A CERTAIN strain of indie appears custom-engineered for miserable middle-aged men to scowl at behind the wheel on the school run. If that’s you then you love these:
The Cure
On the outside, Grumpy Indie Dad is all Next shirts and V-neck sweaters. On the inside, he’s a raging goth in a perpetual state of self-indulgent misery. The average Cure song perfectly captures the feelings he has when sitting through Michael McIntyre’s Big Show: existential dread and a painful awareness of his one precious life slipping through his fingers.
The National
Seeing a greying beard in the mirror is dispiriting and adulthood is a never-ending tsunami of social anxiety; it’s as if The National have read Grumpy Indie Dad’s mind. Matt Berninger writes lyrics so that Dad never has to reveal what he’s really thinking, which is good because he’s gone off talking since he turned 40.
Wilco
Wilco rejected mainstream commercialism in much the same way as Grumpy Indie Dad goes out of his way to reject grinding suburban happiness. Why should he see joy in the small moments of everyday life? ‘There is something wrong with me,’ sings Dad as he spends yet another Wednesday driving his kids to and from clubs they don’t even like.
Pixies
With their quiet-loud-quiet dynamics, no band more accurately reflects the mood of Grumpy Indie Dad. First an ambiguous stare into the middle distance. Next, an explosion of rage and a cry of ‘Get your bloody shoes on! Shoes, not Crocs!’ Finally, a retreat into the silence of shame and nursed resentment.
Joy Division
A Mr Grumpy T-shirt simply doesn’t do justice to Grumpy Indie Dad’s innate sense of despair. Listen to the first minute of Joy Division’s Colony. That’s what the inside of his head sounds like when he’s picking coats up off the floor and flushing away his children’s turds.
The Horrors
A band that broke through 15 years ago is Grumpy Indie Dad’s concession to ‘new music’. Lyrics such as ‘It’s a good life… until it’s gone,’ remind him of happier times, like when he lived alone in a squalid studio flat at the age of 23 and played Xbox from when he got in at 5.15pm to when he went to bed at 2.15am, pausing only to microwave a Rustlers.
Bon Iver
A bleak winter soundscape is the perfect antidote to two hours in a bright, noisy soft play centre. Bon Iver’s spiritual soul-searching taps into Grumpy Indie Dad’s certainty that there must be something more to life than this. Dragged against his will into the ball pool, he accepts there isn’t.
