Indie surf summer
There were an awful lot of bands putting out songs about going to the beach in the early 2010s!
For reasons I don’t entirely understand, surf music had a really big moment around 2010-2014. Or at least, music about surfing and adjacent summer activities had a big moment, because what I’m talking about bore little resemblance to the original surf music of the 50s and 60s.
There were two overlapping but distinct subgenres. First, surf punk, whose origins make sense to me: there was already a garage rock revival happening, and American punk has always been inspired by the early 60s Beach Boys sound.
I’m less sure of the more indie pop side of the phenomenon, sometimes dubbed surf pop. The utility and objectivity of the term “landfill indie” is disputed, but I would personally define the kind of music I’m thinking of as being adjacent to landfill indie if not fully a part of it. I suppose that given the sheer number of indie bands emerging in the 2000s and early 2010s, it’s not that outlandish that enough bands would write about California, the beach, summer fun, etc. for surf pop to cohere into a discrete subgenre. But I still don’t entirely get why so many bands existed solely to put out songs about California, the beach, summer fun, and nothing more.
Bafflement aside, in high school, it captivated me. At the time, my beloved 8tracks (the app) was rife with playlists combining surf punk and pop with music that maybe wasn’t strictly on theme but had the same sun-drenched, lovestruck, laid back quality. This was the definitive sound of the summer as far as I was concerned.
In college, when I started sophisticating my music taste, I tried to get over my now-shameful indie pop infatuation. It kind of worked; I spent that time and the years afterward filling in the gaps in my musical knowledge between the 60s and now, and I really did get tired of the 2010s sound.
But we’re a decade out now, and mentioning 8tracks in my last essay made me nostalgic, so I decided to rework my high school/early college summer playlist. Because, guess what? This genre still slaps, actually, even if it sounds incredibly dated.
As with the 8tracks playlists this is inspired by, the songs featured here are not all strictly about surfing/the beach/summer. I am a cold-hearted New Englander and I can’t take that much Californianism. They are also not all strictly garage punk or dreamy landfill indie, because I threw in a few sonically adjacent indie favorites that I store in the same part of my brain.
“The Only Place” by Best Coast (The Only Place, 2012)
“Cayucos” by Cayucas (Bigfoot, 2013)
“Marathon” by Tennis (Cape Dory, 2011)
“Love You So” by The King Khan & BBQ Show (The King Khan & BBQ Show, 2005)
“Be Your Baby” by Harlem (Hippies, 2010)
“No Waves” by FIDLAR (FIDLAR, 2012)
I’m fondly remembering my extremely straight-edge teenage self learning FIDLAR songs about being a drug-addled dropout on my acoustic guitar.
“Summertime” by Together Pangea (Living Dummy, 2011)
“Girl, You Couldn’t Do Much Better On The Beach” by Palma Violets (Danger in the Club, 2015)
“Honey Bunny” by Girls (Father, Son, Holy Ghost, 2011)
“No Hope Kids” by Wavves (Wavves, 2009)
“Norgaard” by The Vaccines (What Did You Expect from the Vaccines?, 2011)
I recently saw someone say something like “you really had to be there for the vaccines’ first album, but if you were there… man.” I guess I wasn’t quite there because I got into it a couple years after it came out, but it had such a hold on me. As a very intensely feminist teen, I nominally objected to this song’s lyrics, but I loved the sound too much to stop listening.
“Crying in the Sunshine” by Miniature Tigers (I Dreamt I Was a Cowboy, 2016)
“House Party” by Summer Camp (Beyond Clueless, 2014)
“Rush” by Jay Som (b-side, 2016)
“Always Forever” by Cults (Static, 2013)
“Dead in Your Head” by Bleached (Ride Your Heart, 2013)
“Let’s Go Surfing” by The Drums (The Drums, 2010)
This is probably the peak song of the phenomenon this playlist represents, and it’s also probably the one I like the least now. I almost cut it, but I decided it’s too emblematic to leave out. I always thought it sounded like he was saying “Obama, I wanna go surfing…”
“Neu Chicago” by Clive Tanaka y su orquesta (Domestic Pop Deux, 2011)
“Bike Dream” by Rostam (Half-Light, 2017)
I’m guessing the 2010s surf music boom was to some extent influenced by Vampire Weekend’s first two albums, which I predictably adore. Discovering Rostam Batmanglij’s solo work after being very sad at how uninteresting Ezra Koenig’s music was without him was like a breath of fresh air.
“Sexotheque” by La Roux (Trouble In Paradise, 2014)
If you know La Roux, it’s probably from their 2009 hit “Bulletproof.” But only the real ones (my friend who was inexplicably obsessed with La Roux in sixth grade and got me hooked on them too) know about their second album. As the title would suggest, it’s full of fun beachy songs about having a bad time.
“I Feel It Too” by The Frights (The Frights, 2013)
I really wanted to end with “Makeout Point” but I was trying to not repeat any songs I’ve featured before and I put that one in last year’s summer playlist.
Do you have any insight into the indie surf boom? Are there any classics from this era I left out? Do you really hate this genre and want to complain about it? Go right ahead!