The Underground Indie Music Curators of YouTube

In 2018, my YouTube algorithm recommended a video that forever changed my taste in music. 

Growing up I didn’t have an interest in music outside the mainstream: the radio stayed on the top 40 stations. But, when I moved to Charleston for college, I was exposed to a lot of new music artists such as Sublime, Slightly Stoopid, and other kinds of stereotypical music of a college freshman in a coastal city who’d just discovered weed and 40-ounce beers. 

My musical tastes stabilized and everything that interested me was rather predictable well known artists or bands. That all changed one day when I was looking for something to watch on YouTube and a recommended video caught my eye. It was the song “I Didn’t Know” by a band called Skinshape, posted by the account David Dean Burkhart. The thumbnail was a style of art I had never seen before, and it really caught my eye. I listened to the song and it was like nothing I’d heard before. I loved it. I immediately started looking around to see where I could find more music like that.

That was my introduction to this niche world of underground indie music (I use the umbrella genre of indie, but this style of music incorporates the subgenres of lo-fi rock, jangle pop, bedroom pop, shoegaze, etc.). It’s nothing you’ll hear at a party, in a restaurant or store, and especially not on the radio (except for WUSC, of course), but it’s the music you’ll want to go on a late night drive with the windows down to. It’s the music that you can lay in your bed and daydream to. It’s the music that has a funny way of making you nostalgic of a time that might not even have existed.

I was so excited to share it with my friends, but it just wasn’t their taste. I turned to the internet to find many people reporting similar experiences, which birthed an online community of people who enjoy this kind of underground indie. The huge problem for lovers of this genre, ironically, was that the underground indie was a bit too underground. If you weren’t in the know, it was nearly impossible to discover new music. 

Most of the music was only uploaded to Bandcamp, not any major streaming platforms (a lot of this music still isn’t available on Spotify due to almost all of the bands from the 2010s being presently defunct). This problem was thankfully solved by people with the knowledge, dedication, and time to scour the internet for tiny bands with almost no followings and listen to their music. These people created YouTube pages for the sole purpose of sharing their favorites with the world: A service that made this incredibly underground genre freely accessible to anyone who happened to stumble upon their channel like I did. 

I stumbled into several channels with collections of thousands of curated indie songs that I would never have found in a million years. The number of songs available in these collections is so overwhelming that I started my own playlist to filter it down to the best of the YouTube indie collections (linked below).

If this seems like a genre you might be interested in checking out, here is a link to my playlist, which I think will set you up to get a better idea of what’s good out there without having to search too hard for the diamonds in the rough out of the thousands of songs now available in the major indie collections. I suggest beginning with the following 3 songs to test the waters: Sunlight by Yuno, Losing Track of Time by Bleach Day, and Interference by Let’s Kill Janice. If you’re into those, check out the rest of the playlist for some deeper cuts. And if you’re interested in checking out the YouTube curators themselves, here are links to all the ones I am familiar with:

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Image courtesy of Skinshape, 2018