Fleet Foxes

“Was I too slow? Did I change overnight?” Robin Pecknold returns to the hunt.

- John Mulvey

On the evening of February 9, Robin Pecknold ambled into one of those strange controversies that blow up on social media and, for a few hours, consume the music world’s chattering class. Talking to the Dirty Projectors’ Dave Longstreth on Instagram, Pecknold became embroiled in a droll, quasi-academic discussion about the precarious state of (his quotes) “indie rock”. “I feel,” he wrote, “like 2009, Bitte Orca/Merriweather/Veckatimest, was the last time there was a fertile strain of ‘indie rock’ that also felt progressive w/o devolving into Yes-ish largesse.”

Opprobrium, inevitably, was swift. Pecknold’s comments were taken as a lament for a time when records by Dirty Projectors, Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear – and, by extension, Fleet Foxes – had greater cultural traction. In the mainstream nowadays, it tends to be R&B, hip-hop and pop that are fêted for an experimental as well as a commercial imperative. Pecknold’s argument was more nuanced than soundbites allowed, but it was disseminated as if he were yearning after some halcyon era, when groups of largely diffident American boys – often bearing guitars, often his friends – became stars, after a fashion.