Lucy Dacus, Bar Italia, and the Artists Reinventing Indie Rock for a New Generation

At first glance, indie rock in recent times appeared to be on life support.

Fan pages for the AI folk-rock band the Velvet Sundown flooded TikTok. Recommendation engines churned out playlists for everything from “helping you pass a kidney stone” to “watching a commercial for an allergy medicine.” The last true indie artist to win the Grammy for album of the year was Arcade Fire, for The Suburbs, in 2011. But recently, a cohort of indie acts—from singer-songwriters Lucy Dacus and Nate Amos to bands like Momma and Chanel Beads—has been presenting an improbably fresh picture of music’s left-of-center scene, one that evokes the generational breakthrough of ’00s bands like the Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Interpol.

“Indie” is a mercurial term, perhaps best understood as music that exists slightly outside the mainstream and embodies peculiarity over polish. Even the most committed purists have lost count of the genre’s revivals. Since punk, indie has mutated from the DIY drama of Buzzcocks and Hüsker Dü to the alt-frequencies of Sonic Youth and Pavement to the freak-folk flamboyance of Animal Collective and Joanna Newsom.

“Every so often, a generation of bands discovers the Velvet Underground, Television, Suicide, and Talking Heads and tries to write their own version,” said Ronen Givony, author of Us v. Them: The Age of Indie Music and a Decade in New York (2004–2014). What makes this cycle different is that the infrastructure that once sustained independence has been replaced by paywalls and playlists. It’s a far cry from the early-aughts peak, when file-sharing spread the music, blogs boosted scrappy bands, and corporations like Red Bull underwrote shows. Even Jay-Z and Beyoncé caught Grizzly Bear at the Williamsburg Waterfront. “For an indie artist to break through now,” Givony said, “they’re almost doing it with one arm tied behind their back.”

If attention is the scarcest resource in the streaming economy, Lucy Dacus has stood out by doing less. “We’re not meant to understand everything all at once,” she said. “You can only frame one idea.” Forever Is a Feeling, which came out last March, is only her fourth album in 10 years. Boygenius—her supergroup with Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker—dropped their debut album in 2023, toured arenas, and walked away as a Grammy-winning band. “I’m making art selfishly, to understand myself,” Dacus said. “If people don’t like it, that’s their business. If they do, that’s also their business.”

Lucy Dacus

At a recent set in the National Gallery of Ireland, she sang “Modigliani”—a love song about seeing a partner beyond their persona, which Dacus has said is about Baker. Deliberate, with a touch of tremble, her voice echoed through the empty halls, allowing the lyric “You will never be famous to me” to feel romantic, precisely because it was raw. “I don’t know if I would succeed doing it a different way,” she said.

To audiences, that reserve reads as a guarantee that what you’re getting is real because she made it for herself. “I’m not gonna pander to my fans,” she said. “That would feel like a death sentence. I feel sweetly toward my fans. We all chose to be in the same room. Them showing up is such a gift. I’m not entitled to their attention.”

Nate Amos operates with similar self-awareness, albeit with the obsessive tinkering of a mad scientist. Water From Your Eyes, his performance art–rock project with Rachel Brown, has opened for Interpol in Mexico City. With his solo project, This Is Lorelei, Amos endlessly remixes and revisits his extensive back catalog. “The goal is for a song to exist outside of any one version of itself,” he said. His 2024 album, Box for Buddy, Box for Star, mixes irony and openness in songs that land like a gut punch. The compositions proved sturdy enough to function like standards. Alt-country crooner MJ Lenderman transformed one hyperpop-punk track into a retro-country dirge. Geese frontman Cameron Winter performed a grand piano version of “Where’s Your Love Now” on his solo tour. A super deluxe edition of the album, released in April, features guest takes on Amos’s Bandcamp bedroom pop by 10 different acts—among them Fantasy of a Broken Heart and Jeff Tweedy, Power Snatch, Waxahatchee, and Momma. “There’s a secondary gratification when a song survives surgery,” Amos said.

This Is Lorelei

If Dacus, 31, and Amos, 35, represent indie’s new sincerity, Momma might just be the genre’s poppiest architects. On a recent afternoon, singer-guitarists Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten, a pair of late-20-somethings who met in high school outside of Los Angeles, sat at the bar of Forgtmenot, a neighborhood pub in New York’s Chinatown. Weingarten’s cherry-dyed hair matched the spicy watermelon margaritas they had ordered. Behind them, the walls were plastered with vintage concert flyers and other downtown ephemera.

The band, which also features bassist and producer Aron Kobayashi Ritch and drummer Preston Fulks, is often grouped with the gritty ’90s sounds of Veruca Salt or Liz Phair. But Weingarten and Friedman also acknowledge a more mainstream influence: the mid-2000s power-pop-punk of Avril Lavigne, Ashlee Simpson, Hilary Duff, and Disney-era Miley Cyrus. “Those Hannah Montana songs are expertly crafted,” Weingarten said. “There’s a real skill to writing something catchy and timeless.”

That prowess is the secret sauce of Welcome to My Blue Sky, Momma’s fourth album. By beefing up the pop-punk gloss with fuzzy neo-grunge textures, Momma turns guitar-driven escapism into catchy earworms. The New York Times declared the lead single, “I Want You (Fever),” one of the best songs of 2025, and said it was the shoegaze answer to Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend.”

Momma

The band had just returned from a run through Japan and Australia. In Tokyo, a fan showed up at their hotel to deliver a gift. Friedman recalled that in Sydney crowds went “so fucking hard” for the album’s scream-along hooks: “Australia feels like the farthest place in the world, so to have a bunch of people be that hyped felt crazy.” During a night off at a Sydney karaoke bar, Friedman and Weingarten fronted a live band to perform Tenacious D’s “Tribute,” a song about a demon who threatens to eat a band’s soul unless they play the best song in the world.

These days, making music can feel like a similar Faustian bargain. “We’re not impressed with indie rock right now,” Weingarten said. “We find it to be very algorithmic.” She illustrated the point with an anecdote about hearing Momma play on “some female indie rock” Pandora station at a hair salon. “At first I was like, Woo, okay, fun!” she said. But as the playlist droned on, all the songs sounded the same. She promised herself right then and there that “whatever we do, whether it’s well received or poorly received, I want it to be controversial,” even if that causes “people to hate the next thing we do.” Friedman agreed: “You can’t keep feeding the formula. Maybe we need to just do whatever the fuck we want.”

In a landscape that rewards predictability, other artists are also keeping rock’s rebel spirit alive through disruption. The London trio Bar Italia—Nina Cristante, Sam Fenton, and Jezmi Tarik Fehmi—trade linear storytelling for voyeuristic snapshots. Testing an outside producer for their upcoming album is an intentional act of instability. “We’ve made three or four albums in a certain way,” Fenton said. “It’s almost more exciting that it could go horribly wrong.” Imperfection also guides Chanel Beads, the project of Shane Lavers. On the band’s debut album, Your Day Will Come, digital distortions and archival sound collages suggest subversive counter-programming to an era in which new music rapidly disappears from the Spotify Top 50. “It’s not really a debate or decision when making music,” Lavers said. “It’s more like planting something, and whatever fruit grows is what you have to eat.”

Bar Italia

Chanel Beads

The Philadelphia quartet Mannequin Pussy—singer Marisa “Missy” Dabice, synth guitarist Maxine Steen, drummer Kaleen Reading, and bassist Colins “Bear” Regisford—have had to literally fight not to let streaming platforms define their existence. Searching their name on TikTok once yielded no results, but when they typed “Mannequin Cock,” their music appeared. The platform wasn’t policing obscenity, they concluded—it was policing femininity. Asking Amazon’s Alexa to play Mannequin Pussy caused the device to shut off entirely. Eventually, the tech-bro powers that be backed down and algorithms were reprogrammed so that, as Dabice put it, “the only type of ‘pussy’ that can be searched on TikTok is ‘Mannequin.’ ”

Mannequin Pussy

Their lyrics also flout conventions: “Not a single motherfucker who has tried to lock me up / Could get the collar round my neck or find one that’s big enough,” Dabice growls on the track “Loud Bark,” from the band’s most recent release, I Got Heaven. Pitchfork declared the record a “mouthy, messy” masterpiece. Mannequin Pussy didn’t adapt to the streaming era so much as win it over on their own terms. Like the rest of indie’s new guard, they’re making the industry accommodate them, rather than the other way around.

Mannequin Pussy and Lucy Dacus: Hair by Gregg Lennon Jr. for Oribe at The Only Agency; makeup by Nick Lennon for Prada Beauty at The Only Agency; production: Suki Smith Studios; producer: Julia Steeger; fashion assistants: Anabelle Hernández, Eric Jackson Chen; hair assistant: Emily Blair; makeup assistant: Luna Vela; tailor: Jackie Martirosyan at Susie’s Custom Designs.

Bar Italia: Hair by Kei Terada for Ouai at Julian Watson Agency; makeup by Erin Green for VIOLETTE FR at Artlist Paris; photo assistant: Rory Cole; hair assistant: Takumi Horiwaki; makeup assistant: Hanna Fee Friedrich.

Chanel Beads: Grooming by Ginger Leigh Ryan for Make Up for Ever; photo assistant: Diego Salcedo; fashion assistant: Isabel Choi; special thanks to Flux Studios.

This Is Lorelei: Grooming by Kazu Katahira for Oribe at Forward Artists; photo assistant: Lux Nguyen; fashion assistant: Isabel Choi; grooming assistant: Rio Kinoshita.

Momma: Hair by Ginger Leigh Ryan for Bumble and Bumble; makeup by Mical Klip for Sofie Pavitt Skincare; photo assistant: Huy Vu; fashion assistants: Isabel Choi, Sofia Prochilo; makeup assistant: Mason Harper; special thanks to Forgtmenot.