Best Old Music: Does 'Heated Rivalry' Herald A Hollywood Wave Of 2000s Indie Rock Nostalgia?

The film and TV industry may be running back the O.C. era through a retro lens.

Heated Rivalry is a new kind of TV show: a sexually explicit romance about closeted gay hockey players. Based on the Game Changers series of novels, the wildly popular series—described as “premium smut” by creator and showrunner Jacob Tierney—premiered on the Canadian streaming service Crave and HBO Max in November and became a viral sensation over the holidays. HBO Max says the show drew 9 million viewers per episode. That’s almost 50% more than the 6.15 million per episode The Pitt pulled off in its first season, to cite another recent HBO Max success story.

The Heated Rivalry glow-up is fascinating from many angles. It’s a queer story, but maybe straight women are too excited about it? It’s a sports story, but maybe the NHL isn’t excited enough? It’s a publishing story, again demonstrating the book industry’s inability to predict which titles will catch fire. It’s also, to a lesser extent, a music story.

As with many hit movies and TV shows, songs featured in Heated Rivalry have enjoyed a viral boost. The biggest beneficiary has been the Montreal indie rock band Wolf Parade, whose 2005 stunner “I’ll Believe In Anything” factored heavily into one of the series’ subplots. The song, from Wolf Parade’s stone cold classic debut album Apologies To The Queen Mary, jumped 3,000% in Spotify streams and has been used in thousands of TikToks since soundtracking a climactic on-ice kiss that served as a pro hockey player’s coming-out moment.

“I’ll Believe In Anything” was already arguably the definitive Wolf Parade song. It was their most-streamed track even before it appeared on Heated Rivalry, and it felt like the obvious choice to represent Wolf Parade on the soundtrack to the chapter about Pitchfork and music blogs from my book SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion. (Buy it here!) Revisiting Apologies for its 20th anniversary recently, Ian Cohen noted that “I’ll Believe In Anything” has acquired a reputation as “not just the platonic ideal of an indie rock song, but a theme song for indie rock as a social movement during its cultural peak.”

The song’s appeal is obvious. The lyrics are about a desperate passion so intense you’d give yourself over entirely to another person (“I’ll believe in anything if you believe in anything”) and the ecstasy of true freedom (“I’ll take you where nobody knows you and nobody gives a damn”). Every line is a huge shout-along hook, shot through with an unnerving electricity by singer Spencer Krug. The band’s dynamic control is masterful, building up so much tension you could snap the song over your leg and then explosively cutting loose at just the right times. As if by magic, the whole thing comes together from abstract individual parts—that squealing synth melody; those pounding toms; that slicing, swaying guitar riff—into a thunderous, cathartic whole. It’s a first-ballot hall of fame indie rock power ballad.

Tierney would surely agree. The showrunner has called “I’ll Believe In Anything” his favorite song. He told the hockey podcast What Chaos! that he specifically built “this big emotional rom-com kind of glorious celebratory moment” with “I’ll Believe In Anything” in mind, even working elements from the lyrics into the dialogue two episodes earlier: “I built two episodes around this one Wolf Parade song.”

The choice to not just soundtrack scenes with 2000s indie rock but weave the music into the series’ DNA reminds me of a different chapter from SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: the one about The O.C., Garden State, and 2000s Hollywood’s indie rock cottage industry. Filmmakers had always used cool music in their soundtracks, but that era stood out for the way indie rock so often became part of the plot. These shows and movies, in turn, became distribution systems, connecting the music with people outside the indie rock bubble (and often contributing to the music’s gentrification in the process).

Scott the hockey star doesn’t define himself as a Wolf Parade fan the way Seth Cohen defined himself as a Death Cab For Cutie fan, and Kip the barista doesn’t beckon Scott to put on headphones with the promise that “I”ll Believe In Anything” will change his life, a la Natalie Portman’s Sam offering up “New Slang.” But like those productions, the music was integral to Heated Rivalry. And like The O.C.’s Josh Schwartz and Garden State’s Zach Braff, Tierney pulled the music for the show from his own library of tunes. That personal touch is why Garden State had multiple Shins songs, and it’s why Heated Rivalry has two Feist songs.

“Music is so important to me,” Tierney told Rolling Stone. “‘I’ll Believe in Anything’ was so built into the show — I wanted to clear it before we even started filming. That’s kind of like an indicator of how music is crucial to the way that I like to tell stories.”

One crucial difference is that The O.C. and Garden State were youth-driven phenomena, as were the various Michael Cera and Zooey Deschanel projects that followed later in the decade. What we’re seeing here is not The O.C. for a new generation. (That would entail, perhaps, a show about a teen who is the world’s biggest MJ Lenderman fan.) This is more like The O.C. generation striking back now that we have wrestled cultural hegemony from our parents.

Heated Rivalry is approaching George W. Bush-era music through a nostalgic lens. Tierney, 46, has described his playlist for the show as “the music of my early twenties.” In that sense the show’s Wolf Parade spotlight is more akin to Stranger Things introducing Kate Bush to a new generation. It is decidedly a blast from the past—so old that Krug told The Globe And Mail, “To be honest, it’s like another person wrote the song, because it was so long ago. I don’t really connect with my 25-year-old self any more.”

The material’s vintage character became painfully clear when Tierney’s actors began riffing on the soundtrack. “They made me feel really old,” he told Rolling Stone. “They were like, ‘What is a wolf and why is it on parade?’ And I was like, ‘I hate both of you.’ And I was like, ‘Feist? 1,2,3,4?’ And they’re like, ‘Oh yeah, we watched that on Sesame Street.’ And I was like, ‘Again, I’d like to push you down a flight of stairs. Your youth enrages me.’”

Do I foresee a new wave of TV shows and movies incorporating 2000s indie rock on a cellular level, running back the O.C. era for nostalgic millennials? It’s possible such a wave is already in progress. We’re several seasons deep into The Bear’s parade of Wilco, Sufjan, and LCD Soundsystem syncs and a couple years past Saltburn spotlighting the likes of Ladytron, Bloc Party, and MGMT. In that light, Heated Rivalry could be viewed as the next big splash in a flood of media soundtracked by iPod-era indie. I’ll really consider it a revival when we start getting more programming about that music—like, say, a rom-com starring Cera and Deschanel as exes who fall back in love when they run into each other on the Modest Mouse cruise.

At a time when Hollywood is routinely giving old music new life, when the whole “indie sleaze” thing has revealed the public’s interest in reliving the 2000s, when shows like Euphoria and Yellowstone are upholding TV’s capacity as a music distribution system, it wouldn’t be the craziest turn of events to see more stories built around my generation’s Pitchfork-approved favorites. And if not, we can at least count on a second season of Heated Rivalry. Tierney says he’s been listening to the New Pornographers and TV On The Radio while writing, so the “Wolf Like Me” renaissance may be imminent.

SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is out now via St. Martin’s Press. Buy it here.