The Guardian Indie

1. Guy Garvey on Elbow’s One Day Like This: ‘Every week, someone tells me they got married to it’

   ‘We threw strings at the track and it exploded into Lion-King-esque euphoria. I once got sent footage of a few hundred people on either side of a tube track singing it at each other’

   By 2007, we’d had a nerve-racking couple of years. We were on the V2 label for our first three albums but they were slowly folding. We signed with Fiction without them having heard a note of our fourth album, Seldom Seen Kid. As the money was running out, it was looking like “proper job” time. I would have been behind a nightclub till. Mark Potter would have been a chef and his brother Craig would have been an auxiliary nurse. But thankfully we got an advance and we were over the bloody moon.

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2. ‘I’ve met people with tattoos of it’: Andy Vella on shooting the Cure’s Boys Don’t Cry cover

   ‘The guitar, the hair, the mystery – I think I captured who the Cure are with this picture. When I showed it to Robert Smith and the band’s manager, they jumped up and down’

   I think this is the Cure image that’s most reproduced. I’ve met people with tattoos of it. It’s been bootlegged, like, millions of times. The bootlegs are rubbish, though – half the time someone’s obviously cut the stencil out with a scalpel, and it’s so crude.

   This image was used for the cover of Boys Don’t Cry when it was rereleased in 1986. It was taken during the video shoot, which featured three boys playing the band when young. I used to just go to those shoots as a fly on the wall, grabbing shots where I could – you try to not get in the way.

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3. ‘People think I’ve gone crazy’: indie sensation Cameron Winter on leaving crowds in tears with his wild lyrics and supernatural voice

   He is just 22 yet he is already being compared to Dylan, Cohen and Waits. The Geese frontman talks about the joys of going solo, employing a five-year-old bassist – and why God deserves a shout out

   The sign in the church reads simply: “God is real.” Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they, being a church. But it’s not a determined vicar who has put the poster up in a bid to convince his congregation. Rather it’s 22-year-old Cameron Winter, frontman of New York rock band Geese and now solo artist behind one of the year’s most beguiling albums.

   Winter is in church – St Matthias in north London – for his first ever UK solo show. And while it may or may not convince you of God’s existence, it certainly feels like an encounter with the divine. Hunched over a piano, his hands run up and down the keys freely as he pours out his stream-of-consciousness lyrics in a voice that has to be heard to be believed – fragile and prone to cracking yet also powerful, soulful, almost supernatural. Who is this creature, you wonder.

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4. Maria Somerville: Luster review – a vivid and vital entry in the shoegaze revival

   (4AD)
   The Irish artist’s folk-inflected sound is both unnerving and alluring on her luxuriant second album

   Maria Somerville’s second album of folk-tinged shoegaze arrives at an apposite time. TikTok has turned the genre into a lifestyle for alt teens, while the internet radio station NTS has made itself synonymous with hazy, deadpan underground pop. But the Irish musician’s sound feels distinctive: both slightly alienating – cool to the touch, unnervingly atmospheric – and slightly sexy, songs like Mayfly and Violet moving with an alluring looseness that often eludes experimental indie music of this stripe.

   Simple but evocative lyrics suggest an endearing curiosity about the world: “Sometimes the sky / Invites me to truly be / Myself more than it could actually be,” she sings on Trip, a curiously circular phrase that feels tentative and certain at the same time. Somerville sings in hushed tones surrounded by chilly production, but when you listen closely, these songs reveal themselves to be unusually swollen with texture and detail: harps twinkle like broken glass and baggy breakbeats reverberate widely, seemingly recorded through a bedroom wall. She has an expansive purview: part of the thrill of Luster is listening closely enough to pick up on the traces of pop, hymnal, trip-hop and experimental electronic music that lies beneath.

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5. Views of TikTok posts with electronic music outgrow those using indie

   Videos tagged #ElectronicMusic attracted more than 13bn views worldwide last year, an increase of 45% on 2023

   It is another example of the parallel worlds in the music industry. The Gallagher brothers may be taking over the world’s stadiums this summer, but over on TikTok users are moving to a different beat.

   Views of posts using electronic music as a soundtrack, including techno and house, outgrew those tagged for indie and alternative for the first time in 2024, according to the social media app.

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