Design by Tyler Farmer
As "indie sleaze" has become inescapable online in recent years, a generation of boundary-pushing Black artists have been overlooked. Santigold, Spank Rock, and Kilo Kish remember a scene far more diverse and experimental than today’s nostalgia suggests.
October 20, 2026
The tension between what artists were actually making and how the music industry tried to categorize it sits underneath nearly every conversation about Black musicians and alternative music. It’s a trend that continues to this day.
By the time Naeem Juwan returned home to Baltimore in the mid-2000s wearing the impossibly tight skinny jeans style he had picked up from the indie and punk scenes he frequented in Philadelphia and Brooklyn, the look still carried enough shock value to get him laughed at on a city bus.
“I remember having my little tight jeans on and going back for the first time,” he recalled to me over our Zoom call in mid-September. “People couldn’t stop making fun of me.”
To Juwan, better known as Spank Rock, the jeans were more than a fashion choice. They were part of a new way of expressing himself that felt “really niche and underground, and very punk,” he says.
So when Brooklyn rap group Ninjasonik released “Tight Pants,” with its proudly ridiculous refrain, “I’m a tight pants wearing ass nigga,” Juwan heard something bigger in the joke.
“It really helped create some sort of anthem” for the styles and culture he and his friends were building, he says.
But the jeans didn’t stand alone. In Philly, where Juwan was making music, he wore them to parties attended by art students, graffiti writers, DJs, rappers, and musicians colliding at Hollertronix, the party started by DJs Low Budget and Diplo. Mashups were everywhere. Southern rap and Baltimore club could sit next to indie rock, punk, house, disco, and whatever else a DJ had dug up that week. He remembers partying in Williamsburg and watching another version of the same experiment take shape.
It was, he says, a true art scene.
And nearly two decades later, those same skinny jeans hardly need an explanation. They have become part of the visual cue for an era now remembered as “indie sleaze,” alongside clothing brand American Apparel, smeared eyeliner, flash photography, sweaty parties, and a certain strain of downtown cool.
Musically, the canon tends to revolve around bands like LCD Soundsystem, The Strokes, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. More recently, a new younger generation has returned to the aesthetics, sounds, and nightlife of the period, with artists like The Dare and Fcukers being touted as those carrying the torch. But the “revival” and nostalgic retelling often leans toward a whiter story than the people who were actually there remember. Artists including Santigold, Spank Rock, Dev Hynes, Bloc Party, and others helped create the era's genre collisions.
“It was really diverse,” Juwan says. “When it’s time to actually get creative and actually do new things, you’re gonna have a lot of different people there, and it’s not just gonna look like one thing.”
Juwan’s version of the era includes TV on the Radio and M.I.A., but also Philly rap group Plastic Little, Brooklyn group Ninjasonik, Light Asylum’s Shannon Funchess, DJ Mehdi, DJ Blu Jemz, Dances With White Girls, and countless other artists, DJs, photographers, and party fixtures whose names have largely fallen away from contemporary retellings.
Spank Rock wasn’t standing on the outskirts of this culture, either. Juwan appeared on the cover of The FADER. He performed at Coachella twice. He and Santigold appeared in an Alexander Wang campaign. He DJed Wang’s Fashion Week parties. He remembers the photographer Bronques, first name Merlin, a towering Black man in a blond wig who documented the era through Last Night’s Party (a photoblog), as someone who helped create the scene through his pictures. So when Juwan encounters retrospectives of the era and doesn’t see himself, the omission can be disorienting.
“I have noticed a lot of these stories popping up, and I’m rarely ever mentioned in it,” he says. “So personally, I have asked why I am not showing up a lot.”
It’s a question that gets at something larger than whether Spank Rock belongs on the next Spotify indie sleaze playlist. The more you talk to Black artists who moved through this period, the stranger our memory of it starts to look.
Among the people who were there, there’s not even a consensus a about what to call that era.
Kilo Kish—the multidisciplinary artist known for slipping between electronic, hip-hop, indie, and experimental pop—calls it the “hipster era,” the language she remembers people actually using when she moved to New York City in 2008. Juwan remembers “hipster” and “scene-ster” circulating, too. Santigold rejects both as names for a musical movement.
“It wasn’t called anything,” she told me over the summer. “It was just indie. It was what indie was at the time.”
“Hipster,” as Santigold remembers it, described the fashion more than the music. Vintage clothing, rare band t-shirts, strange pattern combinations, and the pursuit of something nobody else could quite duplicate. All in all, individuality was the point.
“Indie sleaze” as we know it today is a retrospective term, taking a period of time of independent music, fashion, nightlife, and internet culture and giving it a neat name that the people creating it never had. Once a period becomes a genre, it also becomes easier to decide what and who belongs inside it. Kish herself remembers something far less orderly.
She arrived in NYC in 2008, before she started making music herself, and remembers bouncing between worlds that now tend to be separated into their own playlists and histories. Kish says in a span of a weekend one might see MGMT, then Phoenix, then Santigold, then end up at a rap show. DJs flexed their knowledge by digging for obscure records and moving between Fela Kuti, Donna Summer, David Bowie, Morrissey, dance music, hip-hop, and whatever else could move the room.
“It didn’t feel segregated in any way,” Kish says. “Rappers were making songs with guitarists, and all this was just happening next to each other.”
Juwan remembers the same fluidity in Philly. At Hollertronix, genre-mixing wasn’t some kind of branding exercise. Plastic Little could rap over party records while sampling The Smiths. Spank Rock could pull from Baltimore club, Southern rap, punk, indie, and electronic music without treating any of those references as contradictory.
“When I was moving through that scene, I looked at it as a true art scene,” he says.
Santigold described finding that world as something even more personal.
Before releasing her cultural resetting self-titled debut in 2008, she had fronted the Philly punk band Stiffed. The music industry, she says, had little imagination for what a Black woman making punk and new wave was supposed to be. She remembers carefully considering management and career decisions because she worried about being pulled into what the music industry understood as “Black music,” which at the time largely meant rap and R&B.
“I just wanted to be allowed to be exactly what I was,” she says. “It wasn’t that I wanted to exist in a white world or Black world. I just wanted to be able to exist as I was.”
Then she met Spank Rock. For the first time, Santigold says, she met another Black artist who seemed uninterested in shrinking himself to make his work legible to somebody else. Alongside Juwan and the multicultural creative community he was around, she found a place where the different parts of herself no longer needed to be separated.
“He had this whole vibe and his stage show was exciting; the music was fun, and [his] scene felt like I could step all the way into my whole self,” she says. She also says the internet helped.
MySpace allowed artists like herself to put music directly in front of listeners while the music industry still struggled to understand them. She recalled an early meeting with an Atlantic Records A&R who told her the songs that would eventually become her debut sounded confused and that she needed to figure out what she was. The online audience offered a different answer.
“You could say, ‘Fuck all of you,’” Santigold says of the old gatekeepers. “It doesn't even matter what you say.” People were listening anyway.
The tension between what artists were actually making and how the music industry tried to categorize it sits underneath nearly every conversation about Black musicians and alternative music. It’s a trend that continues to this day.
Kilo Kish remembers wanting her first album placed in an alternative category and being told she couldn’t. “Why not?,” she remembers thinking.
“Your music can be put in a category of R&B, even though there’s no R&B elements to it, just based off of being Black,” Kish says. “These are just holdovers from a world without nuance.”
Santigold’s experience stretches even further back. Stiffed could make punk and new wave, but the industry’s racial architecture still followed her wherever she went. She could hear a lane for herself; the business could not.
“Artists are always only allowed in their spot,” she says. “They could be doing all kinds of shit, but it would be called rap. It would be called R&B, no matter what it is.”
Santigold remembers hearing Bloc Party’s “Helicopter” and being excited simply because hearing a Black musician break through with a major rock song still felt remarkable (the song peaked at No. 34 on Billboard’s U.S. Hot Singles Sales chart). She remembers Dev Hynes when he was a teenager playing in Test Icicles, long before Blood Orange. She later took Theophilus London on tour.
Santigold regularly noted that these artists were not operating in isolation. They could see one another. But now they're being written out of the history books.
Deb Ashley, a culture writer born and raised in Queens, encountered that disconnect from the other side.
Growing up in the 2000s, Ashley became obsessed with New York Noise, the local television show that introduced her to independent artists. It opened a musical world that felt distinct from what her parents had shown her and what mainstream radio was offering. She remembers discovering artists including M.I.A. and Interpol and, eventually, seeing Black musicians like Dev Hynes moving through these alternative spaces. Still, it could be a lonely experience.
Ashley remembers a friend scrolling through her iPod and telling her she listened to “a lot of white people music.” She didn’t start attending concerts regularly until later, in part because she didn’t know many Black people who shared her taste. When she eventually went to see Beach House with another Black woman, she noticed how few people in the room looked like them.
For Ashley, that is part of what makes the disappearance of Black artists from the retrospective narrative so complicated. Black artists existed in these scenes. Black listeners existed, too. But “indie” had already become coded in the popular imagination as something white.
Juwan remembers moving through the world entirely differently. From his POV, rooms were full of people of different races and backgrounds. To him, “Tight Pants” was practically an anthem for the Black kids who had adopted a punk and indie silhouette that could get them clowned anywhere. He remembers meeting Kele Okereke of Bloc Party and Swedish artist Mapei. He says Black DJs, rappers, photographers, and musicians were the fabric of the scene.
“I wasn’t moving through that time in the music scene feeling alienated,” he says.
The polar opposite experiences of Ashley and Juwan only prove two things can be true at once. A scene can be diverse in the rooms where culture is being made and still become white in the popular imagination.
Maybe this is what happens when a scene becomes a memory. The messiness gets smoothed over, the cast of characters gets smaller, and eventually a culture that once resisted easy definition starts to look remarkably uniform in retrospect.
The word “sleaze” does a lot of work in contemporary nostalgia. It summons the cigs, the drunkenness, the dirty jeans, and the crying on the sidewalk, reducing an unruly creative period to its messiest visual aids. Kish remembers all of that. She just doesn't remember it as the whole story.
“The sleaze part gets highlighted,” she says, “but there was a ton of DIY creativity as well.”
Kish says the creativity spilled well beyond the records as artists built their own elaborate visual worlds around themselves through film, costume, makeup, photography, and fashion, while DJs dug through decades of music for references that could be pulled apart and recombined.
Santigold remembers the same instinct. After years of trying to make herself legible to the industry, her debut finally allowed her to think beyond music alone.
“I was figuring out the choreography. I was making the artwork,” she says. “I was finally getting to be an artist in the way that I wanted to be for the first time.”
Kish recalled that period of creative freedom as one of the last moments before social media made people constantly aware of being watched. Kish says one could meet a person at a party, fail to get their number, and have to return to the same party if they ever wanted to see them again. A night out did not automatically become a piece of content attached to a permanent online identity.
“People were allowed to be more free and more candid and more wild,” she says.
People made zines and built worlds from whatever they could find, Kish says. As culture becomes increasingly mediated through screens, algorithms, and artificial intelligence, she understands why younger people might find that tactile messiness intoxicating.
Santigold understands the pull, too. She compares it to the return of vinyl, cassettes, and the desire for IRL experiences. She says looking backward isn't inherently a problem since culture has always recycled itself. The danger comes when inspiration becomes replication.
“At the best of it, you get inspired from the past to create something new for the future,” she says. “I feel like in this era, we’re forgetting to run it through our own self and experience and create something new. It’s more like copy and paste.”
That may be the central contradiction of the indie sleaze revival. The original period was exciting precisely because nobody seemed to agree on what belonged together. The scenes in Philly and New York were being assembled in real time, before anyone knew what they would eventually be called. Now, everything has been given a name, a look, a Spotify playlist, and a recognizable cast. And somewhere in that process, some of the people who made the mess disappeared. Juwan still doesn't have a definitive explanation for why. For years, he wasn’t even sure whether the omission he noticed was real or whether his ego was getting the better of him.
“When I, as an individual, felt like I was being erased or left out, I didn’t know how honest or true that was,” he admits. “ I thought maybe it was just me being mad because I can’t get on the cover of The FADER anymore or whatever.”
Then other people started asking the same questions. Kish has her own explanation for how these disappearances become permanent.
“It just all comes down to who’s telling the story,” she says, “and who is writing the history or rewriting the history. Because that’s what gets remembered.”