Into The Music
Indie folk took a critical beating in the early 2010s. After a decade of Sufjan Stevens and Iron and Wine and Bon Iver creating genuinely extraordinary records, the genre seemed to spawn an infinite number of imitators: bearded men with acoustic guitars and hushed voices and too many string arrangements, all making music that felt like a Flickr photo given sound. The backlash was swift and occasionally vicious.
Here’s the thing: most of those criticisms were right about the worst examples of the genre and almost completely missed the best ones. Indie folk when it works is some of the most emotionally precise music being made. It requires actual songwriting craft in a way that production-heavy genres don’t – you can’t hide behind the beat. The melody has to carry the weight, the lyrics have to justify the plainness of the delivery, and the arrangement has to do something other than suggest pleasant vibes.
The genre traces through folk revival (Joan Baez, Bob Dylan), to singer-songwriter culture of the 70s (Carole King, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell – especially Mitchell, who is indie folk’s most important ancestor even though the terminology didn’t exist yet), through alt-country in the 90s, and into the 2000s wave that Pitchfork championed and then gently retreated from when it became commercially successful enough to seem uncool.
Current artists doing interesting things in this space: Adrianne Lenker (Big Thief’s frontperson, whose solo records are extraordinary), Phoebe Bridgers (who successfully crossed the genre into mainstream visibility without losing the intimacy), Samia (whose Honey is one of the better recent records in this territory), and Julien Baker whose recordings are so emotionally direct they can be difficult to listen to in the best way.
The genre’s critics were right that it attracted too many performers who confused quiet delivery for emotional depth. But confusing the imitations with the real thing is the easiest mistake to make in any genre. Indie folk at its best is adult music that treats its listeners as adults – no theatrical gestures, no production tricks to cover for thin songs. Just the song, and whether it earns your attention. That’s a harder standard than it looks, and the artists who meet it are worth finding.
Now here’s a thing I’ve been mulling for years. When I think about what indie folk draws on, I keep coming back to the folk revival of the early 60s the Kingston Trio, then Peter Paul and Mary, then Dylan pulling the whole thing sideways. What the genre keeps rediscovering is that simplicity is hard. The critics who took shots at indie folk were usually reacting to the imitations the beards, the banjos, the aesthetic without the substance. But the real lineage? That goes back to Appalachian ballads, field recordings, oral tradition. The craft is old and it keeps reasserting itself. Good article for remembering that.
‘Stopped apologizing’ is doing a lot of work in that headline. Indie folk’s problem was never the genre itself it was the decade of self-conscious earnestness that made every song feel like it came with a handwritten apology note. Genesis, Yes, ELP they never apologized for ambition or complexity. The issue with indie folk is the opposite: apologizing for being too simple. Neither extreme works. The bands that actually last are the ones that commit to something without making you feel guilty for listening.
‘Stopped apologizing,’ aight but indie folk been borrowing from Black music traditions for decades without apologizing for that either. Appalachian music has African roots people don’t talk about enough. So sure, stop apologizing, but maybe also start acknowledging.
The backlash this article mentions hit hardest around 2011-2013 and honestly I understood it, every coffeeshop sounded the same. But the same thing happened to grunge after Nirvana blew up: a million imitators made people hate the original thing, which is absurd when you go back and actually listen to Mudhoney or Dinosaur Jr. The genre was always better than its worst imitators.
Look, country music has been going through this exact same apology cycle for thirty years and we’re still here. Every few years someone declares it dead or embarrassing and then some artist comes along and makes it undeniable again. Indie folk will be fine. The problem was never the genre.
What the article calls ‘stopped apologizing’ might be better understood as a belated maturation , and I say that as someone who spent years deep in prog and psych, genres that had their own crisis of credibility in the late 70s and never fully recovered their reputation with critics. The interesting thing about indie folk, at least to me, is that its best work was always essentially a response to the loss of the concept album , a way of putting emotional narrative back into popular music after punk stripped it out. Artists like Sufjan Stevens were essentially making concept albums disguised as intimate singer-songwriter records, and the backlash came when everyone downstream stopped doing the concept part and just kept the whisper-and-banjo aesthetic. What remains now that the imitators have cleared out is maybe the actual thing.
Oh, I have feelings about this. I saw Joni Mitchell in ’74 at a theater that held maybe 800 people , you could hear every breath , and the idea that anyone would call that kind of music ‘apologetic’ or embarrassing would have been unthinkable. Then the 80s happened and suddenly everything had to be big and loud and produced within an inch of its life, and yes, the folk people got self-conscious. My daughter got really into the Fleet Foxes record back around 2008 and I remember thinking, oh, this is what Joni was doing, it just took thirty years to come back around. The craft never went anywhere. The confidence in it just took a detour.
The phrase ‘stopped apologizing’ is doing interesting work here. In mbalax , the Senegalese dance music Youssou N’Dour helped bring to the world , there was never an apology phase, because the music was never seeking outside validation to begin with. It knew what it was. I wonder if what the article is describing as indie folk ‘stopping apologizing’ is actually something different: a realization, perhaps belated, that you cannot build a genre’s soul on borrowed coolness. The craft was always there in the Appalachian traditions, in the fingerpicking schools, in the oral transmission of songs across generations. The apology was always the anomaly.
Look I’m a soca and dancehall girl through and through so indie folk is not exactly my first stop on a Friday night, but I respect any genre that builds real community around it. What I’d love to see is more producers finding that crossover space , like what Burna Boy does mixing Afrobeats and folk guitar textures. When indie folk stops apologizing, maybe it also stops being so insular? The rhythm is RIGHT THERE waiting to be unlocked.
Reading this piece felt like a slow exhale. I’ve been sitting with a lot of indie folk lately during my evening meditations , there’s something in the space it creates, the way a bare vocal and acoustic guitar can settle the nervous system in a way that even my usual ambient playlists sometimes don’t. When music stops trying to prove itself and just… breathes, you can feel it working differently in the body. Whether it stopped apologizing or just learned to trust its own stillness, I’m grateful it’s still here.
‘stopped apologizing’ is fine but the best indie folk was always the stuff recorded in someone’s kitchen anyway. the craft was never the problem, the industry sheen was.
What indie folk figured out , and what the backlash never really grappled with , is that stripping back the harmony creates more harmonic responsibility, not less. When you’re just a voice and a guitar, every chord substitution is exposed. The artists who survived the backlash intact are almost always the ones who actually know what they’re doing theoretically, even if they’d never describe it that way. The imitations got washed out because they borrowed the aesthetic without the underlying structure.