Indie Pop’s Big Year Out
By
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November 20, 2025
Indie pop was invented by Dolly Mixture and Marine Girls: That’s the hill that Chickfactor dies on—or, rather, thrives on—in its latest print issue. Both bands were made up of teens; the youngest member of Marine Girls was only 14 at the time of their debut album.
Perhaps it’s because indie pop is always contextualized in relation to its 1980s heyday—and because wearing thrifted mod clothes, naming your album after a long-defunct East German radio station, and shooting on Super 8mm is just cooler—but it’s easy to forget that indie pop (the jangly guitars and DIY ethics contingent) has always been driven and defined by young people.
If you’ve been anywhere near Bandcamp, your local record store’s staff picks stand, or Pitchfork and other big music blogs this year, you might have clocked this style of pop—shambolic but melodic guitar music—holding sway like it hasn’t for a while. I wouldn’t blame you for conflating this resurgence with some notable reunions. For instance, one of the most beloved Sarah Records bands (a label started by a pair of late teens, incidentally) is set for a big tour and new album next year. That would be Heavenly, who have drawn newer faces into their orbit with the retrospective music video for “C is the Heavenly Option” and the bands they invite to open for them.
But the involvement of any legends from yesteryear is merely a bonus, because the newfound interest in indie pop is all thanks to bands whose ages make you go, “2005 was 20 years ago?!” We’re talking about Sharp Pins, Autocamper, Good Flying Birds, The Cords, and Horsegirl—to name a tight five. Each released an exceptional album this year, demonstrating that the genre not only at its best, but is the freshest it’s seemed since the early ’10s, when Veronica Falls and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart were leading the transatlantic charge.
The zine HALLOGALLO, curated by Kai Slater of Sharp Pins, acknowledges that something is afoot. Its sheep mascot, the website says, represents “cool things like the ☆YOUTH REVOLUTION NOW☆ and ☆TEEN-BEAT☆ movements,” and if you put a sticker of said sheep on your phone or flugelhorn, you show that you are “part of the growing network of Radical Youth Sheeple People Rock-n-Roll Punkrockers.”
Coinciding with talk of revolution and teen-led movements, The Cords—a sister duo from Inverkip, an hour outside Glasgow—coined “C25,” a playful but overdue update to the fetishized C86 compilation tape that you’ve read as genre shorthand a thousand times, but never actually listened to. The Cords’s cassette and flexi single both sold out within hours, and their self-titled debut album (co-released by Slumberland and Skep Wax) hit vinyl charts in the UK. Its carefree, golden retriever energy has since propelled them onto bills with The Vaselines, The Umbrellas, and Heavenly.
Horsegirl’s members aren’t sisters but, as Chickfactor co-founder Gail O’Hara says of her favorite current band, “the intimate connection of being close friends gives them the type of chemistry you see in some bands made up of sisters or relatives.” Incubated in that same youth-led Chicago scene as Sharp Pins and HALLOGALLO, the trio debuted in 2022 with a fuzz-box masterpiece called Versions of Modern Performance, but their sophomore album pivoted towards minimalist clean tones and croaky violins. Slightly more eerie and mysterious than indie pop’s prototypically smiley fare—though with plenty of light and “la-la-la”s—Phonetics perhaps helped reverse some of the wider reticence towards this sound in 2025.
After all, “[indie pop] is often ignored, treated with contempt, and not taken seriously because the gatekeepers dubbed it effeminate or not macho enough,” O’Hara of Chickfactor says. Jangle used to face historical snubs by the jaded, know-it-all elites at Melody Maker and NME, who trolled Sarah bands with sanctimonious, often sexist coverage (the reason O’Hara and Black Tambourine’s Pam Berry started Chickfactor—because no one was covering indie pop—or chicks—with sincerity). But music journalism has become increasingly diffuse and fan-led—the Chickfactor approach, many would argue, had the last laugh—and this has created a meet-you-half-way sort of situation where contemporary indie pop albums are being celebrated by “mainstream” outlets, while at the same time the genre has been upping its game to the point where you’d be mad to ignore it.
So what other factors might be nudging jangling music from the fringes towards the center—from champions such as Chickfactor and The Jangle Pop Hub to Pitchfork’s Best New Music plaudit and the phenomenon where a band like The Cords sells out shows and tapes in mere minutes?
“Indie pop shares an ethos with punk, meaning you don’t have to have attended Juilliard to form a band—you can just start one with your friends,” O’Hara says. This makes it consistently appealing and prevalent, not something reserved for rich kids or learned musicians. “It does not require huge resources, it doesn’t require refined musicianship, and it tends to come from the ground up, rather than being created somewhere in the music ‘industry,’ so it’s always available,” agrees Heavenly’s Rob Pursey, Skep Wax Records co-founder.
There’s also, quite simply, the bleakness of this year: insurgent fascism, state-sponsored genocide. “2025 is one of the worst years in decades,” O’Hara says, “so if people need to escape, relax, or find community, music is the answer.” Maybe listeners are increasingly seeking out the balm of, as O’Hara puts it, “relatable lyrics, chiming guitars, [and] catchy melodies—sometimes you do need a bit of sunshine pop in dark times.”
Alongside this, Pursey observes “a reaction to the cold, dead world of big tech,” with his label championing physical music formats. “In particular, there is a fear of content being artificially generated,” he says. “That anxiety, I reckon, is partly why this kind of music appeals. It’s imperfect in a way that guarantees a human made it.”
It’s not just the AI slop flooding Spotify’s made-for-you playlists that causes fatigue. The popularity of bands like Squid, Black Country, New Road, and Geese this year means the landscape of alternative music has been dominated by more challenging, maximalist art (and in Squid’s case, unrelatable lyrics about cannibalism). “2025 has a lot of shouty music and disaffected noise,” Kai Slater says, “which is all fine and dandy, but melody—much like the notion of ‘rock ‘n’ roll’—is like a plant genus that, despite all the odds, always finds a way to thrive and exist. And in certain periods there’s more of a yearning for that sound in the music world, like in 2025, when you’re surrounded by bleak post-punk poets or whatever.”
“I think that in most eras there’s been a need for less aggressive/noisy/nihilistic rock music and more sequined, sparkly sounds for dainty melodious people,” Slater continues, having released some of the most strikingly melodious, out-of-time tunes of the last year or so in Radio DDR and, hot on its heels, this month’s Balloon Balloon Balloon.
Projects like Sharp Pins are not here to reinvent the wheel. More important is simply to keep it spinning—to shock those foundational genre cornerstones with fresh life and color. Sharp Pins succeed in adding to the lineage, not phoning in a rendition of what already exists. This means, unlike the 4000th shoegaze band whose publicist promises they’re turning the genre on its head, indie pop gets to be more unabashedly referential. Manchester’s Autocamper can have Tom Crossley of The Pastels play flute on their album, What Do You Do All Day?, and lather the arrangements with the fizzy organ tones we instantly associate with Rocketship’s debut. They borrow from and pay homage to the past, but swerve being derivative by pushing forward with brilliant pop music that, to bring it back to basics, holds your attention and makes you feel something—all you can ask for really.
Similarly, Good Flying Birds’s debut album Talulah’s Tape nods to the revered Oxford group Talulah Gosh, while the band name itself pluralizes a Guided By Voices fan fave. Like Slater, Indianapolis-based Kellen Baker wrote and recorded everything himself, and it pops with so much personality. The interstitial skits—monkey noises, SpongeBob SquarePants samples, random audio-meme fragments—make his squiggly solos and boxy riffs sound even more euphoric in contrast. See the transition into “Eric’s Eyes” or the uplifting, endlessly re-playable groove of the album opener. The latter, “Down on Me,” is introduced by a vintage interview snippet in which William Reid quips “my favorite color is gold” in answer to a lazy, polarizing question about whether the Jesus and Mary Chain are the best band in the world or the worst. As the album’s very first word, it’s positioned as a kind of rallying mantra against those that underestimate or infantilize indie pop.
I view Baker’s approach to the anachronistic Good Flying Birds website as a reaction to big tech hegemony that Pursey mentioned, an uncynical compromise between unplugging completely that still lets bands engage with fans online in a way more akin to the wholesome MySpace era. Like the album’s sincere/silly push-and-pull, the site supplements its retro pop-ups, animations, and goofy word art with wisdom-dishing blog posts: “Its freaking september 2025 yallll we are playing music in light of a crushingly fucked world, make something pretty while you can,” and “highly recommend putting on a tune that speaks to u and dancing in ur room right tf now [sic].” I tried it and can confirm: That’s really all there is to it.