LCD Soundsystem Used to Be the Coolest Band In the World. How Did They Get So Cringe?

Every time I’ve seen LCD Soundsystem live, I’ve been surrounded by people who look exactly like me. The most cathartic of those experiences occurred in April 2010, when I carpooled to Coachella with a couple of high school friends in order to witness the kickoff to the band’s yearlong farewell tour. We don’t need to belabor the context, but basically, James Murphy—LCD Soundsystem’s singer, songwriter, and chief creative force—had spent the spring making noise that the band’s third album, This Is Happening, then due out in a matter of weeks, would be its last. The reasons for this were characteristically opaque; Murphy expressed a discomfort with his growing celebrity and a desire to de-professionalize the act of making music. More acutely, the founding principle of LCD Soundsystem has always been a paralyzing fear of ever becoming washed up, and such a fate could be easily prevented with retirement. (This perspective is best articulated in “Losing My Edge,” one of the band’s first songs, in which a paranoid Murphy worries that “better-looking people, with better ideas, and more talent” were coming for his spot in the underground hierarchy.)

Regardless, at the time I was 18, and absolutely heartbroken about the prospect of a post–LCD Soundsystem world. (It was, as it is now, my favorite band.) So I took to the desert, on a hipster pilgrimage, ready to grieve. The memory that sticks out most was the fourth song of that Coachella set, “All My Friends,” a lengthy power ballad that had already become encumbered by significant generational gravity—“millennial ‘American Pie’ ” is a decent analog. Once the piano started rolling, I gazed up at the twinkling sky, then at everyone in my direct radius—skinny jeans cinched in 90-degree heat. I locked the sensation in my mind: Right now I am young, and it surely won’t be this way forever.

Of course, the breakup—the source of my trauma—didn’t stick. Murphy sheepishly reunited LCD only five years later. The band put out an underrated comeback record and has remained an intermittent touring force ever since. This is how, on a refrigerated December evening in Queens, I walked into the Knockdown Center for the eighth night of LCD Soundsystem’s annual holiday residency. It has been a decade and a half since that Coachella show. I am 34 and newly married. I’m dressed in chinos and New Balances. This is the one day I’ll be out past midnight all week, and the only other significant event on my social calendar is my company holiday party. I wander toward the rear of the venue, and a sea of bald spots, earplugs, and faded tattoo ink engulf my periphery. The lapels of leather jackets flare out over yeasty beer bellies. Everyone is still dressed in skinny jeans, if only because millennials have failed to graduate to more stylish inseams. Yep, to my Proustian horror, I was once again surrounded by people who looked exactly like me, and I’d never felt less cool.

There was a time in recent memory when LCD Soundsystem was the most fashionable band in the world. The group released three terrific albums in the early part of the 21st century that defined the sound of Manhattan indie rock and, as it tends to go with these things, American alternative culture as a whole. In turn, Murphy was wreathed with enough downtown-aesthete credibility to star in debauched GQ profiles, get scouted for Franzen adaptations, make weird art-house comedies with Tim Heidecker, and exchange emails with David Bowie. His tastes were beyond reproach, his reputation seemed basically indestructible, and LCD Soundsystem’s legacy as the north star of hipsterdom was secure. Or so I thought. Because for as much as I had a blast at the Knockdown Center—and I did have a blast at the Knockdown Center—a dark thought pervaded my consciousness. How is it possible that this band, which once made me feel so sophisticated, now leaves me feeling unfathomably lame?

I know the most obvious answer to that question: I am not in college anymore. It’s a fact of life that every artist, no matter the grandeur of their prime, eventually becomes a flop. And it’s unimpeachable that the genesis of the indie rock boom occurred two decades ago, enough time to be composted into mulch for voluminous oral histories. But I promise you that aging is only one piece of the puzzle. Because, generally speaking, nostalgia is supposed to be blissful. I had a great time at Oasis during the summer, and I caught the decomposing Pavement—a band that hasn’t released a new recording since the Clinton administration—on one of its final nights of existence. Those shows felt warmer, more alive, ineffably closer to the heat of the discourse—an exaltation of growing older, rather than the Reaper’s cruel reminder. I think the difference is that my favorite band has been saddled with the most devastating of all denunciations. In 2025, LCD Soundsystem is cringe.

I can’t argue with the charges. Over the past decade, and especially the past five years, LCD Soundsystem has receded into gentle domesticity—growing more mercenary, more complacent, and more venal, totally unconcerned with the mystique it once cultivated in real time. Other bands who were less concerned about their artistic bona fides have fared much better. Creed, for example, is one of the most commercially minded rock groups of all time, and when Scott Stapp and Co. reunited in 2024, they had no DIY chicness to safeguard. (Somehow, this led to Creed becoming en vogue, at the same time LCD was becoming cringe—two dynamics that were once unimaginable.) And, to be fair, this reality made LCD Soundsystem, as a brand, more self-effacing in ways I often find charming. I was delighted to see that a corner of the Knockdown Center had been converted into a pop-up for the Four Horsemen, Murphy’s swank, triple-dollar-sign Williamsburg wine bar, a happening I took as a declaration of proud washedness.

But other decisions the band has made have been more difficult to process. In 2023, as part of this holiday residency, LCD made three of its shows “exclusive to American Express cardholders”—meaning that lowly concertgoers brandishing Visas and Mastercards would be frozen out, further winnowing the small slate of dates. (One fan did not mince words, calling the policy the “wackest shit in the world.”) A year prior, LCD Soundsystem had debased itself more dramatically. The band played a surprise set at ApeFest, an expo put on by the Bored Ape Yacht Club—one of the marquee NFT brands from that febrile, post-pandemic delirium when people were spending thousands of dollars on proprietary JPEGs. (The NFT bubble popped soon afterward, revealing the enterprise as a massive scam.) Naturally, my Twitter feed quickly billowed up with images that seemed to be piped in from a psychedelic alternative dimension. There was James Murphy, the onetime King of Cool, pounding out, like, Sound of Silver for a gaggle of bemused crypto dorks. They seemed to be barely paying attention.

Remember, LCD Soundsystem is a band that was once frozen in amber, completely insulated from the corroding forces of time and capital. In that sense, maybe it isn’t surprising that, upon defrosting, the band quickly adapted to a status quo in which the anguish over selling out has lost all salience. (LCD is far from the only act to make a play with American Express.) Still, the distance between the version of LCD Soundsystem I fell in love with and the band as it exists today does leave me with some whiplash. As veteran music journalist Tom Breihan put it in his own postmortem, Murphy was once “so conscious and deliberate about the ways he expressed his own ideas of coolness,” but the calendar turned over, the gray hairs spread, and LCD ceased to be synonymous with a chic, urbanite lifestyle.

“He became a rich guy catering to nostalgia for a certain era of New York hipsterdom,” continued Breihan. “That’s nice work if you can get it.”

For what it’s worth, my date with LCD Soundsystem at the Knockdown Center was neither the first nor the last time I would shell out to fete my personal wistfulness. And, really, that’s the circle of life in the ephemeral realm of indie rock. I used to go to shows to participate in the white-hot zeitgeist—I have tales from long-past Coachellas, Lollapaloozas, and South by Southwests that could blow some of your minds. The best I can hope for now is to see a show and remember what that participation once felt like. Does that make the procession more embarrassing? Undoubtedly, but I have also begun to detect that—perhaps like Murphy—LCD fans are beginning to take some ironic pride in their own creeping irrelevance. When I told my friends that I was planning to attend the residency, several of them sent me an Instagram Reel made by the comedian Lucy Sandwick. The character she plays is a creaking millennial, perhaps suffering through a two-day hangover, gearing up for one final big night out on the town.

“Let’s go see LCD Soundsystem!” exclaims Sandwick. “Let’s all take molly even though we’re 37!”

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If nothing else, in this purgatory, LCD Soundsystem has polished its live act to a mirror shine. The mournful washes of synth on “Someone Great” were as soul-rending as ever, and I appreciated hearing relative deep cuts like “North American Scum” and “You Wanted a Hit.” But the final song of the night, to nobody’s surprise, was “All My Friends.” I lolled my head back, closed my eyes, and basked in the vivid intensity of the moment, much like I did 15 years ago in the desert. But rather than urgency—this anxious understanding that I was in the midst of a foundational experience and must bottle it up for posterity—all that rushed to my head were memories. I thought about the first time I heard the song, curled up in my high school bedroom, the iPod Shuffle revealing its treasures. Or the many New Year’s Eves when my friends and I used it to herald midnight—toasting better days ahead. Or earlier this year, in the dying embers of our wedding, when my bride and I screamed along the words on our first night of holy matrimony. More of these visions will surely accumulate as life goes on, as LCD Soundsystem—fixed in the past—continues to intersect with my future. I might be cringe, but I am free.

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