19 Thoughts Around Broadcast's Tender Buttons

1. I said on Twitter recently that there were a few bands releasing albums in 2021 that remind me of Deerhoof—who are, obviously, still operational and still making very interesting music—but I think the comparison proved too specific (even though I feel like I’m going to be prone to more specificity a few more “thoughts” down the line on this one).
2. In order to understand the heart of what I was trying to get at, I need to work backwards, or at least from a different starting point. Much of the last decade of “indie”—which, for the billionth time, I am using to signify as a marketing term rather than as an ethos—felt referential to the point of pure copyism, with nothing much interesting being done to the source material. If you were a band or project that claimed inspiration from, say, the Human League, you simply sounded (and probably still sound) like the Human League.
3. This phenomenon was so pervasive that, despite certain sub-genres of indie being constructed atop the concept of nostalgia itself, artists continually drew supposed inspiration from sounds so current that nostalgia’s role in the artifice itself actually shrunk (unless you consider recalling a good sandwich you had last week as an explicit act of experiencing nostalgia). You saw this with chillwave (which took no time at all in its brief lifespan for artists to make music exclusively inspired by and referencing their peers), you saw this with witch house (ditto), you saw this with the wave of beach-y bands that followed Best Coast’s specific approach, you saw this with James Blake’s rhythmically perfumed singer-songwriter approach that became so ever-present for a period of time, you saw this with the constant reverberations of new synth-pop bands copying new synth-pop bands copying new synth-pop bands (some of whom were copying Purity Ring). You can still see it today, if you know what you’re looking for.
4. “Indie” artists were often effectively acting the same way major labels were assumed to operate, choosing to ape whatever was trendy at that very moment instead of developing their own sound in a vacuum of their own influence. Take a look at what Olivia Rodrigo has done recently with her two impressive-on-varying-levels singles so far: Seemingly overnight, she’s shed the Disney stigma (while still being very much a part of the Disney universe, mind you) through embracing a safe and smooth blend of Phoebe Bridgers’ close-mic’d emotionalism, Lorde’s purple-sounding confessional pop, and Taylor Swift’s Coliseum-sized intimacy. How is a newly emerging “indie” artist dropping the vowels in their stage name and adding some James Blake-esque wub-wubs to their music any different?
6. Back in 2017—a pre-pandemic period of time in which there seemed to be some sort of underlying critical conundrum as to whether the “indie” artists that came up in the late 2000s should be written off wholesale for whatever nonsensical reason—Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes rightly lamented the lack of “progressive” sounds in 2010s indie, obviously gesturing towards the fact that many bands that had risen during the decade were purely derivative and seemingly uninterested in pushing any sort of “new” sound forward.
7. Pecknold got gently destroyed by this from other critics, which was unfair and borderline disingenuous, especially as some crits immediately interpreted the invocation of the term “progressive” to mean something that he clearly wasn’t getting at. What Pecknold was clearly saying, in so many words, is that there were too many bands that sounded like, like, Porches, including Porches themselves (and I like Porches). And he was right, and if his rightness wasn’t obvious then, it sure as shit is now.
8. I don’t want to spend this entire newsletter going nuts on how derivative, like, SOHN was, so before I move on from this latest iteration of my perpetual Seinfeld-esque “What’s the deal with 2010s indie?” routine, I’d like to highlight a rare record from the past decade that felt like it did something totally new: Yves Tumor’s Safe in the Hands of Love, a massive blast of emotion and noise that sounded equally indebted to Lil Peep’s depressive crawl, trip-hop’s rhythmic iridescence, the monasticism of gothic folk, and a thousand other sonic signifiers that I still have yet to put my finger on. There may have been a few records from the 2010s that I loved more than Safe in the Hands of Love, but nothing else from the decade offered such a massive shock to my system that it left me feeling as if I had just woken up lying in the middle of a crater, wondering where all this gorgeous devastation around me had come from.
9. One more thing on Yves Tumor: The absolute newness that Safe in the Hands of Love represented—a “progressive” sound, if you will—is most likely why I didn’t fall quite as hard for the follow-up, last year’s Heaven to a Tortured Mind. It’s very good! But the explicit Prince-isms and ‘70s rock re-contextualizations didn’t feel as utterly earth-shattering to me, which is absolutely not their fault and not something they should be expected to provide with every release. It just hit different.
11. 2021 has been an interesting year for releases so far, mostly because there doesn’t seem to be much that anyone is actually excited about. I haven’t listened to it yet, but I already know that the big critical consensus record so far—the Floating Points and Pharaoh Sanders joint—is jazz of some sort, a genre that’s been a recent critical retreat for those otherwise uninterested in engaging with variants of strident-sounding pop being made by younger people, spanning the abrasive SoundCloud rap of several years ago to the spiky genre-blend that hyperpop (a subgenre that seems to be already outgrowing itself) represented in its infancy.
12. But there’s been a lot of interesting records released this year—records that remind me of that progressivism that Pecknold was gesturing towards, made by artists seemingly intent on constructing something resembling their own musical language. NYC trio Palberta unleashed the equally challenging and thrilling Palberta5000, filled with hooks and riffs that sound “wrong” 400 times until they bury themselves in your head on the 401st time; Norwegian quartet Pom Poko’s utterly delightful second album Cheater pogos from kitchen sink to kitchen sink while exuding a bewildering blend of cheerfulness and snarling attitude; Goat Girl’s mesmerizing On All Fours finds the South London quartet embracing beats and electronics in a way that recalls a slightly more dance-minded Electrelane—and I’ve just started really digging into the explosive debut from Black Country, New Road, whose music I’ve been quite taken with despite not really enjoying other bands in their sphere (yes, I’m talking about black midi).
13. These records (and others!) remind me what it’s like to be truly surprised when putting on new music—to hear something I don’t expect to hear, to tune into a new work from an “indie” band and be greeted with something other than a recapitulation of talky post-punk, sparkly synth-pop, or the slackness of ‘90s indie rock. They remind me of what you can do when you use a set of influences and existent sounds to craft something unexpected; more specifically, they remind me of Broadcast.
15. Broadcast were, at their core, a band built on a certain level of nostalgia. (It’s very fitting that it seems impossible to talk accurately about the temporal-ness of Broadcast’s current existence, since despite the passing of Trish Keenan in 2011 there’s been no official word on whether or not James Cargill has shuttered the project for good.) When Keenan and Cargill formed the group in 1995, they did so under the name Pan Am Flight Bag—a moniker that itself evokes stylish and retro images of the late 1950s and early 1960s—before changing the project’s name to Broadcast after a single gig.
16. Has there ever been a better name for a band than Broadcast? The name itself instantly conjures a sort of transmission from a different location that you’re tuning into, like a shortwave radio burst. To tune into an aural broadcast can require imagining the physical space that the broadcast itself is taking place in, and to me Broadcast’s music has always sounded divorced from any specific space and time—utterly and completely mystical, projecting a sense of unknown even after a million spins.
17. Back to the nostalgia thing for a minute: I’m certain that Simon Reynolds has a bit on Broadcast in his excellent book Retromania, which I recently gave away after moving apartments. (If you haven’t read Retromania and are looking for a very good encapsulation into popular culture’s obsession with nostalgia, it is a must.) Broadcast’s music evokes, on a level, the flower-power sounds of the 1960s along with the haunting sound-effect creations of BBC Radiophonic Workshop composers like Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire; the project’s last release to date, 2013’s Berberian Sound Studio, directly referenced this inspiration by providing a soundtrack to David Strickland’s giallo-alluding soundstage horror film of the same name. Sometimes, Broadcast sound to me like the sonic equivalent of all of those “logos that scared me as a kid” YouTubes—nostalgia as a distant threat, memory as a faintly glowing sense of fear.
19. Some bands get bigger as they grow older; Broadcast got smaller. The band saw members come and go with every successive release until Tender Buttons in 2005, when Broadcast consisted solely of Cargill and Keenan. In a sense, this growth-by-subtraction is elegantly and poetically perfect when it comes to the band’s music. The more spartan Broadcast became in form, the more blunt force impact their music seemed to possess, even when existing in the dream world of their own creation.
20. Broadcast have never released a bad album, and as it stands they have one of the strongest and most fascinating catalogues in the last several decades of indie—but Tender Buttons is their best album, I think, and it seems that in recent years it’s become a consensus favorite as well. There is and has since been simply nothing quite like it, a masterpiece of seeming simplicity that would be impossible to replicate in any fashion. The hooks are irrepressibly catchy and couched in layers of perfectly calibrated static and noise—the type of abrasiveness that would be potentially off-putting if pushed too far in the red. On Tender Buttons, every single sound possesses just the right amount of impact, constantly inviting you to dive deeper into its brutalist world even as its edges continue to shape-shift, from tangy sharpness to washes of pillowy decay. It’s pure psychedelia in the fashion that Keenan herself once defined the term to The Wire:

I’m not interested in the bubble poster trip, 'remember Woodstock’ idea of the sixties. What carries over for me is the idea of psychedelia as a door through to another way of thinking about sound and song. Not a world only reachable by hallucinogens but obtainable by questioning what we think is real and right, by challenging the conventions of form and temper.

2. I suspect that “Tears in the Typing Pool” has become something of Broadcast’s signature song at this point. DJ Koze used it to heart-stopping effect on his astounding DJ-Kicks mix from 2015, and even though it’s not the centerpiece per se on Tender Buttons (that would be the confoundingly beautiful “Arc of a Journey”), it stands apart from the rest of the album as something melodically uncomplicated while packing an equal punch as its counterparts. It also seems like the song took on a permanent level of emotional relevance after Keenan passed.
3. It’s been a little more than ten years since Keenan died from complications that arose from contracting H1N1. Her death resonated deeply with me at the time, as someone who deeply loved Broadcast’s music and connected with the frequencies that Keenan radiated into the cosmos. She was the first person I thought of when Adam Schlesinger passed away from COVID-19, and she immediately came to mind when I learned about SOPHIE’s unbelievably tragic death earlier this year. All three, to me, are immensely talented artists who had more to offer, lives cut needlessly and painfully short.
4. Time seems to take a more fluid shape when listening to Broadcast’s music, and since COVID-19 came into our lives I’ve lost track of the temporal sight of Keenan’s passing, too. I often catch myself thinking of her death as intrinsically tied to COVID—an easy mistake to make, if it’s a “mistake” at all, since she did pass as a result of a form of influenza. People just seem to disappear so unfairly now, without warning and en masse, and from Keenan’s passing up until this very moment, listening to Tender Buttons always has me contemplating the same line of thought: Where does everyone go when they’re gone forever, and does that journey ever really end?