The Story Of A Fool (As Told By The Fool Herself) certainly doesn’t go wrong. 91 seconds – I counted – of bouncy happy indie punk pop. Josie is from Copenhagen, Denmark, though with members from all over Europe. They list Shop Assistants and Talulah Gosh as their influences (this song reminds me in particular of the former) and have been a support act for Shonen Knife. I can imagine why Shonen Knife would be a fan. I am a fan.

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It is very much not the end of summer here in the Northern Hemisphere and the way things are going with climate change, summer won’t be gone until November, but I’m really enjoying this Summer’s Gone by Oakland’s Twin Bloom. Jangly-but-melancholic indiepop that borrows heavily from Bay Area music from both the past six and past sixty years. Local label Dandy Boy (a favourite here) also mentions Teenage Fanclub as a reference and that’s not a million miles off either. I hope I get to hear a lot more music by the band. Preferably before the summer is gone.

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Bleka Dödens Minut (a band with members from various other Swedish bands) is named after a 100-year old Swedish poem but, as far as I can tell, the eponymous song doesn’t follow the poem’s lyrics. Nor does the music sound as grim as the name, which apparently translates to Pale Minute of Death, or statements like “Life is pain. Get used to disappointment.“ suggest. Rather, this is in-your-face jangle pop that gives you some extra energy at the end of a long day at work. It does that to me anyway.

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I can’t believe it was seventeen years ago that I flew to Berlin to see the Lucksmiths‘ last ever European gig; they have now been a former band for longer than they ever were a band. Of all the bands I love, the Lucksmiths are somewhere near the very top. There are many songs of theirs that I absolutely adore and in recent years I have grown very fond of this cover of a song by fellow Australians The Sugargliders. The original is pretty great already and, I recently learned, is on YouTube. But this version is hauntingly beautiful.

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Beyond ‘favouriting’ the odd song on a music app, I had not paid proper attention to North London’s The Leaf Library until last week. This despite their ‘electric drone pop’, as they call it themselves, really being my thing. Sure, this kind of music, also known as ‘heirs to Stereolab’, can easily become a bit monotonous and hide in the background, but the Leaf Library sounds fresh and exciting even on their fourth album (After The Rain, Strange Seeds, just released on Fika Recordings), of which this Still & Moving is my favourite song. Totally my thing.

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The Chutes are Kenny and Erika, husband and wife from San Francisco (they’re named after a former amusement park in the city), who are about to release their self-titled 7-track debut album on local Dandy Boy Records. This Scraping the Last Bits of Light has been pre-released as a teaser and it really makes me want to listen to the other six songs: upbeat, confident indiepop with call-and-response vocals that befit a married couple. The duo appears to have a history in the local hardcore scene but, no disrespect to punks, there’s very little anger here and I like that.

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Another reunion: after a 32-year break, Heavens to Betsy is playing live again. Heavens to Betsy was Corin Tucker’s band before she formed the better known Sleater-Kinney. I’ve always had a weak spot for them and in particular the quiet, atypically introspective punk of this White Girl, written decades before George Floyd’s murder made some white people confront their inner racism, at least for a while. I hope they play it during their reunion gigs, but even if they don’t it’s worth listening to several times in a row. Especially today.

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“Liberty Belle is a band named after this great album from The Go-Betweens”, according to Bandcamp. In fact, it is one person, Jean-François Cantot from France, who has been writing songs for the past 35 years and now released eleven of them as the album 11 Songs. I like it, especially opener Time Step, which even more than the other songs reminds me of The Go-Betweens (the band’s later work in particular). I’m not complaining, if anything provides me with an excuse to listen to that band again. But the 95 seconds of this song are also really good.

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Named after Primal Scream’s contribution to the legendary C86 compilation, Velocity Girl was one of America’s earlier indiepop bands. In the early 1990s, the DC area band released three albums and many singles. Their sound was a bit heavier than their British influences – they released albums on Sub Pop – but still really good indiepop. Most indiepop purists would argue that their early stuff was the best and as luck would have it, Slumberland is about to release a compilation with some of their early songs, including this Forgotten Favorite, which the same label released as a single back in 1991. 

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Almost three decades in, Death Cab For Cutie remains one of the best band names out there. Music wise, I find their songs pleasant enough, but I am more into the synth pop of Ben Gibbard’s other band, The Postal Service. That’s probably why this Trap Door is my favourite song of DCFC’s most recent album, I Built You A Tower: it’s the most electronic among the songs: a steady background beat of a song that builds up to a cute keyboard solo. That’s more than pleasant enough, actually. 

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I had forgotten I knew about Vivian Girls until Tidal reminded me. Wild Eyes is from 2008, when I was very busy with life and didn’t pay much attention to new music. I wish I had as this is how I like my indiepop: mixing the best parts of Black Tambourine, Henry’s Dress and — to use a non-American reference — the Tidy-Ups. 2008 is so long ago already, but one of the best parts of the Internet is that I can listen to it on places like Tidal or Bandcamp as if this is fresh. And it does sound fresh.

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Night-blooming Jasmin is one of several alternative names of cestrum nocturnum, a plant in the potato family. It is also, with slightly different spelling and punctuation, the name of a song by UK underground rapper fakemink, that has been stuck in my head for the past few days. It has a lo-fi feel to it and doesn’t feel very in your face, more like mumbling out loud. I am not a huge connaisseur of the genre, but this is how I like my hip hop. “Ayy, night, bloom Jasmine, second name Yasmin / Th-they wanna eat me alive, can’t stop them”.

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I’m following the football World Cup more than I expected. It’s fun, with all the usual caveats. I didn’t see any Scotland game though and I know I won’t see any because the Tartan Army is already out of the tournament. That leaves me with It Only Takes One Lion, the unofficial theme song Belle and Sebastian (introduction not needed) wrote in support of their country’s football team. No, it doesn’t come close to the band’s best work (like most indiepop fans, that’s their 1990s work), but it’s fun, catchy and – very rightly, given history – says “we love Haiti” too.

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More laptop twee! New York state duo ear (stylised in lowercase) is more laptop than twee. Given the choice I side with the latter, but that doesn’t stop me from enjoying the duo’s music. In particular this Ne Plus Ultra (released as a single, and also available on the band’s recently released second album Rumspringa), that sounds like a quiet, introverted version of the Femcels, with whom it shares its sketchiness. And I happen to love sketchy, introverted pop songs.

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They were certainly not the first all-girl indiepop band, but given their name they are kind of the quintessential one and, actually, one of the best too: All Girl Summer Fun Band. I fondly remember the few shows they played in my native Netherlands back in 2003 and I am happy to hear the band is still playing the occasional gig. Such as this weekend in their native Portland at the awesomely named and themed Menopunkpapalooza festival, in support of the Menopunks documentary. You’re very lucky if you are going. For everyone else, here is the band’s timeless theme song.

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Look, I can wait until mid August when label Slumberland says the upcoming third album by Real Numbers (of Minneapolis, Minnesota) will be released. Or I can just get really excited about Never Never Again, the one song that has been pre-released and that reminds me more than a bit of Razorcuts (mid-1980s English indiepop is a good reference for the band’s previous work too), including lyrics like “What’s to be done about it / No use to dance around it / You know I thought about it all”. So I’ll just do that.

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Megan From Work is looking for a new bass player to join the band. If you’re interested and you’re available to practice Tuesday nights in Manchester, New Hampshire (or Thursdays, if that works better for you) and willing to go on tour with them sometimes, drop them an email. You will then be able to say that one of pop music’s best band names of the moment is a little bit yours too. And you get to play edgy power pop like this The PIMS (from their 2024 debut Girl Suit, recorded a few years before you joined the band).

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Oh hey, this is fun! I had added Season 2 to my playlist because of a recommendation from I don’t remember where. Then when listening I had to double check to confirm this was released in 2026 and not in 1986 and that this band is from Melbourne, Australia and not from Oxford or Glasgow. They just released their debut album Power of Now with eleven jangly, punky indiepop songs in the style of Shop Assistants or Girls at our Best. I love every single song, it’s just that this What For is the opener that blew me away first.

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Shapes Like People is Carl from England and Kat from New Zealand, now living married life and making music in Wiltshire. And for a change I won’t mention that New Zealand pop label. The jangly indiepop songs sound somewhere between the early indiepop from Glasgow 1984 and the sixties pop from San Francisco 1968. I like it, just as much as I like their description of their “utterly quaint British country home topped with traditional thatched roof”. That sounds like the right kind of middle-aged life. “Don’t change the view, grow gracefully older”.

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I think I’ve said this before, but when indie folk hits things right, it is really good. Angelo De Augustine is from Southern California, is “has his own Wikipedia page” big, and though I just discovered him has released no fewer than six albums; Goodbye Baby Blue is from his latest album Angel In Plainclothes. He has performed with Sufjan Stevens, whom I somehow never got into, but for me in this beautifully quiet song it is comparisons with Elliot Smith, Kings of Convenience or, much further back, Nick Drake that I use as rational explanations for really loving it.

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The six members of The Kind Hills met while studying in Perth, Australia. They now live on four different continents, but that hasn’t stopped them from being a band with what looks like already a pretty impressive collection of releases. Their latest album Little Epiphanies is my first introduction to them and I have become a fan. It’s simple, cute indiepop, a bit dreamy here and a bit electronic there and surprisingly varied. I Need A Holiday is the song that keeps popping up in my head and it seems fitting given the season. “Not quite soon but right away”!

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My friend told me the other day he had dreamt of Beulah. Then a few days later, I found their 1999 album When Your Heartstrings Break in a record store. I don’t know how often I would have thought of the San Francisco band otherwise, but I am glad I did. Elephant 6 pop in its purest form (so that’s the triple-B influence of Beach Boys, Beatles and Byrds), more smooth than other E6 bands and with this awesomely titled We Can Land a Man on the Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart as a perfect album finisher.

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Kids these days don’t know this but early Mountain Goats releases (some of which on cassette only) included some lo-fi casio music. It’s those songs that The Chop’s The Auditor reminds me of, and guess what it is also from a cassette-only release, on Vancouver’s Lost Sound Tapes label. Musically, this husband and wife duo is probably closer to Casiotone for the Painfully Alone: lo-fi bedroom indie dance music, with Gemma’s prominent vocals, despite the duo residing in Glasgow, Scotland, sounding very English. I like it.

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A loud punk band? On my blog? Yes, I am not someone to join the mosh pit, but instead prefer to stay quietly on the outside, with the other indiepop kids. But this song by Minneapolis’s Dillinger Four, their first in many years apparently, is loud but also so… catchy. As if Mac Superchunk got himself a skateboard. And it keeps popping up in my head, which makes it deserve its place on the blog.  

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I’ve had Prism Shores’ I Didn’t Mean To Change Your Mind on my playlist since it first appeared as a single in February but never got round to writing about it. Now a full album (Softest Attack, their second) has come out and while it contains some fine jangly pop, this remains my favourite song by far. The band is one quarter New Zealander (and three quarters Canadian) and that makes the Flying Nun comparison an easy one to make, but the song could easily have been released on that label, two or three decades ago.

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Two albums in (Love You Hate You is from their 2025 debut), there is so little to find about The Parker Posies (from Oak Bay, BC, Canada, apparently) that someone suggested they may have been AI generated. It would be truly sad if it were. This sounds very human: very “awkward high school kids with an appropriately lo-fi production singing about love” that is the core of indiepop. Let’s hope they’re just too shy to do anything but sing cute songs. “Sitting on my bed / Feeling so alone / Dreaming of your smile / Wishing you would phone”. 

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More than this blog would suggest, I am really into electronic music. My neurodivergent nature however means I am really not a club person. Which is why my ideal kind of electronic music is somewhat introverted, music that I can dance to, but quietly in the safety of my living room. Zoumer really fits that bill. It is the alter ego of Yasmina Derradj, living in Copenhagen and from Algerian descent, something reflected in the title e.a.l. (euro arab lovergirl) on her recently released second album (from which this is taken), as well as her North-African influences.

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Sometimes it takes me months of brooding to find something to write about a song I like. And sometimes I get inspired to write on the first listen. That is what happened to Fall Breaks, self-described as “the recording project of a 16-year-old music nerd” to which I add that he is from Uberlândia, Brazil. I’ve been in love with his Unmarked EP (his fifth, according to Bandcamp) since yesterday. Laid back, synth-driven indiepop that occupies the space somewhere between Sarah Records and Jesus & Mary Chain. Of which there is quite a lot these days. But this is really good.

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Oakland’s Dandy Boy Records describes Above Me as “the main songwriting vehicle for San Francisco based artist Rick Altieri”. As part of Blue Ocean, Rick released two albums on another Oakland label, Slumberland. The dreamy shoegaze of that band (and many other bands on that label) is a good reference for Above Me, though here the synths and drums play a more prominent role, making me almost write ‘soundscapes’. I say almost, as underneath the electronics this Water Drops, like most of Above Me’s debut album Soften The Blows, is a really fine pop song.

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I started a new job last week and went to a conference right away. That was great. It was also mentally exhausting and that is when I fall back to ‘safe bands’. The Softies are a very safe band. There is a lot to say about all the bands Jen and Rose were in too, because that matters, but The Softies are also two women, two guitars, two voices and very intimate songs. This is from their 2024 comeback album, that I love to bits and is as good as their early work. I am so glad The Softies exist.

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There is a kind of synth-driven indiepop that goes all the way to British bands like the Field Mice and Another Sunny Day back in the 1980s. It was very popular in Sweden in the early 2000s, when that country was an indiepop Valhalla (and this kind of music was particularly popular) and now lives on in bands like Vain Pursuit, who I discovered recently through the JanglePopHub blog. Vain Pursuit appears to be the solo project of Vinny Ball from New York and ten (digital) singles in, Fears (from 2023) is my favourite song.

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More laptop twee! Josephine’s Next Million Miles (cool band name, BTW) are a four-piece from New York City. They share with bands like London’s Worldpeace DMT and The Femcels a playful enthusiasm and a childish seriousness (or serious childishness) that goes all the way back to the original twee pop from the 1980s. I would gladly recommend any song from their recently released debut album Buckle Up (out on dawk26). I’m choosing this Summer Song because it reminds me of Architecture in Helsinki who, come to think about it, were kind of proto-laptop twee.

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This week, a friend scanned the first band interview I ever did, in 1996, with Peter Hughes of DiskothiQ. I didn’t know what to ask a band – I still don’t – and most questions were about the European tour Hughes had just done with the Mountain Goats, whom he would later join as a full-time bass player. DiskothiQ ceased to exist around the turn of the century, but not before they had planted this very catchy (that bass line!) simple 3-minute pop song (a lo-fi pop variant of college rock, if you need a description before you listen) in my brain.

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Chicago’s Sunday Records was active in the 1990s and early 2000s, releasing 7” singles and CDs by legendary indiepop bands such as Fat Tulips, The Cat’s Miaow and Aberdeen. They returned in 2018 to release some great music from all over the world, all musically going back to 1980s Britain, the golden age of indiepop. Sheffield’s The Suncharms are not only British themselves, they also go back to the 1980s; like the label they reformed some years ago. The songwriting and vocals here remind me a lot of Razocuts, if perhaps slightly more shoegaze-y. Great stuff for any day.

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Someone wrote a book about The Clean. And though it may never reach the top of my To Read pile, it was a good reason to listen to some of the songs of the legendary and influential New Zealand band. Thankfully, The Guardian compiled a list of ten essential songs. Of which this 1994 song Secret Place is my favourite. Less Velvet Underground than a lot of their other music and more jangly organ-led pop like, say, The Bats. Which I guess is hardly surprising as the song is written and sung by Robert Scott, who is in both bands.

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The thing with reading announcements of upcoming releases is that I get impatient and end up falling in love with previous work and then write about that. So with apologies to Love, Burns (Phil Sutton of Brooklyn, NY; previously of Comet Gain, Kicker and others): their new album Pavement Drawings will be out in a month, but I currently really love its 2024 predecessor Blue and this Hard To Fall in particular. For fans of 1980s British new wave (say Aztec Camera, but less Scottish). And, well, with more to come in a month.

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I saw a video of Loren Vanderbilt performing with Heavenly and that reminded me that I had never posted anything by Humdrum, of which Loren is the main member. And that despite this There And Back Again being one of my favourite songs of the past few years, one that even made it to my very selective playlist with favourite songs I put on when I am sad and need grounding. It is happy, it is pure indiepop, British at heart but Chicago by location, obviously released on Slumberland but also reminding me a lot of mid 2000s Matinée records. 

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In what feels like last week but was actually the beginning of the century, I traveled to Sweden for a tiny indiepop festival. One of the bands that performed was Dorotea, a then very young trio from Gothenburg who played very energetic, punky indiepop, as if the Ramones were decent people and into indiepop. Speaking of decent, Decent is my favourite song (at 84 seconds far from their shortest) by the band, who were still going a dozen years later when they played the song at Indietracks and had not lost any bit of their youthful energy.

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