By: Lucas Fink By: Lucas Fink | July 20, 2022 | People, Lifestyle, Culture, Music, Art, Women of Influence Latest, Entertainment, Local,
As we’ve explored in prior articles, the San Francisco Bay Area is a uniquely fertile cultural landscape, consistently serving as a bastion for the most promising up-and-coming musical talent (especially true relative to the punk genre). The roster of successful artists and bands hailing from the city and its surrounding areas is not limited to just Green Day and their successors, though: an abundance of hugely influential indie and alternative bands first took root in Northern California.
We’ve assembled a list of some of the best, edgiest, most obscure indie bands from the SF Bay for those wishing to delve further into the Bay’s flourishing music scene or those in need of more artists to namedrop at parties and impress those affected twenty-somethings who’ll spend half an hour pontificating on which Radiohead album they’ve decided is the best.
See also: Rage Against the Machine at These Best Underground Bay Area Punk Venues
Sweet Trip
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Created in 1993 by Roberto Burgos and Valerie Cooper in San Francisco, Sweet Trip is a fascinating experimental indie project whose earlier work is now - thanks to Spotify and YouTube - being rediscovered and appreciated. Their singular soundscape blends glitchy, danceable electronic production with dreamy synths, sticky melodies, and alt rock-style guitars and drums. Velocity: Design: Comfort is regarded as their magnum opus and features the charmingly energetic “Dsco” and the rave-ready drum-and-bass banger “Pro: Love: Ad”.
Film School
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Film School is the brainchild of San Francisco-born Greg Bertens, who formed the indie rock outfit in 1998. In the band’s early days, Bertens frequently collaborated with members of the legendary American post-punk group Pavement (whose famed lead singer Stephen Malkmus hails from Stockton, California). Such a collaboration makes sense given the musical proximity between the two acts. Film School, now six albums deep into their career, have not sacrificed quality for the sake of quantity; their lush, reverb and distortion-heavy production and jangly guitar melodies continue to entrance and uplift.
Standouts from their recent 2018 album Bright to Death include the hazy summertime vibe-setter “Crushin” and the sparkling, upbeat banger “Bye Bye Bird”. In 2014, they played a set at the storied SF indie venue Bottom of the Hill.
See also: A Crash-Course On The San Francisco Bay's Punk Culture And Its Most Prominent Bands
Jay Som
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Spending her childhood in the East Bay’s Walnut Creek as the daughter of two Filipino immigrants, the profoundly talented multi-instrumentalist Jay Som cemented the bedroom pop-rock subgenre in the late 2010s with help from peers like Japanese Breakfast and Soccer Mommy. Som’s delicate, lo-fi sensibilities makes for a transifixingly raw immediacy, marrying confessional lyricism with hypnotic, densely layered production in the vein of dreampop pioneers like Yo La Tengo and Phil Elverum. Notable singles include the euphoric, synth-heavy “Baybee” and the more stripped down, intimately melancholic “Tenderness”.
Whirr
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Whirr is a San Francisco indie rock group and is, far and away, the most thoroughly shoegaze-y of all the bands on this list. Their gloomy, distortion-heavy aesthetic, barely intelligible lyrics, hard-hitting drums, and cacophonous production are very clearly drawn from their shoegaze predecessors My Bloody Valentine and Slowdive, but they stand apart from their inspirations and peers with their clever integration of complex time signatures and instrumental prowess.
“Younger than You” is a moody masterpiece ripe for the headphones of an angsty teenager, and “Ease” is a blazingly fast-paced testament to the talent of Whirr’s drummer, guitarist, and bassist.
Trails and Ways
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A dreampop quartet from the East Bay, Trails and Ways formed when their members befriended each other as undergraduates at UC Berkeley. They released two brilliant albums in the 2010s before disbanding, with one of their members going solo under the name Tanukichan (whose 2018 album Sundays is also quite brilliant).
Their distinctive marriage of bossa nova rhythms and dreamy synths made their tracks endlessly listenable: look no further than the Latin-inspired, absurdly catchy guitar diddy at the core of “Mtn Tune” and the equally transfixing track boasting thrumming bass synths “Skeletons”.
Xiu Xiu
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Definitively the most experimental of the bands featured here, Xiu Xiu is your answer when asked by a beanie-wearing music major at a college party what music you’re into. Xiu Xiu was formed in San Jose - the heart of the South Bay - in 2002 and consists of the power-duo Jamie Stewart and Angela Seo. Their inimitable brand of art rock is as challenging as it is rewarding to explore, frenetically bouncing between Stewart’s stunningly visceral vocals and Seo’s eclectic instrumentation and innovative keyboard work.
For the uninitiated, their 2017 album FORGET is an accessible starting point, featuring the gorgeously produced, meandering and melancholic “Get Up” and the upbeat, sing-along-ready synth rock-pop banger “Wondering”. If you’re still on board after FORGET, their ingenious, profoundly affecting 2004 record Fabulous Muscles is the next step, specifically the track “I Luv the Valley OH!”, a song ripe for sobbing your eyes out. Stewart’s frayed, gravely cries and utterly devastating lyrics are stunningly layered over minimalist instrumentation and occasionally interrupted by a beautifully morose guitar melody.
See also: Awaken Your Inner Music Geek At SF's Best Alternative Independent Record Stores
Photography by: Wendy Wei/Unsplash