Louder: Building an Indie-Rock Career in the TikTok Era

By Caryn Ganz

Pop Music Editor

Everyone comes to new music with their own cache of experiences and reference points. I’ve always loved Beach Bunny because it reminds me of my first years at SXSW in the early 2000s, wandering from sloshy indie-rock show to show discovering jangly/propulsive bands and sweet/tart new voices … which reminded me of women-led bands I loved in the ’90s. Lindsay Zoladz, who profiled the band’s singer-songwriter Lili Trifilio this week, says she hears traces of Letters to Cleo and Velocity Girl. Bob Odenkirk (yes, that Bob Odenkirk, he’s a fan!) said the band reminds him of Pixies, Sebadoh and the Cavedogs, “the indie rock that I loved from the days of yore.” I was delighted to learn that Trifilio has said that her most direct influence is none of the above, but rather the mainstream pop group Aly & AJ’s 2007 album, “Insomniatic.” It isn’t a huge surprise that two of Beach Bunny’s songs have blown up on TikTok, a platform that rewards broad appeal and emotional specificity — but does having a viral hit mean something different in the indie-rock ecosystem? It’s a question Trifilio has been grappling with as she prepares to release her band’s new album.

Burna Boy’s sixth album, “Love, Damini,” also interrogates the costs of success while he and his producers connect “Afrobeats to its worldwide kin: R&B, Jamaican dancehall, reggaeton, Congolese rumba, hip-hop and more,” Jon Pareles writes in his Critic’s Pick review.

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Jon Caramanica hosted an insightful conversation about Jack Harlow and white rappers on Popcast, and Lisa Abend tracked young students at Jazz Camp for Girls in Copenhagen, where a population usually underrepresented in the genre gets a chance to experiment and shine.

On a personal note: In 2003, I got an assignment at Spin for a “Bands to Watch” story — a 250-word mini-profile on an emerging band — for Metric. (Google at your own peril; I was a young writer.) It would be the first and last time I was able to write about the group because we ended up becoming friends, which has been an enduring joke: While Metric’s music has become increasingly complex, probing, deeply catchy and impeccably crafted, I’ve never been able to advocate for its coverage. But I can note here that its latest LP, “Formentera,” is out today.

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