Landfill Indie: Digging Up the Rubbish Pile

By Music Editor Kate Moore

“Landfill Indie” is often used as a derogatory term in the most affectionate way. It is a label many bands dread seeing themselves tossed under but for a certain style, can be inescapable. If you have listened to morning radio at any point in the mid-2000s, it is more likely than not that you have encountered Landfill Indie. During this period, guitar obsessed bands dominated the rock and indie charts - The Fratellis, The Wombats, Razorlight – all characterised by a simple structure and heavy guitar riffs. Since, many of these songs have been dismissed as forgettable or just plain boring. But is that true, or are we dealing with a case of good old fashioned music elitism? What is so wrong with having a boring song, anyway?

The mid-2000s were a rough time. Low-rise skinny jeans were stapled to the front window of every Penneys in Ireland, Louis Walsh was still running rampant around our TV screens, and worst of all, Hozier was still doing his Leaving Cert and had not yet discovered the guitar. Many of you currently reading this would probably have been about three to five years old - a fact the editor feels deeply insecure about - and were luckily unaware of this pop-culture calamity. But there was one thing we did have, and that was good indie rock music. Up the Bracket by The Libertines, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not by the Arctic Monkeys, Tourist History by Two Door Cinema Club, to highlight a few. A veritable army of guitar bands stormed the doors of every HMV across Ireland and the UK, begging to be the next big thing in “Easy to Listen To” and “Mildly Catchy” indie. And therein lay the “problem”, the problem that came to be known as Landfill Indie.

But Kate, our darling music editor, you may be saying: what actually is this Landfill Indie thing? What do Arctic Monkeys have to do with any of this? And to that I say: calm down my sweet children, your time will come. Like, right now. To give you a few examples, Landfill Indie encompasses, Bombay Bicycle Club, The Pigeon Detectives, The Kooks, The Ordinary Boys, Scouting for Girls, Razorlight, Dirty Pretty Things, Editors, Maximo Park – and basically any band that have at least three songs which could fit easily into an episode of Skins. Some of the more iconic tracks: “Fuck Forever” by Babyshambles, “Bang Bang You’re Dead” by Dirty Pretty Things, “America” by Razorlight, and “Naïve” by The Kooks. Landfill Indie can be pretty much understood to be guitar-based music that was rarely massively experimental or genre crossing, with a basic verse-chorus-verse structure, and with relatively simple lyrics. However, does this make it bad, or deserving of being lumped together into one massive mega-category?

The term “Landfill Indie” was first coined by Andrew Harrison in The Word magazine and has since been used by cynical journalists in tear-down think pieces as recently as 2022. Many of the arguments surrounding the use of the term are based on the idea that the music was simply not “good enough” and were mere imitations of bands like The Strokes or The Libertines or Bloc Party. Vice described Landfill Indie musicians as “overwhelmingly white, trilby-doffed men singing about local boozers, university girlfriends and World War II”. Back in the harsh media landscape of the 2010s, the conversation around it became more and more brutal: “All these bands!” commented Simon Reynolds in The Guardian “Where did they come from? Why did they bother? Couldn't they tell they were sh*t?”

It is far too easy to make something a metaphorical punching bag, particularly when in music journalism. In my opinion, the problem with this approach is that it is reductive and over-simplistic. It would be easy to dismiss Landfill Indie as a boring fad of overproduced music that briefly dominated the charts and disappeared after hanging around too long, much like that one guy with a guitar at a party. But this would be far too dismissive of a genre that had no less than massive impact on culture, particularly in Britain. One would be hard pressed to go to any football match in the UK without hearing “Chelsea Dagger” over speakers or as a chant. Early Arctic Monkeys’ albums, although they have somewhat escaped the Landfill Indie label, were the soundtrack to so many early teenage years. Similarly in Ireland, bands like Two Door Cinema Club and The Blizzards became the darlings of both radio and TV advertising, their earworm riffs quickly becoming the soundtrack to brands like Meteor and Debenhams. I can recall a particularly striking moment from my early teens where I found out that one of my friend’s older sisters had dated the bass player in a semi-famous indie band before they reached stardom, and all of a sudden fame seemed achievable for us all. Like it or not, Landfill indie seeped into everyday culture to a point where it was almost inescapable.

Reminiscing on such bands and music (and sometimes even furniture ads) can make many of us joyfully nostalgic, and several questions become inevitable: why are we filing bands and musicians into such a restrictive category? And why is the tone of our conversations around this category so limiting? Most importantly of all: is it just what it seems on the surface – good old fashioned music elitism? So again, the writer begs the question, what is so wrong with a boring song, anyway? Does something have to be innovative, or exemplary, or even interesting to be considered a “good” song? Why is that? Is it because it is the truth or because we as a society tend to value perfectionism or being seen a certain way more than our own enjoyment, and tend to really like viewing ourselves as better than everyone around us, and then projecting that need onto fellow music lovers?

Well, that got a bit intense for a second, but I do not think that it is too far of a reach to say that a lot of the conversation around Landfill Indie is music snobbery.

Some of the greatest songs of the 2000s are classed as Landfill indie. Popularised by Amy Winehouse, the impact of “Valerie” would have been impossible without the existence of Liverpudlian quartet, the Zutons. “Mardy Bum” by Arctic Monkeys, was perhaps the greatest ode ever penned to domestic unrest and lingering nostalgia for a dying relationship. The entirety of Costello Music by The Fratellis is a masterclass in how to write catchy, if lyrically ridiculous, 3-minute indie songs, and it features one of the most recognisable songs possibly ever – the immortal “Chelsea Dagger”. So what if  they are somewhat predictable? So what if they’re not exactly the Ulysess of lyrics? So what if the word “hotel” is used about ninety times in Costello Music? Is it not the inherent point of music to unite people and ro have fun doing it? To make art? And whose job is it to define what constitutes as proper “art”, anyway? 

If there is a reason why being critically lauded makes a song better than a song that made even one listener want to pick up a guitar, I would love to hear it. 

Obviously, it is not quite as black and white – skill, talent, expertise and so much more go into making musical masterpieces that only get better as time passes, and these may be inherently just a little bit better than most Landfill Indie. My point is, why on earth dismiss something just because it is repetitive, or even, and I shudder to say, popular? Especially when it is such a prolific and consistent soundtrack to so many people’s lives. Even if something is mass produced, repetitive, or like everything else, it is still someone’s favourite song. Landfill Indie may have driven music critics crazy in the mid-2000s, but the absolute war waged upon it was, like many of the fashion choices of the 2000s, completely unnecessary. 

So, in the advice of one of the greatest Landfill Indie songs of all time, “Let’s Dance to Joy Division” by The Wombats, let us all relax a little bit and enjoy the music: “Let’s dance to Joy Division / And celebrate the irony / Everything is going wrong / But we’re so happy.”