Is anyone else as bored as I am with bands telling us they’re bringing back 'real' rock? In a recent interview with NME, Villanelle's Gene Gallagher expressed that the indie mob have “a genuine passion to bring rock music back.”
True rock fans will know that it hasn’t gone anywhere - but this isn’t the first time we’re seeing this take. Last October, Yungblood told Guitar.com that “rock is definitely coming back.” Fast forward to April this year and the Telegraph posted a story that claimed Yungblood was “bringing real rock music back from the dead." There’s so much to unpack here. What's dead, exactly? Rock music has never been dead! If anything, it’s never been more alive.
There are so many great bands forming every week who are reinventing the wheel, challenging the boundaries of rock and innovating subgenres within the heavy scene. Rock music never went anywhere, it just evolved.
Experimentation is a gift. It shouldn't be something we fear or ignore. Look at recent releases from people like Native James, an exciting, emerging artist modernising the rock-metal fusion, or Sixth Wonder, a prog metal band whose sound resonates as deeply emotional and empowering, or Megg Jacobs, a multifaceted artist embodying the nostalgia and rebellion of 90s pop-punk while toying with the grittiness of metalcore. All of these projects and more are on the up, exploring different vessels within rock and sidestepping its rules.
The idea that the music industry lacks real rock these days is nonsense, but mostly just mirrors ignorance. If anything, rock music has become a much more exciting space and environment since COVID.
The global pandemic reflected a time of uncertainty and social change on a grand scale, and 2020 saw many rock artists bring out some of their most introspective and experimental projects. Take Nova Twins’ Who Are The Girls?, a genre-mashing powerhouse of a debut album providing us with angsty vocals and raw guitar shreds, or Poppy’s I Disagree, a collection of avant-garde, hyperpop, metal and alternative anthems.
There was also Loathe’s I Let it In and It Took Everything - a devastating record with brutal screams tied around lyrics of displacement and heartbreak ("Take a step back, knowing all that’s real. Breathe out, alone again. Drowning in the noise.”)
The idea that ‘real' rock has gone anywhere discredits the incredible music that continues to shape this space today. When artists boldly and repetitively announce how they want to 'bring back' rock, they’re blinding themselves to what's happening right in front of them: new bands that are reinventing the wheel and contributing to the forever-evolving sphere of rock as we see it.
Plus, let's be frank: more often than not, when people talk about "bringing rock back", it's almost always tied around bands of four or five white dudes playing the same-old, Arctic Monkeys-coded indie-rock. It’s never inventive, just a carbon copy of what we’ve seen before. It’s like they’re stuck in a time capsule.
If you find yourself caring about the ‘realness’ of a certain genre of music, maybe ask yourself what that actually looks like. While we owe it to the GOATs who paved the way for rock today, that doesn’t mean we need to be stuck in the past. Bands can take influence from those original greats while reshaping the future authentically.
The rock industry would be a very dull place if artists didn’t experiment. Rock never died: your perception of what rock is just outdated.
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