Today we’re haunted not so much by melancholy as by doomerism — the idea that music is now in decline and will not get any better. In a 2024 poll, Americans ranked the 2020s as the worst decade of music since the 1930s, matched by a significant decline in consumption of current releases. People are especially troubled by AI music — not to mention ghost artists, platform marketing, quasi-payola schemes, and the dominance of streaming. (Oh, good news: you can gamble on music now too.)
Retromania is definitely back, as new artists produce atmospheric, churning hardcore and other sounds of a bygone musical age. A survey of contemporary rock music shows artists aren’t just searching for old-school musical inspiration, let alone mourning history’s lost relics. Instead, they are producing music that is vital and relevant to life in the 2020s.
This latter point is the most remarkable. For over a decade, rock faced predictions of its death and denunciations of its supposedly reactionary fandom — rock, according to its critics, is just too white and too male. Things looked especially dismal given the dominance of poptimism, a critical tendency that ditched rock for easy web traffic and centrist liberalism. For this crowd, all things pop and hip-hop were to be celebrated as the political vanguard. Rock, in the indie form, was the music of the dreaded Infinite Jest–reading white aesthete. In its classic form, it was the music of the right-coded redneck. Both of these figures, and their preferred music, would need to step aside for the future. For progress.
Fast-forward to the present. Rock was one of the fastest growing genres last year, surging not only in the United States and UK but Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. And many great musicians never stopped making records — all the 2000s artists named above (save Winehouse, RIP) have evolved over time and continue to make music.
People are excitedly rediscovering classic rock again, and kids are joking online about the triumphant return of what they’re calling “white boy garage music.” Even butt rock and nu metal are apparently cool again.
Meanwhile, poptimism has been atrophying, crashing down at the same time as the broader liberal cultural approach that once empowered it.
In the exact moment a genuine left is driving history’s rebirth, rock’s fortunes are on the rise. Perhaps it might serve as wellspring for a new alternative.