Indie Grrrl: 10 female musicians shattering the indie rock glass ceiling
by Sam Jennings | @samjexperiment
Those of you who’ve recently heard (and understood) the mighty wisdom of Grace Jones concerning our current milquetoast pop class should be quite disappointed in our apparent lack of true female iconoclasts. It has been a long-held Western assumption that men alone can be mysterious, brilliant, or remote. However, recent years have yielded a small web-based renaissance of indie performers who can now depend of an ever-improving community that spans from various pockets of the Internet to the oft-generous festival circuit. And no one has seen more advance than women songwriters. Here, then, are 10 women who refute that — who create personal (and thoroughly feminine) popular music that handily doubles as (post-?)modern art. With exceptions, these women are generally white and American (yet another problem, perhaps subject for another article?), but regardless embody true, positive change.
This list is not intended to exclude or diminish the talents of those women in absentia, only to celebrate the genius of some of those who now embody a new sexual revolution in the independent world. It does, however, exclude any artist signed to a major label — thus the general absence of R&B, Hip-Hop, Country, and — most lamentably — Lauren Mayberry of CHVRCHES and Fiona Apple. Feel free to tell me who I left out — I welcome the education. And besides — if you care, you’re probably right.
FKA twigs
Born in England and of Jamaican, English, and Spanish descent, FKA twigs (born Tahliah Barnett) started as an A-list music video backup dancer. In her own words: “I would read comments like: ‘I’ve never heard anything like this before, it’s not in a genre.’ And then my picture came out six months later, now she’s an R&B singer.” For a non-white woman especially, negotiating the confines of the industry is a soul-crushing affair. But as FKA twigs, Barnett has since taken up a place as perhaps the most outré pop star in the world (Bjork notwithstanding). She’s an interesting, though not always involving, multi-media artist: EP M3LL155X and its accompanying 16- minute video are brilliant, and exhausting, modern electronic performance art. But first consult her debut LP1 — a thesis, more or less. In time, a masterpiece. More than that, it’s unsettling, fascinating, and daringly coital. It finds both freedom and constriction in sex, as in the modern female body-concept. Her landscapes are twitching, spacious and modern, but the abstraction of words and sounds, particularly when combined with her performance, elevate the music to the complexity of fine art.
Song: Two Weeks (hints of Aaliyah resurrected, like that Queen of the Damned video; spare with melody, but not with words: “I can fuck you better than her.”)
Album: LP1
St. Vincent
I find St. Vincent best in parts — having yet to hear an album that is compulsively listenable front-to-back, since it often seems that her art rock (loosely inherited as it is from Davids Bowie and Byrne, not to mention King Crimson) sometimes sacrifices the art for artifice. But on her best cuts — e.g. “Surgeon”, “Cruel”, “Digital Witness” — her technique never outpaces her craft. “Cruel”, if anything, proves that she’s an uncommonly smart pop writer, as does newest single “Teenage Talk”. Not the genius that some take her for — but a helluva good guitarist, and a helluva live performer. Points for the single about bored masturbation.
Song: Cruel
Album: Strange Mercy (4 great songs, and no bad)
Speedy Ortiz
Graduate-schooled and Boston-based, Speedy Ortiz (née Sadie Dupuis) is firmly DIY, yet word-driven to a point bordering on poesy. Her thorough and outspoken feminism is borderless and seems to come as thoroughly from Sylvia Plath as it does Liz Phair or Destiny’s Child. She recently established an anti-harassment concert hotline. This sort of progress-as-inclusion extends to her music, which avoids being a general update of ‘90s indie guitar rock through sheer unpredictability, and no shortage of shade thrown to the boys. There’s an argument to be made that her stance is too reactionary, but in the rawness of her songs and personality I sense something genuinely proactive, and we are all the better for it.
Song: Puffer (viciously underrated and mostly genre-less)
Album: Foil Deer (see above)
Grimes
Is there a better pop star on the planet? And, yes, from now on we talk about Grimes as a pop star. Surely she’s earned it? Of all the women here, she possesses perhaps the purest talent — she’s not only a stunning singer, but one of our finest working producers. And as Grimes, she endures as one of the most unique pop images I’ve seen: emerging from her first few mysterious projects, finding success with “Visions,” ditching entire albums and developing herself as one of our most bravely vulnerable, transparent artists. Up to this point, her finest music has been seemingly without precedence. “Oblivion” is a masterpiece, elusive and emotional, rich with nostalgia, even as it subverts its themes of fear and sex. “Circumambient” finds a middle ground between Cyndi Lauper and “Windowlicker”. But what to do we really expect from her now? “REALiTi (Demo)” — released this year — was her most beautiful, hopeful song yet, a seeming indicator that Grimes was only going to be greater the clearer she became — and now she says she hates it. At least with Grimes it’s not a game, and I find no reason not to trust that what comes next will be as great as it is honest.
Song: Oblivion
Album: Visions (beauty, fear, robotics; the 21st century as futurist synth pop)
Courtney Barnett
With this year’s “Sometimes I Sit and Think, Sometimes I Just Think,” we at last got a complete picture of Barnett as a songwriter, and she’s many wonderful things: funny, wistful, easily melancholic. But it’s her humility that gets across most. Interesting, then, that she mostly avoids gender politics, even as she catalogues endless forms of Millennial malaise. She appears far more interested in the general and the personal — the all, or else herself as a part of it. Though Australian, she is very much situated within a Midwest 1980s punky, American rock tradition — thus her concerns come across as genuinely middle class in a way that most pop music simply can’t. But if her milieu seems so class-based, her wordy, reflexive couplets (“Underworked and over-sexed/I must express my disinterest,” is a personal favorite) sport a lateral complexity that approaches Dylan and Springsteen. And of course there’s the odd joy of knowing that the modern middle class’ poet laureate is just a normal working-class woman from Down Under.
Song: Elevator Operator (Oliver Paul, suicide prevention, angst, and, yes, elevators)
Album: Sometimes I Sit and Think, Sometimes I Just Sit
Waxahatchee
The rising Philly scene is home to many great Indie bands — e.g. The War on Drugs, Kurt Vile and the Violators, Hop Along — but the reigning DIY queens in the City of Brotherly Love are sisters Allison and Katie Crutchfield. They still work together, but Katie especially has proved to be a wonderful songwriter, singer, and multi-instrumentalist with her project Waxahatchee. There is formal simplicity to her music, which is homey, melodic and disarmingly straightforward. She’s as comfortable trying on shades of Cat Power and Joni Mitchell as she is The Magnetic Fields or Teenage Fanclub, juggling her compassionate feminism with Indie Rock tropes. But there’s a specific softness to every note — even her guitars are fuzzed out, never too loud. It makes every moment welcoming — and kind. She inhabits this space with clarity; even ostensible “rockers” communicate feminine grace, openness, and, most importantly, passion.
Song: Blue (at her most open-eyed)
Album: Ivy Tripp (cluttered with ideas — I imagine much like the house in which she recorded it)
Jenny Hval
Jenny Hval’s recent Kingsize asks two very important — very timely — questions, namely: “What is soft dick rock?” and, “What is it to take care of yourself?” Finally freed from the impenetrable, hook-less fog of her first few albums, Hval’s strange, burbling pop (somehow reminiscent of both Arthur Russell and Boards of Canada) is suddenly fierce, feminist, and bleak. The album itself is cyclical — abstract passages reemerging, songs coming into focus only to return to their original, primal drone. The result is extraordinarily spiritual — obsessed with the subject of the self in our ocean of noise and information, of man and woman and the haze of sex between them. And to that end, lead single “That Battle is Over” proves her most profound moment yet. It is both anthem and anti-anthem — feminist but not necessarily pro-self. It’s even self-righteous and accusatory: “You say I’m free now/That battle is over/And feminism’s over/And socialism’s over.” Until it ends with a perfect lyric for our times: “This is what happens on the edge of history/The Great Eye turns to us/We are the only thing that’s aging/But we don’t know it yet/We cling on to heaven.”
Song: That Battle is Over
Album: Kingsize
Julia Holter
I will admit to not being that familiar with Holter’s last few albums, finding the first couple too obscure to penetrate without protracted, exhausting attentiveness). But she opened up on 2013’s Loud City Song, which was tasteful, lush, and drowning in Ariel Pink-size studio ‘verb. The real standout was “Maxim’s I”, and it appears indicative of the direction she’s taking, especially in her two new singles, “Sea Calls Me Home” and “Feel You”, and her newly-released album. But the underwater carnival that she first toyed with in “Maxim’s” now outright embraces intricate chamber pop. She has a classical musician’s ear for texture, and a pop musician’s craft. Nothing really resolves, there’s only an autumnal sense of resignation on the baroque “Feel You”. But when she sings, “I can’t swim!/It’s lucidity!/So clear!” on “Sea Calls Me Home” she seems peaceful and giddy, comfortable in herself alone. They complement each other quite wonderfully.
Song: Feel You
Album: Loud City Song
Grouper
Grouper does things to you, if you listen close enough. Her vague landscapes sound as if coated in a layer of mist — our impression of her as smudged and bleary as a Monet or Gauguin. She’s technically been releasing albums since the early Aughts, and it’s honestly hard to tell many of them apart. Yet her unflagging melancholy and inherent distance remain forever enticing. She first peaked with 2007’s Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, a haunting album that suggested wintry loneliness and peaceful despair, muffled by a blanket of snow (think Bon Iver, only bleaker.) And she’s since grown, her ambience developing into a sort of folk-musique concrete. With music like this, I often reach out and can’t find a thing to hold on to, but I find myself returning to Grouper again and again, trying to sort out her words and images from their murky watercolor background. This is music that has to sit with you — in your soul, quiet and insular. When it washes over you, it’s hard to tell whether it is that despair or peace that registers most. I’m not sure I can separate the two — and I’m almost certain that’s the point.
Song: Vital (the most beautiful and open she’s ever been)
Album: Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill
Olivia Chaney
With her debut this year, The Longest River, Olivia Chaney proved herself a folk artist of a rare order. Not that she is only that (she is also a fine songwriter), but there is a preservationist’s streak there — whether it’s a Scottish folk song or Purcell — that ends up giving her own material more credence. This is something we don’t get very often in America: a performer lending her own voice to a tradition she has truly taken the time to learn. Our folk music is almost nonexistent — the commercial garbage that passes for it on the Top 40 is generally worse than hair metal. Thankfully, Chaney has her own rich tradition to draw on — particularly the great English singers Linda Thompson and Sandy Denny — but in her own writing, she is most obviously tied to Joni Mitchell, possessing the same reflexive introspection, comfortable within a seeming still image of herself behind her drawing-room piano. And that is where she covers the most ground — settling into an early-middle-age confessional. Her songs are comforting, largely confronting a stressed-out, modern life, finding in herself spirits of older traditions, her detailed romances enriched by these ties to the past.
Song: Swimming in the Longest River (folk as history, psychoanalysis, literature, and, of course, good wordplay)
Album: The Longest River
