Singer-songwriter Mitski’s 'My Love Mine All Mine,' has, for 12 weeks, been on the Billboard Hot 100, an unusual metric of success for a wholly independent artist. And for 10 weeks, her indie rock-meets-chamber pop-meets-country held the No. 1 position on Billboard’s TikTok trending chart.
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Mitski is, of course, not the first indie artist to explore weeping Americana sounds. Soloists Angel Olsen and Waxahatchee, or groups like Plains, Wednesday and two-thirds of the Grammy-nominated band boygenius. Lucinda Williams ’ “too country for rock ‘n’ roll, too rock ‘n’ roll for country” style is a clear predecessor; and every few generations, it seems like a great new band pulls from alt-country’s narrative specificity.
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In 2023, indie artists like Mitski and Olsen offered an alternative to the pop-country acts dominating mainstream charts like Morgan Wallen (in picture), Luke Combs, and Jason Aldean. The movement is led by female performers, for one, and artists who don’t immediately fit into a traditional genre format. They also offer an alternative to traditional images of indie rock: instead of shying away from their geographic identities — like moving to New York and smoothing out to “y’alls” and “ma’ams” from their speech and music — they’re embracing them. Banjos and lap steel abound . Songs about God, rural roads, trucks, guns, humidity, and crickets do, too.
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Indie rock’s current adoption of country comes at a time of increased global interest in country music, including that of Luke Combs, and Jason Aldean (pictured). According to the Midyear Music Report for data and analytics platform Luminate, country music experienced its biggest streaming week ever last year, a whopping 2.26 billion. The genre has historically been enjoyed by English-speaking Americans, but their reporting shows growth in non-Anglophonic territories such as Philippines, Indonesia, India, Brazil, Mexico, Germany, and Vietnam.
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Jess Williamson of Plains sees the connection to country music from a more traditional indie rock audience as a post-COVID-19 lockdown revelation. “We saw people leaving cities, moving to smaller towns and out to the country. We saw people in cities baking bread, starting herb gardens, craving something simple, nostalgic, and that feels good,” she said. “On tour, we covered ‘Goodbye Earl’ by the Chicks , everyone is singing along, and that’s the least cool s--- I can imagine. People are through being cool and are embracing who we are and what we really like. And for a lot of people, that’s country music.”
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Karly Hartzman, frontperson of the Ashville band Wednesday, has never left North Carolina. “I think where we live is inseparable from our music at this point. Of course, we are influenced by country music, but country music sounds and feels the way it does because of the environment it’s made in. A great country song feels like where it’s from,” she says. Wednesday’s 2023 full-length “Rat Saw God” made AP’s best albums of the year list for its alt-country rock sensibility, where pulling the listener into the quiet parts of a Carolinas hometown is as much a part of the sonic fabric as lap steel or guitar fuzz or a poetic line sung out of key.
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