The Reinvention of the Modern Rock Band

I grew up in the suburbs of Whitby, Ontario, a medium-sized commuter town, a little under an hour’s drive from Toronto. Unlike our neighbouring Oshawa, anything like a “local music scene” was and is pretty much nonexistent (unless you count the rotating roster of a dozen or so dad-rock cover bands that play at the Pearson Pub on weekends). When I was a teenager, playing music with friends usually meant after-school jams in the music room under teacher supervision, or me and one other person playing Weezer covers in a bedroom on a Saturday afternoon—loud enough to be annoying to our parents—but not so loud that the neighbours would call the cops. 

The most “established” musicians were usually SoundCloud rappers and producers because their work didn’t require much physical collaboration or use of a rehearsal space bigger than a bedroom. If you wanted to make loud music with guitars and drums, the options were pretty limited. And if you wanted to perform that music for other people, especially people your own age, your options were even worse; nonexistent. Since there was no cheap music around to go see, there was no tangible, local model for young people to emulate if they wanted to start their own band. 

Ever since the pandemic ended, I’ve made a point of connecting with local musicians and seeing small shows in Oshawa (which, in hindsight, is only a 15 minute drive away, but as a license-less 15 year old that might as well have been a hundred kilometres) as my band attempts to build itself from scratch, and figure out what it even means to be a rock band in 2022. 

With no local scene to participate in, we’ve largely relied on broader scopes by looking into other music scenes from the outside. The Oshawa scene is the one closest to home, but recently, our lenses have been occupied by something really exciting happening in UK indie. In Brixton, South London, there’s a little independent venue called “The Windmill”, which seems to have become something of a cradle for a new British post-punk movement. I won’t go deep into the meaning or extended implications of the term “post-punk,” but it can be described as music that adheres to certain “punk” ideas, like high energy and a DIY ethic, while embracing experimentation and innovation, and taking influence from a variety of genres.

Crowd at The Windmill, Brixton in 2011 (NME)

According to their website, The Windmill is “first and foremost after (booking) quality music,” and this open-ended principle has encouraged some really unique sounds and ideas to emerge. The new post-punk movement blooming in this venue is characterized by experimentation in song structure, harmony, rhythm, lyrical content, instrumentation, and all the other things that usually define rock music. Someone who’s actually been to London could probably tell you about a dozen other equally-significant venues (ones I’ve not discovered), but I’m just going to focus on The Windmill here.

In 2019, all four members of the London-based band Black Midi had graduated from high school, exploding with energy, talent, and a lot of noise to make. They played some of their first shows at The Windmill, and eventually went on to have a residency at the venue, during which they refined their sound. Though they weren’t the first band playing experimental rock music at The Windmill, they were one of the first who really caught the wider world's attention. Their debut, Schlagenheim, is an album about raw energy, specifically the kind of unstable, unpredictable human energy that a piano roll and quantized patterns would have to do a lot of work to emulate. Though some of the rhythms and timbres in songs like “Speedway” or “Near DT, MI” evoke electronic music, the vast majority of the music is played with real guitars and drums, and there’s an overall emphasis on rawness and physicality throughout the album.

And it’s significant that the quartet was so young when it came out too. Bands have been attempting to recapture the raw glory of grunge and punk for years, but Schlagenheim was something new, a uniquely unhinged and anxious kind of post-punk that only Gen Z could create.

Black Midi performing in Reykjavik, Iceland, in 2018 (KEXP)

Many of these bands, including Black Midi, are also associated with the South London-based producer, Dan Carey. Carey has produced for the likes of Sia and Lily Allen, but lately has been turning more of his attention to guitar-based bands like Wet Leg, Fontaines D.C., Black Midi, and Squid. In 2019, Carey’s Speedy Wunderground label released Squid’s Town Centre EP. Town Centre draws from a very British kind of funk, with its high tempo syncopated rhythms, and echoes Talking Heads and LCD Soundsystem with its over-the-top spoken word vocals. Where Squid lacks the freight train weight of Black Midi, they make up for it with a persistent neurotic twitch, which can be felt in their tightly interlocking rhythms and jagged guitar riffs, but they underline it with a strong sense of atmosphere that binds the little pieces together like hot glue. There’s a general sense of anxiety, self-doubt, and societal frustration on Town Centre, all of which are hallmarks of new post-punk. And made relevant as those emotions are tuned in to the current cultural climate, I think that these bands have found a very effective way of communicating them through traditional rock instrumentation.

Black Country, New Road (SPIN)

One of the most popular groups out of this new generation is the six-piece (formerly seven-piece) Black Country, New Road (for the sake of this article abbreviated to BCNR). Their debut For the First Time fits right in with its peers, with non-traditional song structures, crooked, dissonant riffs, and unconventional instrumentation. Alongside the classic lineup of guitars, bass, drums, and keyboard, two of BCNR’s members specialize in saxophone and violin, whose sounds make up a central part of the music. Vocalist Isaac Wood performs in a highly dramatic talk-sing, which is another pretty common thing among their peers, but Wood stands out with a uniquely deep, sensitive voice that shifts between a melancholy mumble and a wretched howl. Perhaps even more special, though, are his lyrics, which are sometimes beautifully elegant, sometimes embarrassingly ridiculous, but always come across as very real. I think that BCNR manages to capture pathos and humanity in a way that their peers don’t always (and may not necessarily be trying to, especially in Black Midi’s case). While Black Midi are reintroducing muscle to guitar music, Black Country, New Road are reminding people of the tactile sensitivity that is so well captured by real instruments in a real space.

The Windmill, despite everything, has not been spared from the conditions threatening live music everywhere. Over the pandemic, there was a big local push to save the venue from permanent closure, with some of the aforementioned bands playing fundraisers for what is clearly such an important part of the community. Maybe it’s just me, but post-pandemic, it seems like there’s been a renewed enthusiasm everywhere for live music and playing with friends, and I think that the recent surge in popularity of guitar-based music is a symptom of that enthusiasm too.

I know I’ve been going on about the virtues of guitar music and of playing real instruments, but I’m not suggesting that this new post-punk movement (or whatever you’d like to call it), or any other new kind of guitar music is on its way to uproot electronic music, nor that it should. I do love electronic music, and I always have, I’d just like to see a world where the two creative approaches can exist in balance with one another—especially coming out of an era where the continuing relevance of loud rock music was a little touch-and-go. Not to suggest, of course, that nobody has made any rock music in the last decade. Plenty of indie and underground guitar bands have been laying the groundwork for bands like Squid or Fontaines D.C., but the spirit of post-punk has been dormant for some time, in my opinion. Bands like Black Country, New Road, reinvigorate my hope that powerful, visceral instrumentation isn’t obsolete just yet.

In the playlist attached to this article, I’ve included some bands from the London post-punk scene, but I’ve also included bands that might not necessarily be grouped in with an act like Black Midi, but who I think are experimenting with new styles of rock music, and who I just wanted to mention.

As a parting thought, I’d like to say that if you’re in a band, or thinking about starting a band but don’t know what to do, don’t be discouraged by what seems like a dispirited musical landscape. If there’s nowhere to rehearse, make a space to rehearse. If there’s no venue, convince a local bar or record store or anywhere else to let you put on a little show. Or even better, invite all your friends to a field somewhere and pull out the acoustic guitars. Whatever it may feel like, there is probably a demand for live music wherever you’re from, and it’s just a matter of letting people know where they can hear it.

If the conditions don’t exist, then build them from scratch.

Header by: Michael Passler