The Hype Cycle of a Small Genre
How Bedroom Pop’s Trajectory Informs Today’s Shoegaze Fascination and Where It May Go Next
For a few years now, and I mean years, I’ve been trying to put into words what happened to “lo-fi bedroom pop.” Dylan Gamez Citron, the force behind bedbug, did it better than I ever could. Leave it to a fan-turned-practitioner to narrate discovering and riding the mid-2010s small music wave better than a simple writer! I have already read the essay twice and plan to read it again in the future.
It’s a balm for me: Dylan’s experience of coming into this music online and feeling kinship with people who had stupid, hard-to-quantify feelings that made it onto homespun music resonates with my own. I can remember finding “Jimi Bleachball” by Foxes in Fiction at 16 (via Pandora!) and being completely taken by it. I then remember listening to the album it lives on, Swung From the Branches, and being pretty challenged. It led me to Orchid Tapes’ Tumblr, where I found music by Sam Ray, Rachel Levy, Mat Cothran, Alex G, and so many more before I was out of high school. One month before leaving Cleveland for college, I saw Cothran headline as Elvis Depressedly with Mitski and Gabby’s World opening, all coming from different corners of this nascent, personal, cheesy indie space, and I was permanently hooked. Farewell to the days of swallowing corporate indie on Sirius XMU; there’s something deeper out there.
By the time I sunk my teeth into the bedroom pop universe, itself an uneasy conglomerate of geographies, labels, and musicians, it had exploded into a proper trend with big indie labels like Domino and Run For Cover backing the most popular practitioners. Some artists positioned themselves as singer-songwriters, others as rock bands, others as haunting electronic composers. Their shared reverence for homemade music, do-it-yourself practice, and willingness to, at risk of cringe, “go there” tied them together beyond just shared time and place. Little blogs from Post-Trash to The Le Sigh and tape labels from Birdtapes to Z Tapes kept the fire burning.
Oddly enough, bedroom pop’s turning point came when The Le Sigh was planning to retire its coverage. Toward the end of the short-lived but influential blog’s life, its editors compiled their third compilation of female and non-binary musicians on clear cassettes with the help of Father/Daughter Records (in this scene, the cassette was everything; the recorded tape hiss on top of the tape hiss that came from playing the recording doubled the warmth). The comp featured demos, b-sides, and loosies from blog favorites like Fern Mayo, Katie Dey, Florry’s Francie Cool and Remember Sports’ Addie Pray. It also featured a new song from Boston-based Claire Cottrill, better known as Clairo, called “Pretty Girl.”
I was gallivanting around Europe at the time, on a break from American indie culture, studying feminist theory with a bunch of liberal arts students. So, I wasn’t aware that “Pretty Girl” took on a life of its own after the comp’s release. Today, the video young Cottrill made for it in her room is achingly close to 100 million views. The young DIY enthusiast, with the help of savvy folks in her orbit, inked deals with management, a label, and more. Cottrill is two albums plus several EPs, loosies, and features into an alt pop career that has careened between sounds. But, her shadow over bedroom pop loomed so large, it couldn’t help but alter its course permanently.
If you read Dylan’s piece while listening to “Pretty Girl,” you can pick out the specific components that make Cottrill’s song prototypical bedroom pop. The plainspoken, low-fidelity vocals, chintzy keyboard, and bedroom visuals check the boxes. Plus, it’s a catchy tune, hard not to love. Another early hit, “Flaming Hot Cheetos,” is rife with bedroom-pop-keys and sincere vocals. But, both songs feel a good distance removed from The Microphones of 15 years prior or even Frankie Cosmos. Cottrill and her collaborators dabbled more heavily in downtempo, R&B, and hip hop, which was on its own trajectory toward all things chill and minimalist. A coterie of stoner-friendly downtempo R&B-informed pop artists seemed to grow to prominence at once around Clairo: Cuco, boy pablo, beabadoobee, Rex Orange County, BENEE…the list goes on. While these musicians are all doing something different and have their own distinct histories, geographies, and scenes of origin, their proximity is not unlike that of the lo-fi bedroom pop scene Dylan describes, but there are a few key differences.
Once a thing in music, whether it’s a sound, artist, genre or whatever, becomes a thing, the suits find ways to keep that thing propped up. At Spotify, that might look like new playlists, either genre primers or curatorial ventures like Lorem or POLLEN. On YouTube, that might look like David Dean Burkhart pivoting from publishing found-footage music videos on YouTube to posting dozens of favorite songs with their accompanying album art per week in full collaboration with publicists. This switch coinciding with the gradual, then all-at-once, shift in the aesthetics of “lo-fi bedroom pop” reinforced the shift’s inevitability. Playlists and YouTube aggregators—Burkhart, thelazylazyme, and i’m cyborg but that’s ok, among others—shared single after single from rising artists in this space, reinforcing to newer, younger, and broader audiences what the bedroom pop sound would be at the close of the 2010s. By the COVID-19 lockdown in early 2020, when BENEE and Gus Dapperton’s bubblegum Billie Eilish song “Supalonely” became the song to use on Tik Tok, bedroom pop’s transition was functionally complete. Some of early lo-fi bedroom pop’s favorite practitioners had fallen in disgrace, others had pivoted towards entirely different music-making practices commensurate with their newfound budgets. The garden wasn’t being tended.
It would be one thing to lament the genre’s transition to a different sound. I’ve seen plenty of Twitter tears poured over that. For several reasons, I don’t especially care. Some of the music is quite good (listen to waterbaby) and genres have always been porous. But now, in 2024, I look back at some of these rising stars and wonder where they’re at. For a hot minute now, it seemed like the boy pablos, mxmtooms, chloe moriondos, and Frances Forevers of the world were going to be the defining alternative acts of the 2020s. While they all have music careers that are nothing to sneeze at, the truth is much more complicated, especially as the industry forgoes artist development with the expectation that the young upstarts they find on Tik Tok will be ready-made performers and record slingers. To the dismay of industry heads, of course, they’re just as human as the last batch of musicians who rode a hype wave.
In 2020, NBC and other major news aggregators’ curiosity about bedroom pop felt like a watershed moment for the genre, but today, bedroom pop feels somewhat bygone. The upper echelons of the music industry are pushing their pop stars farther than ever before and regional rap has had a moment, culminating in the unlikely celebrity of Ice Spice. Bedroom pop will always have an outsized space in the streaming world, whether it be on YouTube or Spotify, but its place in the conversation is sort of quiet, kind of like the sounds it makes. The subgenre in the indie-major crossover space right now, however, is shoegaze. Eli Enis has been a fierce cataloguer of America’s growing shoegaze scenes and the tidal wave of shoegaze and hazy slowcore that has had Tik Tok in a tizzy. The winds are changing course.
What’s happening with shoegaze and slowcore feels not unlike bedroom pop: devotees of the critically adored subgenres like Blue Smiley and Horse Jumper of Love are cult favorites, and boundary-pushers like They Are Gutting A Body Of Water are getting more and more attention. Frontman Doug Dulgarian’s reactions on Twitter to TAGABOW’s newfound attention and the constant chatter about what a trailblazer he is of “Philly shoegaze” are met with an uneasiness I can remember Sam Ray embodying a decade ago when he was so ascendant in bedroom pop, a label he didn’t really take on himself. There’s extremely exciting new music being made in this space. Bands like feeble little horse, Full Body 2, A Country Western, Spirit of the Beehive, Knifeplay, trauma ray, Bleary Eyed, and the adjacent but wholly different bands with which they play from @ to Wednesday are all really onto something. While this is unfolding, the industry is latching onto Whirr-inspired bedroom shoegaze projects from young viral upstarts like quannnic, Wisp, flyingfish, julie, and so many more. Their definition of shoegaze or slowcore, and how they make it, differs meaningfully from prior generations. It’s inspired uneasiness from shoegaze musicians and critics alike, but that skepticism is nothing compared to the enthusiasm being poured onto these new musicians.
What their influence will do to the genre’s memory and present position is basically impossible to know, but I fear it will follow the same trajectory as bedroom pop. Hopefully, all of these young musicians can grow into the writers and performers they aspire to be and dazzle audiences for generations to come, setting the agenda for the alternative scene with every single and album. But, I don’t have faith in the industry to support that, and I wouldn’t be surprised if these young musicians pivot towards making music that’s more true to their own form a la Jane Remover or even Girlpool before their split. There will be a postmortem like Dylan’s for the late ‘10s/early ‘20s shoegaze scene when it inevitably wanes in favor of something else. Young fans will find themselves disoriented as the modes of gazing their favorite artists’ chose due to necessity or reverence for the subculture’s originators, from A.R. Kane to my bloody valentine, are replicated with an unseemly cleanliness. It won’t offer the same emotional resonance; it’s not equipped to do so.
Spotify already has playlists like side effects and IRL Angel to help catalyze the transition from subculture to…well, the purgatory of whatever bedroom pop is now. Everything feels like a death knell after what happened to the first scene I loved, so hopefully I’m wrong, but also, I feel like this is the natural life cycle of hype. It’ll be exciting to see how the artists I love continue to make music that’s true to them. That’s all I could ever want, as a fan and a critic.
Here is a list of favorite projects from that time, place, and sonic space. Some are active today, some are not, some under different auspices, none of them sound quite the same, and all a privilege to return to:
i tried to run away when i was 6
…and more, but i’m almost at max length