AUSTIN, Texas — Fishing for trends at the South by Southwest festival is an often futile, dopey task, with nearly 2,000 distinct and divisive musical acts vying for attention in venues across the city of Austin. But wandering from show to show this year, it was hard not to notice that electronic pop and rock — those on-again, off-again paramours of the past three decades — are back together again, mashed up and fused into something new and not entirely defined.
Rather than the sprawling, drawn-out beats of mainstream EDM artists like Skrillex or the spare laptop-pop textures of post-Postal Service indie rock, groups like Icona Pop, Charli XCX, CHVRCHES and Tegan and Sara rocked out in Austin with lean, concise, big-hooked songs that verge on the anthemic, and are suitable for both the dance floors and the arena rafters.
“We were born in the dark club, with neon lights and sweat,” notes Icona Pop’s Caroline Caroline Hjelt. “But we’ve always been writing music to perform on big stages.”
Granted, these sorts of mega-mergers have happened before. Both Depeche Mode (who played a scaled-down Friday-night set at SXSW) and Daft Punk (who didn’t show up at the festival, despite persistent rumors to the contrary) have filled stadiums with crisply contoured electronic rock.
Icona Pop. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/WiredAnd in the ‘80s, back when synths often earned sneers, massive acts like The Cars took traditional guitar rock and augmented it with muscular, hook-maxing keyboards, paving the way for future heirs like The Killers.
But a new generation of musicians — culturally curious, intuitively omnivorous and raised without any of the anti-digital hang-ups that were still prevalent in the ’80s and ’90s — have further fogged the borders between rock, pop and electro.
“It’s a new thing,” says Icona Pop’s Aino Jawo. “Everything is getting mixed together: Dance music going together with pop music, or dance music going together with rock. You can hear a big mix.”
Which may be why so much of the new sound is hard to classify, especially when it’s performed live. Take Charli XCX’s biggest solo hit, “Nuclear Seasons.” On record, the song would seemingly have little to do with rock; instead, its precise drum-machine whacks and keyboard spangles recall the ’80s girl-group Exposé. But when she performed the song at the festival, accompanied by a live drummer, “Seasons” had an even greater urgency and grit. It sounded heavier than some of the guitar bands playing down the street.
Similarly, while the three members of the Scottish band CHVRCHES aren’t interested in coordinated dance moves or fist-pumping call-and-response opportunities, the group’s web-spread singles — “Lies,” “The Mother We Share” and “Recover” — nonetheless sounded epic during an early afternoon performance at the Fader Fort, with the kind of power and punch that once required a wall of guitar amps.
“One of the big challenges is writing with electronic instruments,” says CHVRCHES’ Iain Cook, “is that you realize you don’t have massive guitars and drums that take up all the sonic space. [You wonder], ‘How do you fill that out?’ And that’s forced us to be really creative about how we treat the synths and the drums — trying to push them in a bigger direction, and coming up with lines and riffs that, in some ways, are more like rock music.”
Sometimes the amalgamation is right on the surface, as with Charli XCX, whose half-hour set with live drums and wall-of-sound synthesizers was a deeply catchy, highly egalitarian distillation of three decades’ worth of music — a sound that incorporated everything from goth to hip-hop to ’80s freestyle.
Other times the mashups were subtle, aiming for the power-chord wallop of hard rock, but with keyboards instead of six-strings. You could hear it with Glasgow’s CHVRCHES, whose synth-spiked single “Lies” sounds like a riff-roaring rock anthem that’s been wiped clean of guitars.
And you could see the eclectic appeal in the audience at the Wednesday night performance by Swedish duo Icona Pop, whose electro-punk hit “I Love It” (co-written by Charli XCX) drew an enthusiastic crowd that included skinny indie kids, throwback ravers and backward-capped, devil-horn-throwing bros.
Charli XCX. Photo: Brian Raftery/Wired“The future is in saying, ‘I’m going to use everything that influences me,’” says Sara Quin of Tegan and Sara, who played SXSW in support of Heartthrob, a synth-steered dance-rock album far removed from the group’s acoustic-duo roots.
“I’m stealing this from
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Jonathan Lethem, but there’s the ecstasy of influence. We live in a world that’s very different from the ’80s and ’90s, where you could shut everything else out and say, ‘I only listen to rock music,’ or ‘I’m an alternative kid.’ That’s not possible anymore. Everything is a feed into something else. People are picking up everything, and then funneling it through their creative voice. What’s coming out probably seems — to older people like us — very schizophrenic. But kids today want to be as varied as possible.” Tegan and Sara’s embrace of electronic music was a bit more gradual. After forming in the mid-’90s as an indie-folk duo, the group gradually began incorporating elements of pop and new wave, and layering in synthesizers. “We were so rooted in indie-rock that it required baby steps,” says Quin.
“It was a huge part of our progression, because we weren’t just buried in our own thing. We had to learn to work with other people, how to stretch and become more versatile. That just naturally crosses over into your own songwriting.”
Heartthrob is the group’s most pronounced pop effort yet, with day-glo keyboards pushed to the forefront. When the group closed its Thursday-night set with “Closer” — a joyous, near-primal dance-rock fusion — the group was greeted by waves of bobbing fans. Maybe some of them were trying to figure out what to call the new sound that was filling the night air. If so, they didn’t pause to think about it too long.
