There’s a lot of anger at algorithm-driven music discovery around – a lot of it justified, as the big platforms push the already-big acts and lowest common demoninator slop is aided in rising to the top. But we can’t talk about the topic without also acknowledging that it has provided some surprising opportunities for unorthodox music. One such is Santa Cruz, California 90s “slowcore” indie rock band Duster, who not long after they’d reformed found a two-minute sketch of theirs from 1998 called “Inside Out” going supernova on TikTok, eventually clocking up over 17 billion plays.
Of course in a sense this was a freak occurrence, but even that song aside, Duster’s extended second act has been extremely popular – and this speaks to an appetite for the raw, ragged and unadorned. We’ve seen in recent years how enduringly popular and creative artists from the original 80s wave when indie meant indie can be: in the US, J Mascis, Kristin Hersh, Kim Deal and co, and in the UK the likes of Slowdive, Ride, The Jesus & Mary Chain and Jason Pierce and Pete Kember formerly of Spacemen 3 are all on the creative form of their lives.
So to their fifth LP, and the 13 tracks here absolutely exist in a zone where the intervening codification of “alternative” via grunge and emo and electro-rock and the “loudness wars” and all the rest never happened. For all their success, Duster still sound like they’re recording in dusty bedrooms and smoky basements, and spending their lives smoking cigarettes and feeling fucked up and poring over Syd Barrett and Stooges and Neil Young albums. Yes, they sound a lot like Galaxie 500 and Mazzy Star and Codeine, but that is absolutely fine: they are effectively making this way of sound-making into a folk form, and they’re really good at it. So for all that the fuzz and tape his and scrape of fingers on strings and murmured, cracked vocals are super familiar, for all it feels like we've seen this indie slacker movie before, they remain endlessly listenable – indeed there’s a sense of sanctuary in the familiarity, and it is no wonder they have struck such a (detuned, wobbly, distorted) chord with younger generations.
Listen to the LP:
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