My debut book Such Great Heights is available for pre-order

My book on the evolution of 21st century indie rock is out Aug. 26, 2025 via St. Martin's Press. You should buy it.

My debut book is available now for pre-order!

Maybe you caught a few exhilarating seconds of “Teen Age Riot” on a nearby college radio station while scanning the FM dial in your parents’ car. Maybe your friend invited you to a shabby local rock club and you ended up having a religious experience with Neutral Milk Hotel. Perhaps you were scandalized and tantalized upon sneaking Liz Phair’s Exile In Guyville from an older sibling’s CD collection, or you vowed to download MP3s by every band Kurt Cobain endorsed in Nirvana’s first Rolling Stone cover story, starting with the Breeders. Me? I found my way into indie rock through Radiohead.

In the spring of 2000, three years after the disturbing cartoon music video for “Paranoid Android” scared me off from finding out whether OK Computer was the genius work of art I’d been promised, I borrowed a copy of the album from a high school classmate and fell in love. Like so many before and after me, “Radiohead fan” became my personality. (To me it seemed a lot more sophisticated than my previous personality, “Incubus fan.”) I spent the summer driving around suburban Ohio basking in The Bends, then coming home and downloading every Radiohead rarity I could find on Napster. In the fall I lined up at midnight outside Sour Records to buy Kid A the second it was released, then stayed up even later dissecting it with a friend on AOL Instant Messenger. I don’t remember a thing about my junior year homecoming dance, but I acutely recall returning home in the early morning hours, rewinding the VHS tape I’d used to record Saturday Night Live, and watching a manic, transcendent performance of “The National Anthem.”

As winter set in, the Radiohead fan sites began linking to every year-end list that included Kid A among 2000’s best albums. Most of them presented a mix of the same few names — OutKast, Eminem, D’Angelo, PJ Harvey — but one countdown stood out. An obscure website called Pitchfork Media had ranked Radiohead No. 1, and I knew virtually none of the other artists on the list. There were quirky band names like Modest Mouse and Yo La Tengo and Grandaddy and Godspeed You Black Emperor! There was a mysterious group from Iceland with an alien baby on their album cover. The one other record I’d heard — Badly Drawn Boy’s The Hour of Bewilderbeast, discovered on a sampler CD in CMJ New Music Monthly — had mesmerized me almost as much as Kid A. So I figured a bunch of these CDs must be worth picking up.

It didn’t take long for independent rock music to colonize my brain and for Pitchfork to become my bible. Artsy and peculiar yet dynamic and accessible, these bands captivated me. Some were widely beloved influences like Pavement and Pixies. Some were budding media sensations like the Strokes and White Stripes. Some were lesser known entities that scored highly on Pitchfork, like the Dismemberment Plan. I liked the music, but I also liked the sense that I’d discovered something special, something secret, something superior. As someone with average-or-worse charisma, looks, and athletic ability, who’d never had much to brag about besides my grades, I bought into the snobbery that often seemed inextricable from indie-rock fandom. “Hipster” was an aspirational status for me, albeit one I always felt too sheepish and basic to fully achieve.

By the time I showed up at college in 2002, a state school in rural southeast Ohio, indie rock had so monopolized my listening that I was basically oblivious to what was happening in mainstream music. I’d encounter a pop song here and there, but the Billboard charts meant nothing to me. I barely even had time for Rolling Stone, Spin, or alt-rock radio. It was all about whatever was being hyped on Pitchfork and the burgeoning network of websites, blogs, and message boards that cohered into an online media ecosystem. Within this alternate universe Matador Records was the most important label in the world, nobodies like Menomena could become low-key celebrities by virtue of a Best New Music designation, and a pop-rap dynasty as dominant as Murder Inc. more or less did not exist (except maybe as a punchline in a rave review of some avant-hip-hop release on Def Jux). It was an insular subculture unto itself — until it wasn’t.

As the decade wore on, the world started to catch on to my little secret. Indie bands steered their sounds in radio-friendly directions, tastemakers in the scene embraced sounds that were already on the radio, and indie rock started to morph into something quite different. The Postal Service happened. Seth Cohen happened. Myspace happened. A few months after I graduated from college and got a job at a weekly newspaper in Columbus, the increasingly influential Pitchfork named Justin Timberlake’s “My Love” the best song of 2006. The following year, one of their reviewers disparaged Wilco — whose Yankee Hotel Foxtrot the site had once anointed with a perfect 10.0 review — as “dad-rock.” Indie bands started sounding more and more like pop acts, embracing synthesizers and dance beats, and codified indie fashion made its way from thrift shops to Urban Outfitters to Macy’s. By the dawn of the 2010s, “indie” was a commercial force, but the music and culture were evolving in ways that felt less and less like “rock.”

In 2013, when I got a job at the pioneering music blog Stereogum, a hipster was more likely to worship Beyoncé than Built To Spill. The most popular indie bands were reinventing their sounds to incorporate soft rock (Bon Iver), dance beats (Arcade Fire), hip-hop (Vampire Weekend) — anything to avoid sounding like “indie rock” as it was once understood. I didn’t realize it then, but this movement’s cultural peak had already passed. So many indie bands were aspiring to be pop bands, and most of them flew too close to the sun or failed to achieve liftoff at all. Streaming services like Spotify changed the way people discovered music, hastened the decline of blogs and digital media, and adopted a business model that widened the gulf between the musical haves and have-nots. Nowadays indie rock is back underground for the most part. Meanwhile “indie” as a lifestyle brand has evolved to the point that it includes arguably the biggest pop star in the world.

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In Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion, I trace the rise and fall of indie rock as I had come to know it, from Is This It to folklore, exploring the cultural and market forces that shifted the landscape. It’s a book about how subculture becomes pop culture; about how capitalism consumes what's “cool”; about reckoning with prejudice; about how new technologies can build up, shake up, and destroy; about who gets to define what's hip and how those same things become passé when the "wrong" people get involved. It is the story of the word “indie” and the many ways its meaning has drifted and mutated over the course of a quarter-century.

I know this story because I lived it. I’ve immersed myself in indie rock since high school, and for the past 12 years I’ve worked for one of the foremost publications chronicling that world. At Stereogum, I’ve written extensively about the full spectrum of indie music, from esoteric DIY bands to major-label artists who are indie only in spirit (or marketing plan). In 2014 I launched The Week In Pop, a column exploring mainstream music from an indie fan’s perspective, which I authored every week for eight years. Beyond my work for Stereogum, I’ve written for legacy publications like The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Rolling Stone and prominent digital outlets like The Ringer, Deadspin, and The Verge.

Partially a celebration of a beloved subculture’s triumphs and partially a lament about what it lost along the way, this is a tale that will resonate deeply for anyone who nodded knowingly when Bon Iver won Best New Artist, who looked to Zooey Deschanel for fashion inspiration, who filled their iPod or CD wallet with albums that got Best New Music from Pitchfork. Other books have intersected with the story I’m telling, but not many have followed indie rock’s glow-up into the 2010s, when so many changes set in motion in the 2000s came home to roost. Such Great Heights provides a definitive big-picture look at this genre’s radical evolution over the past 25 years, illuminating how indie rock changed the mainstream and how the mainstream changed indie rock.

Pre-order Such Great Heights and keep following this Substack for bonus content from the book leading up to its release.