Eight underrated indie pop albums from last five years that you need to hear

If you’re like me, you can spend countless hours contemplating the meaningless and trivial. I suspect one day, sociologists will label my years on Earth as the Trivial Era – a time in which humankind fiddled with our phones as the planet burned. That may seem like a kind of depressing way to begin an article on outstanding recent vintage pop music, but it kind of gets at the very nature of the most loosely defined of all major music genres.

“Pop music” doesn’t really mean anything. Or, perhaps it does – but that meaning is ultimately meaningless. Pop music is popular music, and what is popular changes with the weather. There is no real stylistic thread that holds together pop music, beyond the very fact that it is popular. Consider this:

Billboard redefined the way it classified music and began releasing year-end top songs for post-war popular music in 1958. The first number one – by definition the most popular song of the year - was Domenico Modugno’s “Nel blu, dipinto di blu,” which you may know as “Volare.” Or maybe not. It may well have been a hit – as Paul McCartney might say – before your mother was born.

Brilliant indie pop albums from the last five years that you must hear

Today, the reigning year-end Billboard champ today is Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night.” Tell me the link that binds a romantic chanson to a mournful country ballad with a beat. While you’re working on that, consider the songs that have been Billboard-certified as the most popular in the “3s.” Wallen’s country ballad came in ’23.

In ’13, it was Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop.” 50 Cent’s “In da Club” dominated 2003. Whitney Houston’s Dolly Parton cover “I Will Always Love You,” the Police’s “Every Breath You Take,” Tony Orlando’s “Tie a Yellow Ribbon,” and the Beach Boy’s “Surfin’ U.S.A.” fill out the list. Again I ask you, beyond popularity, how to link those songs stylistically?

Thus we began applying modifiers to the basic term “pop.” That did carve up the broad genre into more understandable pieces. So Bubblegum Pop could refer to the Osmond Brother’s brand of bouncy, tween-centered songs, while Pop Punk could define a harder-edged, but still melodic type of song. “Thrift Shop” and “In da Club” are both hip-hop songs with a melodic sensibility, and that may be the single most defining aspect of pop music – a melody-forward impulse. Still, those melodies are a far cry from Whitney Houston or the Beach Boys.

Now, when you modify an ill-defined genre like “pop” with an equally vague adjective like “indie” – well, that pretty much opens you up to virtually any type of music. “Indie” just means independent, which suggests this type of pop music is free from the narrow strictures of mainstream gatekeepers. That is an indirect definition – describing what indie pop is not, rather than what it is. So indie pop is not Sabrina Carpenter. But what is it?

It's a conundrum – a genre of music that wants to appeal to a mass audience without relying on the tired formulas that have been working in the recent past. And out of that very conundrum sprouts some great music. It is positively dialectical, practically Hegelian in its evolution. OK – that’s the last time I’ll mention Hegel – at least for the next two weeks. After all, we’re not here to talk about 19th-century German philosophers.

We’re here to talk about some awesome indie pop albums that have come out in the past five years. They span the genres and draw influences from a variety of sources. But they all have that pop melodicism that makes them perfect for both casual listening and rocking out when you need a lift. Which defines all great pop music, indie or not.