Staff Mix No. 2: Meet Me in the Chatroom

When The Strokes released their debut album, Is This It, in October 2001, the singer/songwriter Alden Gardner Robinson (known best to fans of internet-addled pop music as Aldn) was just a little over four months old. And yet, despite his distance from the scuzzy New York bars that launched that band to international fame, their sound has loomed large as he’s come into his own as an artist channeling a lot of feelings into genre-blurring pop music. 

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Over the past few years, there have been a lot of artists like Aldn—young kids who started making music amidst the post-everything Gecsplosion of hyperpop, who look back to the sounds of early 2000s indie rock as one of their major influences. This mix collects a few of the major players of this foggy scene, each of whom approach these sounds from different directions. At one end, there’s straightforward post-punk revivalists like Kenny Hoopla and EKKSTACY, whose grayscale emoting recalls Interpol and Bloc Party at their most raw. At the other, there’s genre-blending pop pranksters like Frost Children, who occasionally evoke the rattle and hum of Yeah Yeah Yeahs' most prickly arrangements. In between, there’s a wide-ranging collection of experimenters, reaching back to a recent past that they can’t remember. Still, they find emotion and meaning in the haze of borrowed nostalgia.