playlist – INDIE ROCK CAFE

PLAYLIST: Top 10 DIY Songs, March 2022

Posted on 04/15/202205/03/2022 by Max Hammer

The DIY (and small label) top 10 songs for March 2022 features kick-ass songs from DIY artists and bands stretching from the tip of Ireland to the urban sprawl of Los Angeles.

These are also ALL artists and bands to watch in our opinion; otherwise they would not have made this top 10 playlist because there are too many promising artists and bands around that many of you have never heard of – and admittedly, plenty that we didn’t know of; which is the great gift of music discovery.

Check out the other top 10s if you dig this; share and like if you can and don’t miss our new Top 50 playlists – dope, dope music only here at Indie Rock Cafe – celebrating 15 years of music blogging.

It may just be us, but Junk Drawer reminds us of a British Kurt Vile while Car Boot Sale is sounding heavily Spoon-influenced (not a bad thing). The crooning of Niall Mutter is captivating and soothing while Operation Man also shows off his vocal skills and pop sensibilities.

True that not all of these artists/bands are DIY in the traditional sense, but we consider small labels as ‘DIY’ much of the time to make things easier.

This top 10 playlist is in no particular order – you pick your favs. It’s too good of a playlist to sort out that way. All that matters is the music and whether you feel it or not.

NOTE: The number in parenthesis indicates the number of monthly listeners on Spotify.

Jaguar Sun TORONTO, Canada
https://www.instagram.com/jaguar__sun/ (318K)

Tomberlin – LOS ANGELES, California
https://twitter.com/tomberlin (270K)

Great Gable – BUNBURY, Australia

https://www.greatgablemusic.com/ (265K)

The World is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die – WILLIMANTIC, Connecticut
https://www.theworldisabeautifulplace.com/ (132K)

Niall Mutter – MONTREAL, Canada
https://www.instagram.com/miallnutter/ (71K)

Operation Ivan – PORTSMOUTH, England
https://www.instagram.com/operationivanuk (26K)

Beach Vacation – SEATTLE, Washington
https://beachvacation.bandcamp.com/ (26K)

Weird Nightmare – TORONTO, Canada
http://weirdnightmare.net (18K)

Junk Drawer – BELFAST, Ireland
https://www.facebook.com/junkdrawerband – (5K)

Car Boot Sale – LONDON, England
https://www.instagram.com/carbootsaletheband/ (3K)

Stream all 10 via Spotify or YouTube:

Don’t stop there.

Check out more of our playlists on IRC’s Spotify profile – many of which have been carefully, and manually, curated over the years, covering themes from VIPs in songs to world music and from best seasons playlists to playlists of great indie/alt rock/folk/pop covering themes like world countries, states, love, moods, and everyday, ordinary things. A must-check-it-out-collection. Promise.

Best 50 Indie Rock Songs of March 2022

Posted on 04/05/2022 by IRC Staff

You’re probably like a lot of us – so much music, so little time to seek out, organize, stream, like, save, etc. many of the best tracks released during March.

Even while March 2022 has arrived and passed like a blur, there were bunches and bunches of sick tracks dropped.

This playlist contains a lot of new and ‘revival’ post-punk indie/alt. The explosion in popularity of bands like Yard Act and Fontaines D.C., to name just a few, has resulted in a glowing river of new (from the old) post-punk sounds – mostly from relatively new, and unknown (but why?) bands from the U.K. and Ireland (where post-punk originally spawned 40 years ago from the ashes of the rather brief wave of popularity in punk rock).

Plus, there are a bunch of fresh tracks from well-known, veteran indie/alt artists as well as the buzz bands of the moment.

Also, don’t miss our still-popular Top 10 Indie Songs playlists – dropped every month of the year.

For even more choice indie/alt songs from March, fire up Best 2022 Indie/Alt Rock, Vol. III

Black History Month – Celebration of Love Playlist (50-pack)

Posted on 02/12/2022 by Kat Nip Carver

One of the many ways to celebrate Black History Month during this time of the month is through music.

This playlist was enjoyable and challenging to curate because we wanted to pull together a diverse set of love songs from an array of talented black artists – both familiar to most people, and those who are less widely-known but nonetheless belong in the pool of black artists representing worldwide.

It’s impossible to create such a playlist that is a full, comprehensive (in the truest sense) collection of great love songs from black artists. So we put together as representative a collection as we could with a limit of 50 songs.

One of the factors we wanted to address with this playlist was to collect amazing love songs from as many genres as possible and that include all of the decades of recorded music going back to the 1950s.

The playlist covers a wide selection of high-caliber love songs from genres like hip-hop, rap, soul, R&B, jazz, rock, and Motown.

Artists range from Tupac, Marvin Gaye, Lauryn Hill, Bob Marley, Black Eyed Peas, Stevie Wonder, India-Arie, The Supremes, Whitney Houston, Fugees, Mos Def, John Legend, Chance The Rapper, Jay-Z and more.

Not to be forgotten of course are all of the tens of thousands of black producers, composers, songwriters, and musicians behind-the-scenes of so many of the greatest love songs ever made – regardless of who sang them, made them famous or is remembered for.

LET’S LOVE INSTEAD Valentines’ Mix w/Kuwada, Lord Huron, Iron & Wine, Taj Mahal &more

Posted on 02/10/2022 by Kate Stevens

Over the years, we’ve made plenty of love songs playlists and mixes and all.

Some have been a little popular – such as The Ultimate (Mostly) Indie Valentines Playlist – and shared over the years.

In fact, for a number of reasons, and a general dissatisfaction forever in how Spotify deliberately dilutes musicians’ royalities, we’re going to be sharing more playlists from non-Spotify platforms.

For this Valentines we put together a playlist featuring some terrific and inspirational love songs we’ve been listening to in the cafe lately – from a variety of genres and artists around the world. Surely hope you enjoy it and share/like/follow if you do. Peace.

Top 10 DIY Songs, August 2021 – Wild Giants, Fake Parents, The Mananas, Jeremy Newall & more

Posted on 09/13/2021 by IRC Staff

August 2021’s Top 10 DIY Indie Songs is a compilation of tracks that we received over the summer and listened to in order to create this Top 10 playlist featuring the following indie artists and bands from across the U.S., with the exception of an entry from Canada and Sweden.

Places represented include Phoenix; LA; Denver; NYC; Whitley City; Nashville and Chicago. Enjoy and please like and share.

Wild Giants – Phoenix, Arizona (“Souvenir”)
Fake Parents – Los Angeles, California (“Birthday Party”)
The Mananas – Denver, Colorado (“Back At U”)
Jeremy Newall – Toronto, Ontario (“Come On”)
Scotch Mist – New York, New York (“Operator”)
The Stupors Arizona – Phoenix, Arizona (“Simple Company”)
Milano Sun – Stockholm, Sweden (“Tough Sailors”)
Surviving Fate – Whitley City, Kentucky (“You”)
Sam McLeod – Nashville, Tennessee (“Sam McLeod”)
The Brand New Shoes – Chicago, Illinois (“With Airplanes”)

#1: Since its founding by recording artist Austin Walashek in 2018, the indie rock outfit Wild Giants has been dropping singles and playing live music all over Arizona. The band’s latest single, “Souvenir,” won over to take the No. 1 spot for DIY submissions in the month of August.

#2: Fake Parents, formerly ‘Parents’, is a Los Angeles-based indie rock band featuring members Garrett Hazen, Ryan Calaunan, and Blake Vallotton. The band records at Hazen’s home studio in La Mirada, California, and Vallotton directs the visual storytelling.

#3: “Back At U” is a recent 2021 single release from Denver indie rock band The Mañanas. The Ecuadorian indie pioneers "Nockah" originally composed the song in 2018. According to the band: “The song felt too "gringo" and out of place with their current discography. Fast forward two years, lead singer and composer Danny Pauta moves to Denver and meets with Brandon Unpingco to create The Mañanas where this song resurges. Watch the song video here.

#4: Jeremy Newall is a Toronto-based multi-instrumentalist (guitar, bass, piano, drums, synth) with influences ranging from Boy Pablo, Day Glow, Tom Misch, phum viphurit, and The Strokes. The Toronto musician’s new single, “Come On,” celebrates indie bedroom pop bliss. He writes the track is “light-hearted song about getting turned down.” To make this song much more entertaining he included samples from some iconic childhood cartoons. Last year, Newall lost his job as a touring musician in Nice, France due to covid leading to a total work-mode that resulted in various tracks that made up the EP Sheesh.

#5: The single, “Operator”, from the New York City indie rock outfit Scotch Mist bumbles along with all of the ingredients of indie pop-rock. The music project is the work of musician Eduardo Zighelboim.

#6: While no longer ‘active,’ the Phoenix indie rock band, The Stupors Arizona (formerly The Stupors), originally formed in 2005 and retired in 2011, still drops an occasional single and plays a few show or festival. This new track, “Done,” seems to have had time to simmer since 2011. Band member ‘Dibbs’ says it’s “an in-your-face-from-a-she/her-perspective on a bad breakup.”

#7: Based out of Stockholm, Sweden, indie rock/pop band, Milano Sun‘s new single, “Tough Sailors,” is what the band calls a “Storm kissed, salt-sprayed indie smash” that was “rescued from the once missing ship. Drenched with in-your-face guitar licks, psychedelic sound effects and 90’s clothing – it’s reusing sprinkles from all your favorite pop/rock decades from the 20th century.

The band is comprised of Johan Jonasson (Guitar, Vocals), Love Sivik (Bass), Zackarias Ekelund (Drums), and David Wikberg (Keys, Guitar, Vocals) with influences that include The Beta Band Beach House, Tame Impala, and Blood Orange.

#8: The brand new band Surviving Fate is a Kentucky-based duo of musical couple of Denny (all instruments,vocals) and Lyndsey Kidd (vocals) from Whitley. Denny Kidd has toured around the country in a previous band. That’s pretty much all we know about them, but if you dig the track, look them up. https://youtu.be/N40esh0xxXo

#9: “Baby Love” is the sweet new single from Nashville lo-fi/bedroom pop recording artist Sam McLeod. The single, he says, was written for the happiness he felt after the birth of the couple’s baby. “It started as a melody I started humming in Jan 2019 when I came home from the hospital with my newborn daughter” and felt a sense that as a couple he and his wife ‘made it.’ “with this amazing little girl to raise together.”

A Nashville native, McLeod’s style has matured from rock into an indie-folk sound that “creates a graceful fusion of influences like Ethan Gruska, Leelanhd, James Vincent McMorrow, and Jarryd James.”

#10: Based in the rock and roll city of Cleveland, Ohio, the Brand New Shoes is a DIY indie rock band featuring four friends and musicians who met in high school. They dropped a self-titled album in 2019, were sidelined for much of 2020, and have now released the album Still Love, featuring the single, “With Airplanes.”

Top 10 Indie Rock Songs, August 2021 – Villagers, Chvrches, The Killers, Liars & more

Posted on 09/03/2021 by IRC Staff

August 2021 indie rock releases, and the accompanying singles, turned out to be one of the best months so far this year for new indie rock music.

Therefore, this Top 10 Indie Rock Songs playlist for August features Villagers; Chvrches; The Killers; Liars; Big Red Machine; Ty Segall, and others.

The album releases provided a good amount of listening material for the month. If you missed any of these, check out our Best August 2021 Indie Rock Albums with reviews from around the web and embedded album streams.

Please do us a tiny favor: like, share, and follow us if you dig what we do and want to encourage more. Remember, always choose love, in all of its forms.

Stream all of the 2021 Top 10 Indie Rock Songs playlists.

Top 10 Indie Songs, July 2021 – Billie Eilish, Inhaler, Wavves, LUMP, Creeper & more

Posted on 08/18/202109/06/2021 by IRC Staff

July 2021 Top 10 Indie Songs playlist features a variety of strong indie/alt releases from artists and bands like Billie Eilish; Inhaler; Wavves; LUMP; Piroshka; Creeper; The Go! Team; A Place to Bury Strangers; The Goon Sax; The Flatlanders.

Top 10 Indie Rock Songs, May 2021

Posted on 06/18/2021 by Kate Stevens

The Top 10 Indie Songs for May 2021 features a sweeping diversity of indie artists and bands, including a number of true DIYs that got our attention. This top 10 playlist is infectiously enjoyable especially when the world is coming back to life. Thank goodness indie rock is thriving in 2021. There are six entries from the U.K.!; three from the U.S. and one from France.

This playlist of our top picks (based on what we actually got to hear) include terrific releases from:

Mar Malade (U.K.)
FUR (U.K.)
Camel Power Club (France)
St. Vincent (New York)
Hazey (U.K.)
Massage (California)
Mia Joy (Illinois)
Ski Lift (U.K.)
Bliss Williams (U.K.)
Ali Horn (U.K)

Not intentionally nor by design, these Top 10 Indie Rock Songs for May 2021 are mostly feel-good, upbeat and celebratory. So put your happy shoes on and enjoy. The full Spotify and Soundcloud playlists are included at the end of the post.

This song just had to be the opening track on this particular playlist. U.K. band Mar Malade delivers the summer-time goods on “No Bird (Mr. Hardy)” with its undeniably upbeat, feel-good single booming with tropical-influenced beats and riffs, accompanied by horns and a bumbling, drooping bass line. The song is one of the little hidden gems we love coming across, and sharing.

U.K. indie rock band FUR has returned with two very noteworthy new singles, including the electrifying track, “If Only,” featured here, and which has been on repeat in the cafe for weeks, along with the other track, “The Fine Line of a Quiet Life.” Indie rock is a vague term used to identify rock artists that are or were unsigned, or have signed to small record labels, rather than major record labels. It may also describe artists which have a specific “sound”, and is therefore a genre, although this label is contested by many.:

The Paris indie band Camel Power Club‘s latest track, “Drunken Dreams,” (featuring Racoon Racoon) is impossible to ignore thanks to its mellow but catchy rhythms and melodies, as well as arguably an indie anthemic groove for 2021. We’ll still be playing this track years from now. Camel Power Club is an indie rock band based in Paris, France.

Indie veteran St. Vincent rarely misses the mark with her releases, which is one reason she has amassed a large and loyal following over the past 10+ years. With her recent recollective of her father’s record collection, she serves up another gem, including the reflective single, “Down.”

The more chill, grooving single, “Half A Feeling,” from Los Angeles indie band Massage is a kickback-and-relax song for a summer day. The band has been increasing its visibility among music lovers in the past few years thanks to the indie love their 2018 debut album, Oh Boy, garnered. Now, the follow-up recent release of Still Life has picked up strong reviews from the blogs and zines.

Another U.K. band, this time the Bristol indie duo of Tim Brown (guitar; vocals) and Justin Wilkins (drums; vocals), aka Hazey, make the list with their intricate mix of ethereal guitars and synth rhythms. Hazy is influenced by The Killers, Deaf Havana, Pale Waves, and The Cure. Perhaps the most sombre track on this playlist, the song is ironically titled “Bliss.”

We dug Chicago indie dream-pop artist Mia Joy as soon as her new single “See Us” hit the webs. The soft, whispery track, and meditative, emotive synth keys, conjures up images of floating on a puffy white cloud on a gorgeous summer day and just being happy. It’s the perfect track to chill to and even fall in love too. Joy recently signed to FireTalk Records.

London-based threesome, Ski Lift, returns with their sophomore single, “Portal,” assembled with addictive energy; a sharp, driven guitar riff; and melodic vocals to make it almost an instant for the top 10 for May.

Bliss Williams – “Falling For You”

Yet another London, and U.K., entry on this top 10. One-man recording artist Bliss Williams‘ track, “Falling For You,” was featured in our last In Dee Mail edition, and now in the Top 10. As Williams describes, the single features “sweeping strings [that] melt into harmonies far more precise than the yearning-tumbling…all served on a bed of punchy backbeat and bass groove.”

Ali Horn – “End Credits”

It only seemed appropriate to place a single called “End Credits” at the end of a playlist. But don’t let the song’s position in the playlist indicate its awesomeness as a great track in the top 10. Notice the cheerily, upbeat chorus (‘sing a happy song/happy song’), the bouncy rhythm and beat, and your tapping foot. Ali Horn is based out of Liverpool (England); making him one of six English indie bands or artists in this playlist.

[Editor’s Note]: For a relatively small country (especially in comparison to the U.S.), the number of spectacular bands, artists, and genres of rock/pop music that has come out of England since The Beatles up to today is dazzling. Considering that the U.S. has remained four to six times larger in population than England for the past half of a century-plus, ratio-wise you can say they’ve got us beat as far as one country just dominating pop and rock since 1964.

Stream amazing cat-related playlists of the best indie/alt tracks ever!

Make sure to check out our other category/theme-based playlists of the best indie/alt rock songs over the decades – playlists include Best Feel Good Songs; 100 of the Best Chill Indie Summer Songs; Akademic Playlist Series; 1,000+ of the Best Indie Songs Ever; 1,000+ of the Best Alternative Rock Songs Ever playlist; and many others – kickass playlists!

Top 10 Indie Songs Playlist, April 2021

Posted on 05/16/202105/17/2021 by IRC Staff

The Top 10 Indie Songs Playlist for April 2021 features some of the best indie songs of 2021. By the way, we are launching our first Top 10 Alternative Rock Songs playlist series in a few years, so watch for that because the tracks we are gathering are keepers.

This Top 10 Indie Songs playlist includes a mix of mostly small, largely unknown artists and bands who broke through with their own track that was compelling enough to save it as among the top ten of the month. We tried to avoid mainstream ‘indie’ artists and bands for this playlist – we include the best among that group in other playlists and posts.

And on Soundcloud via Sonic Gold Media

Top 10 Indie Songs, Jan. 2021 – Grouplove, Tearjerker, PEEL, Wilderado

Posted on 03/30/202104/26/2021 by IRC Staff

We are late to get the first couple of 2021 Top 10 Indie Songs playlists together – mostly to pick the best indie songs from a flood of solid singles and albums dropped in the first couple of months of the new year.

The IRC team is glad that we took extra time to really whittle down hundreds of indie rock songs to come out with only the best of the best.

There is also a fair amount of tracks that we classify as more alternative rock than indie rock. You can probably figure out which are which – but to us, they are closely-aligned genres in many ways.

This Top 10 playlist is filled with powerful, intriguing, different, and must-hear indie songs and bands – some of which will be familiar and others new to many of you. We are really excited to share these top indie songs of 2021 in the playlist below.

*February and March 2021 Top 10 Indie Songs playlists are coming out this week! Please share and like.

January 2021 Top 10 Indie Songs

A Boy Named Johnny Gates

Brighter Days

By the way, we have a ton of interesting playlists on Spotify, but we prefer not to point you there. Spotify is not fair to artists and bands so we don’t encourage using it.

Plus, it’s a pain in the ass as a free user, and not too much better as a paid user. We are Soundcloud, YouTube, and Bandcamp fans here – the platforms that are good for and to independent musicians and bands.

Just click once and let it roll through all ten tracks uninterrupted and commercial-free. Below you’ll hear fresh tracks from bands (including indie bands that are now, for all intent nad purposes, mainstream indie) like Grouplove, Tearjerker, PEEL, and Wilderado as well as tunes from lesser-known and DIY artists and bands like Alex Walton, O Cerne, Sonar Red, Jimso Slim, NXTIME, and Up! Way Up! Enjoy and please like and share. We appreciate you.

Stream commercial-free from 12 Top 10 2020 Indie Songs playlists – gooood stuff.

Essential Indie Winter Songs Mix

Posted on 01/16/201101/11/2022 by indierocker

Originally posted in Jan. 2011 – Spotify playlist below has been updated to 200 CHOICE winter-focused songs from indie artists and bands across the spectrum (many who were ‘indie’then are more ‘mainstream’now)

Last week, we shared our first winter mix, the second most viewed and streamed page right behind The Best Break-Through Bands of 2010 of the past week. Obviously, yall wanted more so we felt compelled to create a second indie winter songs playlist.

This follow-up to last week’s playlist features a pretty solid selection of ‘wintery’ (or close enough) songs from big hitters like Beach House, Sufjan Stevens, The Arcade Fire, Galaxie 500, Joy Division, and other favorites, like The Answering Machine, Little & Ashley, School of the Seven Bells, Sambassadeur, and so on.

There are certainly plenty of people along the east coast (who’ve struggled through three major blizzards in the past three weeks) and other regions of the U.S. who are not happy about the cold, ice and snow. Perhaps it’s just best to accept the reality of winter, and embrace what we think is a great collection of songs, regardless of their subject matter.

For people who live in the usually coldest parts of the country, and who just plain loathe or hate winter to no end, we can only hope that some of these tracks will warm you up. There were many otherwise relevant songs that we decided not to include over others in this playlist mix. For you seemingly rare folks who like, or absolutely love, winter, there should be an extra tinge of specialty, one may assume, to these songs.

And yet so far this winter, the line drawn in previous years for the coldest regions on a U.S. map has moved south considerably, to include unlikely cities like Mobile, Atlanta and Jacksonville. There have been record breaking low temperatures and snowfalls from Florida to Virginia, where snow and below freezing temperatures are conditions that people in those regions are not accustomed to, and used to be rare events compared with recent decades.

And, of course, the dark comedy that puts the cherry on the winter drama of recent weeks, is provided by none other than the political and media idiots who spout out loud that it all proves there is no “global warming”.

All things considered, January seems the most appropriate time to share as many “winterish” songs that we have in the bins. With a sleigh full of theme appropriate songs, the following are the second mix of 25 winter songs, making 50 altogether. In case you missed it, you can access the first S-25 Winter Mix from last week.