Indie Hype

Passion Pit are one of the most talked about bands of 2009, particularly on the internet. They’ve gotten a lot of buzz since they formed in 2007, a result of lead singer and songwriter Michael Angelakos first writing songs for his then-girlfriend and starting a band “because [he] had nothing else to do” that took over the Boston music scene. After being upstreamed to Columbia via Frenchkiss Records, however, the band began to garner national attention as well, and their major label debut, Manners, was released with the kind of overenthusiastic fanfare that Vampire Weekend received during 2008 and MGMT got the year before that.

They’re a band in the middle of what seems to be a well-oiled machine at this point: indie hype. Last year Current aired “Hyping Indie Hype,” a segment about creating buzz for underground artists in both rock and rap, suggesting that even with the marketability of “indie” as a genre since television shows like “The OC” made indie cool to the masses, it’s still hard for independent artists to really break the mainstream. For those that do, however, the praise is overwhelming, pushing emerging bands at consumers so much so early that a backlash can happen before the band even fully establishes their sound. These days, some consider Clap Your Hands Say Yeah a cautionary tale.

Lime Wire contributor Matt LeMay says that indie music has fallen prey to a tendency towards online “groupthink,” mirroring the same mainstream trends that independent music is supposed to be getting away from.