Stephen Malkmus’s New Band and More Culture Picks

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It’s Friday; here’s what we’ve got going on, because we can’t all spend our days reading Jean Cocteau by the pool like Jacob Elordi.

What was/is Indie Sleaze?

What do we mean when we use the word “indie”? What don’t we mean? This week on the site, GQ correspondent Meaghan Garvey examined the alleged revival of something called “indie sleaze,” a catchall term for a post-Y2K aesthetic characterized by “horny advertisements, flash photography, wild club nights, and quaint technology.” These things are (again, allegedly) trending anew, thanks to artists like the Dare and Charli XCX—who even pulled once-ubiquitous party photographer and indie-sleaze-aesthetic-definer the Cobrasnake from the Sparks-addled mists of time to shoot flash-blasted candids of Lorde, Billie Eilish, Rachel Sennott, and others at her 32nd birthday party.

What’s actually being “revived” here is unclear—as Garvey dives deeper into indie sleaze’s supposed 2024 manifestations, she finds only repurposed signifiers of what used to be called “hipster” culture, categoric vagueness (a Spotify playlist that collapses genre and history by yoking together the Dare, M.I.A., vintage chillwave, and the Postal Service—girl, so confusing!), plus many, many millennials decrying the whole phenomenon as one big foist. “Of course,” Garvey writes, “they’re mostly speaking to themselves, having experienced for the first time their youth culture repackaged for a generation whose standing in target market demographics has finally eclipsed their own.”

A special new band

Of course, before it was a quasi-resurgent varietal of sleaze, “indie” had a very different connotation, and it’s hard to think of two guys more synonymous with it than Pavement cofounder Stephen Malkmus and Chavez/Superwolf guitarist Matt Sweeney (who was rocking an arguably indie-sleaze-ish mustache all the way back in the ’90s, when practically nobody else on the scene dared to grow one except Chris Cornell—RIP).

Last year Malkmus and Sweeney quietly joined forces with multi-instrumentalist Emmett Kelly and Dirty Three drummer Jim White to form a new band, the Hard Quartet, and recorded 15 songs out at Rick Rubin’s spot in Malibu; you can hear the by-turns-winsome-and-rawkish results on their self-titled debut album, available today by the usual means. (Best one-two punch: the Malkmus-sung “Heel Highway” into Sweeney’s “Killed by Death,” loveliest tune ever to share a title with a Motorhead song that begins, “If you squeeze my lizard, I’ll put my snake on you.”)

All four members spoke to GQ correspondent Sam Sodomsky about starting a new chapter together. “These guys are fuckin’ cool,” Malkmus says, confessing that his internal monologue in their presence goes something like this: “Am I cool or am I a poseur? You know—Maybe I’m just…a dad from the ’90s.” (If Stephen Malkmus worries he’s washed, is there hope for any of us?)

Heartstopper, Joker, and More

Speaking of cool dads/2000s indie music: Ezra Koenig wore Hokas to play a surprise gig with his band Vampire Weekend on the sidewalk in front of New York hipster-oasis Time Again, per this report by GQ’s senior fashion writer and Time Again bureau chief Sam Hine; click through to glimpse Koenig’s kicks in the photos by GQ visuals editor Bowen Fernie, who also captured shots of some exclusive-to-this-show VW merch and (this is somehow the most Vampire Weekend thing about this story) a CitiBike traffic jam.