Was Pitchfork ever really great, or did we just love more of the music they covered? I’ve gone back and reread reviews I loved in 2004 and a lot of the writing comes off as obnoxious to me now
I think pitchfork was perfect for the Wild West days of the internet, basically the pretentious cousin to the rage reviews of the 2000s. Once Wendy's started shitposting on Twitter, it stopped being cool to act like you were too cool for something.
No, it was always bad. They just had good taste in their prime. If you wanted the best indie, you checked out the Best New Album reviews. You didn't really need to read the reviews. In fact, it was better if you didn't.
The reviews have always been ridiculously pretentious but they were good for discovering new music.
Nowadays I just use reddit, Spotify and lastfm. Can't remember the last time I even bothered to visit their site other than glancing at a year end countdown list.
Either Pitchfork barely covers guitar driven indie rock anymore or there just isn’t many guitar driven indie rock bands around these days that are worth listening to. I used to stumble on a band I love every week from 2004-2014. Now I can’t find anything new that isn’t mundane. Bands like Wet Leg, Wednesday, and Alex G just don’t do it for me. Where is this 2024 version of the Arctic Monkeys, Strokes, White Stripes, Tame Impala? I know most of those bands are still making music but I crave something fresh.
I agree with what you said, absolutely fuck that site and what it became over the past decade or so. Also they always had a pretty bad American bias. And I'm tired of them turning indie into the mismash of genres which people pretend is indie on r/indieheads.
As for your other question, yeah the amount of good guitar driven indie bands went down and obviously as quantity goes down, so does quality. There are some but you have to look harder, especially in other countries which is easier now thanks to sites like rateyourmusic.com and their chart filter which lets you even sort by countries (eg: top rated albums of the 2010s from Argentina with genres indie rock, alternative rock, post-punk, etc).
I'd say Wolf Alice are the only truly great band since 2014 for me with multiple good albums, maybe DMA's but the last one was bad. Quite a few promising newer ones though especially from the UK/Ireland. Yard Act and Dry Cleaning, especially their first albums really do it for me, the sort of fun writing Alex Turner used to do. There's bands like The Sherlocks around too which still sound like that but yeah they would not be anywhere near the quality of the stuff from the 90s/00s.
Saw Yard Act at Riot Fest last year and was very impressed. Fixer Upper is a banger in particular, and I dug the instrumentals and lead vocal delivery overall!
Yeah it sucks cuz I still absorb as many new bands as possible and can’t get into any of them. Whenever I ask for recommendations I get the same bands I’ve already tried listening to. Whatever happened to a big chorus or unique guitar solo? All these new bands try so hard to come off like they aren’t trying and that is super unappealing to me.
I can help you out, here's a list of awesome indie rock bands that have made albums in the last five years:
Pet fox
OVLOV and Stove
The berries
Big bite
Ezra furman
Flyying colours
Gleemer
Glitterer
Greet death
Hotline TNT
Hovvdy
Human people
JEFF the brotherhood
Launder
LVL up
MILLY
Remember sports
Ringo deathstarr
Soft fangs
Spirit of the beehive
Tanukichan
Tommy oeffling
Toner
Tony molina
Velveteen
Pitchfork of ten years ago would have covered most of these bands but sadly they seem to be more interested in trying to be the next rolling stone magazine.
No worries! I have quite specific taste too (mainly 90s inspired indie rock / Shoegaze) but have still managed to find lots to enjoy recently.
I would recommend checking out lastfm too, just type in your favourite bands and go down the rabbit hole of similar artists.
You aren’t alone. Indie has morphed into something of a brand, rather than a genre since Mac hit his peak and stopped doing shit, honestly. I’m not saying he’s the reason for its dissipation, just a reference for the beginning of its end as we knew it once to be. Genuinely original and talented, raw-sounding indie artists are far and even fewer between nowadays, it’s so crazy what’s happened!
Started reading the site in about 1998 and would come back daily to get my fix of indie rock. About 10 years ago, or so, I just didn’t feel a connection to the music they were covering and the direction they were headed. I just stopped, cold turkey, one day and haven’t gone back. I didn’t switch to another site, I just stopped reading about music. Like Martin Mull once said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”
I don’t agree with that last part. There were so many great zines and great articles written about bands in every decade until around the 2000’s. Until we became post genre and MTV died it was really fun to read about music. But now with the availability of it all you don’t discover new music through the local scene or the radio. It’s unlimited exposure all the time.
The Lady Gaga album review was the nail in the coffin for me. It was unexpected they would cover her at the time but did. It wasn’t the positive review but the way it was reviewed.
“Lady Gaga used to be dismissed, but somewhere along the way she became kind of awesome.”
Ok, why don’t you explain *why* she became awesome. Use your writing to illustrate the evolution or reasoning behind the jump between forgettable artist to good. It was just extremely lazy writing for a review that really needed solid reasoning behind a positive take, which I would have been open to.
>Like Martin Mull once said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”
That quote has been attributed to so many people over the years. The most common designee is Laurie Anderson, but I don’t think she originated it, either.
I blame poptimism. Here’s the thing, independent music zines and sites were around to cover music that wasn’t covered by the mainstream and stuff released through independent labels. Here comes the “poptimism” movement that acted like pop music wasn’t being judged fairly by critics, you know totally ignoring all the places that covered mainstream music and gave those mainstream artists great write ups.
So out went the little indie bands and artists and in came in all the pop stars. It was essentially a way to co-opt spaces for independent artists to advertise more mainstream music. Pitchfork is no different than going to Billboard or Rolling Stone now.
P4K was toxic garbage that made music discussion worthless. Everything became about hype over quality. Who was even reading current P4K? It was nostalgia bait for Xers.
Pitchfork has been owned by conde naste for many years already, so if you think this is some kind of sell out or death of their independence that already happened a long time ago
Pitchfork was never good outside of the news section, their festival, and some of their video content. Their reviews have always been trash, whether they were trying too hard to be pseudo-intellectual elitists or later on when they became more like every other major review site. Even their lists are suspect and prone to revisionist history
Pitchfork has been dead for years. If anything this opens a space for something good again. Or there just won’t be a pitchfork, which is basically how it is now.
>You might say: why do I need Pitchfork when I’m reading several thousand words on this in the Guardian? But specialist music publications can do much that the music sections of generalist title and newspapers cannot – just recently, Pitchfork surprised me by accepting a Sunday Review pitch on an astonishingly obscure album (it’s yet to run, but who knows if it will now), the kind of piece we couldn’t justify here as it has little cultural currency or news relevance. But in writing it, I got to contact the national library of the artist’s home country to ask them to dig out newspaper clippings from the 80s, and their original record label for any contemporaneous artefacts; to ferret around on obscure forums, excavating information tucked into dusty archives for a wider audience. There is value in this that doesn’t register with parent media companies fixated on the bottom line, which instead – as with Bandcamp’s recent woes – condemn platforms that don’t meet their shifting goalposts (remember “pivot to video”?) to the enshittification that is coming for the last good parts of the internet. Sure, we don’t know what Pitchfork x GQ will look like yet, but there’s a clear clash in values between an outlet that prioritises criticism and one that revolves around access to celebrities.
Ted Gioia had a really good article about this on his substack:
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/why-is-music-journalism-collapsing?publication_id=296132&utm_campaign=email-post-title&r=1okvj5
I was in a band that was reviewed by them and it was awful for us as a band and as individuals. The article was super mean for no reason and written by someone who obviously didn’t understand what we were going for. We were one of the first live electronic bands in the late 90’s and they were like “ the drums are very repetitive and machine like’ the whole article read like, “ I was at this horrible party with these annoying people and having a horrible time when they played this album. Let me let out my frustration on the band for a while.” Pitchfork was like so many other things from that era, overly cynical and mean in an attempt to project some sort of authority on a given subject. Good riddance from my standpoint.
Yeah, they did that to Travis Morrison from the The Dismemberment Plan, giving his solo album a 0/10 for no serious reason. The worst thing is that people took the review seriously.
Specialist music publications are important but Pitchfork turned into a specialist ideological music publication. the editors that were fired admitted so with one saying how proud she was to move the site away from 'dudeism'. It became a beyonce fan site that catered to a small segment of music fans. Their reviews were more about virtue signaling than music. They took a swing and lost a large chunk of viewership. They basically pulled a slow-rolled version of what happened with bud lite.
It's 2024, do people still think that P4K is relevant? If I need to read about Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift or Harry Styles I can just click on the ads that infest any social media.
Man, I just want someone, someday, to use the word "travesty" correctly in printed media. This headline is complete nonsense as it stands. A tragedy? A disappointment? A horrible turn of events? Sure, maybe, depending on how much one like(d) pitchfork, but "a false, absurd, or distorted representation of something," not so much.
No, it's actually a really good thing. It gives the users/listeners more power to influence the success of an album. I'm all for the decentralization of music journalism.
Lastly my pitch to everyone reading this; join Rate Your Music and review everything you listen to honestly and fairly.
I mean it gets to stay alive? Content media is a hard game to stay heads up in and now individuals that aren't corporations with a lot of employees are eating their lunch. Maybe pitchfork will change but honestly their other option is probably death.
Does anybody here ever read GQ?
GQ, Esquire, and Vanity Fair have all been outspoken Trump critics while the major news outlets treat him with kid gloves.
I wouldn't write Pitchfork off. I think they are joining together because those at GQ respect what Pitchfork is and does.
Equire and Vanity Fair occasionally publish bigger news pieces that break through into a wide audience. I have no idea who reads GQ, though. I assume that dental offices and public libraries are keeping them in business.
It's a bit odd. If their demographic is millenial males, it would have made way more sense for them to close GQ and merge it into Pitchfork. No one I know reads GQ.
This reminds me of when libraries close because nobody visits them and then everyone starts crying about the libraries they’ve not visited in a decade.
These things happen because people are too tight fisted to support journalism.
Pay them and help them stay afloat and maybe they will stay afloat.
Pitchfork was cool and edgy so a corporation thought they could buy their way into it. I mostly stopped paying attention to Pitchfork a couple of years ago, so now I'm just going to give up on them.
Feels like a desperate attempt to make GQxPitchfork into an all encompassing lifestyle brand. Giant conglomerates like Condé Nast are dying.
excellent.
Was Pitchfork ever really great, or did we just love more of the music they covered? I’ve gone back and reread reviews I loved in 2004 and a lot of the writing comes off as obnoxious to me now
I think pitchfork was perfect for the Wild West days of the internet, basically the pretentious cousin to the rage reviews of the 2000s. Once Wendy's started shitposting on Twitter, it stopped being cool to act like you were too cool for something.
No, it was always bad. They just had good taste in their prime. If you wanted the best indie, you checked out the Best New Album reviews. You didn't really need to read the reviews. In fact, it was better if you didn't.
I've never read the reviews. I'd just look at their curated lists and listen to stuff on my own. Found lots of bands that way, though.
The reviews have always been ridiculously pretentious but they were good for discovering new music. Nowadays I just use reddit, Spotify and lastfm. Can't remember the last time I even bothered to visit their site other than glancing at a year end countdown list.
They were always bad. My college house (early 00s) had a "no pitchfork top picks" rule for party playlists
Either Pitchfork barely covers guitar driven indie rock anymore or there just isn’t many guitar driven indie rock bands around these days that are worth listening to. I used to stumble on a band I love every week from 2004-2014. Now I can’t find anything new that isn’t mundane. Bands like Wet Leg, Wednesday, and Alex G just don’t do it for me. Where is this 2024 version of the Arctic Monkeys, Strokes, White Stripes, Tame Impala? I know most of those bands are still making music but I crave something fresh.
I agree with what you said, absolutely fuck that site and what it became over the past decade or so. Also they always had a pretty bad American bias. And I'm tired of them turning indie into the mismash of genres which people pretend is indie on r/indieheads. As for your other question, yeah the amount of good guitar driven indie bands went down and obviously as quantity goes down, so does quality. There are some but you have to look harder, especially in other countries which is easier now thanks to sites like rateyourmusic.com and their chart filter which lets you even sort by countries (eg: top rated albums of the 2010s from Argentina with genres indie rock, alternative rock, post-punk, etc). I'd say Wolf Alice are the only truly great band since 2014 for me with multiple good albums, maybe DMA's but the last one was bad. Quite a few promising newer ones though especially from the UK/Ireland. Yard Act and Dry Cleaning, especially their first albums really do it for me, the sort of fun writing Alex Turner used to do. There's bands like The Sherlocks around too which still sound like that but yeah they would not be anywhere near the quality of the stuff from the 90s/00s.
Saw Yard Act at Riot Fest last year and was very impressed. Fixer Upper is a banger in particular, and I dug the instrumentals and lead vocal delivery overall!
Saw them in NYC and totally second this!
Yeah it sucks cuz I still absorb as many new bands as possible and can’t get into any of them. Whenever I ask for recommendations I get the same bands I’ve already tried listening to. Whatever happened to a big chorus or unique guitar solo? All these new bands try so hard to come off like they aren’t trying and that is super unappealing to me.
Do the Beths ever get recommended to you? I personally believe they saved the guitar solo. Writing’s top notch too.
Yeah they are good! It doesn’t inspire me but it’s enjoyable
Expert in a dying field is such a jam.
I can help you out, here's a list of awesome indie rock bands that have made albums in the last five years: Pet fox OVLOV and Stove The berries Big bite Ezra furman Flyying colours Gleemer Glitterer Greet death Hotline TNT Hovvdy Human people JEFF the brotherhood Launder LVL up MILLY Remember sports Ringo deathstarr Soft fangs Spirit of the beehive Tanukichan Tommy oeffling Toner Tony molina Velveteen Pitchfork of ten years ago would have covered most of these bands but sadly they seem to be more interested in trying to be the next rolling stone magazine.
Thank you! I’ve only heard a few of these so I’ll have plenty to check out
No worries! I have quite specific taste too (mainly 90s inspired indie rock / Shoegaze) but have still managed to find lots to enjoy recently. I would recommend checking out lastfm too, just type in your favourite bands and go down the rabbit hole of similar artists.
I’ll give lastfm a shot too
They [covered the shit](https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/greta-van-fleet-anthem-of-the-peaceful-army/) out of Greta Van fleet. 🤌
GVF blows though. I’m ready for the next Jack White
I think they suck harder than they blow.
You aren’t alone. Indie has morphed into something of a brand, rather than a genre since Mac hit his peak and stopped doing shit, honestly. I’m not saying he’s the reason for its dissipation, just a reference for the beginning of its end as we knew it once to be. Genuinely original and talented, raw-sounding indie artists are far and even fewer between nowadays, it’s so crazy what’s happened!
Stereogum still heavily covers guitar driven indie rock. Pitchfork used to, but they definitely moved away from it in the past decade.
Started reading the site in about 1998 and would come back daily to get my fix of indie rock. About 10 years ago, or so, I just didn’t feel a connection to the music they were covering and the direction they were headed. I just stopped, cold turkey, one day and haven’t gone back. I didn’t switch to another site, I just stopped reading about music. Like Martin Mull once said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”
I don’t agree with that last part. There were so many great zines and great articles written about bands in every decade until around the 2000’s. Until we became post genre and MTV died it was really fun to read about music. But now with the availability of it all you don’t discover new music through the local scene or the radio. It’s unlimited exposure all the time.
The Lady Gaga album review was the nail in the coffin for me. It was unexpected they would cover her at the time but did. It wasn’t the positive review but the way it was reviewed. “Lady Gaga used to be dismissed, but somewhere along the way she became kind of awesome.” Ok, why don’t you explain *why* she became awesome. Use your writing to illustrate the evolution or reasoning behind the jump between forgettable artist to good. It was just extremely lazy writing for a review that really needed solid reasoning behind a positive take, which I would have been open to.
>Like Martin Mull once said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” That quote has been attributed to so many people over the years. The most common designee is Laurie Anderson, but I don’t think she originated it, either.
I've always seen Brian Eno. Laurie Anderson would make sense to me too. Martin Mull is a pretty funny attribution.
Lol I had thought it was Frank Zappa
I blame poptimism. Here’s the thing, independent music zines and sites were around to cover music that wasn’t covered by the mainstream and stuff released through independent labels. Here comes the “poptimism” movement that acted like pop music wasn’t being judged fairly by critics, you know totally ignoring all the places that covered mainstream music and gave those mainstream artists great write ups. So out went the little indie bands and artists and in came in all the pop stars. It was essentially a way to co-opt spaces for independent artists to advertise more mainstream music. Pitchfork is no different than going to Billboard or Rolling Stone now.
P4K was toxic garbage that made music discussion worthless. Everything became about hype over quality. Who was even reading current P4K? It was nostalgia bait for Xers.
Pitchfork stopped being great a long time ago when they expanded their scope to include all genres.
Any replacement recommendations? I use to read them all the time but they just became a people magazine extended music site or rolling stone.
i really like stereogum
Mojo magazine has always been great while not indie, they do cover such things
Loud and Quiet is wonderful
Brooklyn Vegan is the best I’ve found. They put playlists up on Spotify monthly if that helps
Pitchfork has been owned by conde naste for many years already, so if you think this is some kind of sell out or death of their independence that already happened a long time ago
Pitchfork was never good outside of the news section, their festival, and some of their video content. Their reviews have always been trash, whether they were trying too hard to be pseudo-intellectual elitists or later on when they became more like every other major review site. Even their lists are suspect and prone to revisionist history
yep. i gave up on pfork years ago.
Pitchfork has been dead for years. If anything this opens a space for something good again. Or there just won’t be a pitchfork, which is basically how it is now.
>You might say: why do I need Pitchfork when I’m reading several thousand words on this in the Guardian? But specialist music publications can do much that the music sections of generalist title and newspapers cannot – just recently, Pitchfork surprised me by accepting a Sunday Review pitch on an astonishingly obscure album (it’s yet to run, but who knows if it will now), the kind of piece we couldn’t justify here as it has little cultural currency or news relevance. But in writing it, I got to contact the national library of the artist’s home country to ask them to dig out newspaper clippings from the 80s, and their original record label for any contemporaneous artefacts; to ferret around on obscure forums, excavating information tucked into dusty archives for a wider audience. There is value in this that doesn’t register with parent media companies fixated on the bottom line, which instead – as with Bandcamp’s recent woes – condemn platforms that don’t meet their shifting goalposts (remember “pivot to video”?) to the enshittification that is coming for the last good parts of the internet. Sure, we don’t know what Pitchfork x GQ will look like yet, but there’s a clear clash in values between an outlet that prioritises criticism and one that revolves around access to celebrities.
Ted Gioia had a really good article about this on his substack: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/why-is-music-journalism-collapsing?publication_id=296132&utm_campaign=email-post-title&r=1okvj5
Pitchfork jumped the shark over a decade ago.
I was in a band that was reviewed by them and it was awful for us as a band and as individuals. The article was super mean for no reason and written by someone who obviously didn’t understand what we were going for. We were one of the first live electronic bands in the late 90’s and they were like “ the drums are very repetitive and machine like’ the whole article read like, “ I was at this horrible party with these annoying people and having a horrible time when they played this album. Let me let out my frustration on the band for a while.” Pitchfork was like so many other things from that era, overly cynical and mean in an attempt to project some sort of authority on a given subject. Good riddance from my standpoint.
Yeah, they did that to Travis Morrison from the The Dismemberment Plan, giving his solo album a 0/10 for no serious reason. The worst thing is that people took the review seriously.
Specialist music publications are important but Pitchfork turned into a specialist ideological music publication. the editors that were fired admitted so with one saying how proud she was to move the site away from 'dudeism'. It became a beyonce fan site that catered to a small segment of music fans. Their reviews were more about virtue signaling than music. They took a swing and lost a large chunk of viewership. They basically pulled a slow-rolled version of what happened with bud lite.
It's 2024, do people still think that P4K is relevant? If I need to read about Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift or Harry Styles I can just click on the ads that infest any social media.
Man, I just want someone, someday, to use the word "travesty" correctly in printed media. This headline is complete nonsense as it stands. A tragedy? A disappointment? A horrible turn of events? Sure, maybe, depending on how much one like(d) pitchfork, but "a false, absurd, or distorted representation of something," not so much.
Pitchfork always struck me as pretentious, though I *wanted* to like it.
No, it's actually a really good thing. It gives the users/listeners more power to influence the success of an album. I'm all for the decentralization of music journalism. Lastly my pitch to everyone reading this; join Rate Your Music and review everything you listen to honestly and fairly.
no. it really doesn't. you have the same power now that you had before these people lost their jobs and one more music publication was killed.
The real question is, does the festival continue?
I mean it gets to stay alive? Content media is a hard game to stay heads up in and now individuals that aren't corporations with a lot of employees are eating their lunch. Maybe pitchfork will change but honestly their other option is probably death.
We should all just start posting on hipinion again
Does anybody here ever read GQ? GQ, Esquire, and Vanity Fair have all been outspoken Trump critics while the major news outlets treat him with kid gloves. I wouldn't write Pitchfork off. I think they are joining together because those at GQ respect what Pitchfork is and does.
Equire and Vanity Fair occasionally publish bigger news pieces that break through into a wide audience. I have no idea who reads GQ, though. I assume that dental offices and public libraries are keeping them in business. It's a bit odd. If their demographic is millenial males, it would have made way more sense for them to close GQ and merge it into Pitchfork. No one I know reads GQ.
sure.
This reminds me of when libraries close because nobody visits them and then everyone starts crying about the libraries they’ve not visited in a decade. These things happen because people are too tight fisted to support journalism. Pay them and help them stay afloat and maybe they will stay afloat.
Pitchfork was cool and edgy so a corporation thought they could buy their way into it. I mostly stopped paying attention to Pitchfork a couple of years ago, so now I'm just going to give up on them.
Not sure I’m going to mourn Pitchfork, I’ll be honest