here is the thing nobody wants to say out loud: most of what you love is already over, and the part you are still enjoying is the echo.
this is not a complaint about kids today. kids today are fine. kids today are, if anything, better musicians than we were, better organised, better at recording themselves, and far less interested in the specific brand of self-destruction that made the last twenty years so photogenic. that is progress. that is good. we mean it.
the problem is structural. when a scene works, it works because there is somewhere to play, somewhere to sleep, somewhere to print, and enough people who care to fill a room on a wednesday. all four of those are being priced out simultaneously. you cannot fix that with a better guitar tone. you cannot fix it by starting another label. we have watched six people start another label this year and every one of them is now running a warehouse out of a bedroom.
what actually helped, historically, was somebody with a lease being irresponsible with it. a room, a bad p.a., a person willing to lose money for four years because the alternative was having nothing to do. every scene worth writing about started with an act of financial stupidity by somebody who is now, twenty years later, unwilling to admit that is what it was.
we are not going to pretend we have a solution. we are a magazine. our entire contribution is telling you which records are good, occasionally telling you which people are frauds, and keeping a list of rooms that still let bands play in them. that is the job. that is the whole job.
but if you have a lease and a tolerance for losing money, now would be a good time.
the alternative is another decade of bands who are technically excellent and have absolutely nowhere to become interesting. you can hear it already. everything is recorded beautifully. nothing sounds like it came from anywhere.
one more thing, and then we will stop. the reason this matters is not nostalgia. we are not asking anyone to recreate a year they were not alive for. the reason it matters is that a scene is the only quality control that has ever worked in this form. a room full of people who will tell you to your face that the new songs are worse is worth more than every review ever printed, including ours. take that away and you get exactly what we have now: bands who are praised by an algorithm, discouraged by nobody, and finished by twenty-six.
go be irresponsible with a room. that is the whole editorial.