An oversized wool cardigan, loafers, and a Fender Stratocaster; what genre does this band play? Yeah, you guessed right – it’s indie rock. I love the Vancouver music scene, but you can’t argue that there isn’t an easy stereotype there. The singer of said indie band probably owns multiple pairs of basketball shorts, smokes Newport’s, and you can’t quite tell if they are 15 or 35.

Aleksandr Neplokhov / Pexels

Chances are one of the members either works at or co-owns a record store or recording studio, and they have probably performed on The Peak at least once in their career. As someone who has written numerous articles on alternative and indie rock bands across the province, from bands ranging from less than 100 monthly listeners on streaming platforms to hundreds of thousands, their Wikipedia pages all have the same three elements. What radio station did they perform on, what level of Warped Tour did they perform on, and a feature for their newest single that is releasing next month that only took 6 months to finish!

You either love them or hate them, but you can’t deny that indie rock is a fun genre. We love our local indie bands, check out some of the features I’ve written on local artists and find someone new to fall in love with. Give their Spotify and Bandcamp pages some love and count how many of them start their bio with… “Vancouver-based indie,” or if the Bandcamp page hasn’t been used. The ultimate Vancouver indie band starter pack contains a band photo taken somewhere in an alley, or in somebody’s living room, at least one song about Vancouver, and a drummer who has already been in 3 other indie bands.

I want you to think back to the last indie performance you saw, whether it was online or in person. I’d like to bet they fit one of these boxes written in this article. Indie has so many sub-genres that you can’t just generalize indie as its own entity. Indie pop, rock, and folk all have massive communities and fanbases from all different backgrounds and to categorize them all into one stereotype isn’t fair. But you have to admit, it is accurate.