The indie rock genre is one of those genres that people kind of “just get into.” It is a genre that your best friend’s cool older brother listens to alone in his room, or a genre that makes its way onto your favorite coffee shop’s soundtrack. It’s not the genre that you actively seek to like when you first start learning about bands and music – that honor goes to all the big pop girlies or the classic rock legends. Most likely, your relationship with indie rock music began by accident after stumbling upon a small pile of indie rock albums at a hipster record shop downtown. But really, how did indie rock become such a phenomenon? Where did it all start?
After becoming an active fan of indie rock during his high school years, Chris DeVille became a seasoned professional in the genre. He has written about indie rock for the past 12 years, focusing on everyone’s favorite small indie rock groups to the ones that have made it mainstream but avidly deny that status… DeVille even started ‘The Week In Pop’ column at Stereogum, where he wrote about mainstream pop music through an indie rock fan lens. DeVille was there when the genre really took off, and now, he is detailing its rise and evolution in Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion.
Coming in August 2025, Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion is an ode to the artists and cultural forces that shaped the genre. Not only will fans learn more about essential albums and bands, but they will also learn how the genre became a movement. How did it impact society? Why did it become trendy to not follow the trend? What part did the internet and social media play? DeVille answers these questions by going back to the early aughts and breaking down the genre’s development over the last 25 years.
Telling us more about the book, DeVille shares,
“Partially a celebration of a beloved subculture’s triumphs and partially a lament about what it lost along the way, this is a tale that will resonate deeply for anyone who nodded knowingly when Bon Iver won Best New Artist, who looked to Zooey Deschanel for fashion inspiration, who filled their iPod or CD wallet with albums that got Best New Music from Pitchfork. Other books have intersected with the story I’m telling, but not many have followed indie rock’s glow-up into the 2010s, when so many changes set in motion in the 2000s came home to roost.”
Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion will be available August 26, 2025, through St. Martin’s Press. You can pre-order a copy here.
Learn more about what DeVille has to say about the book here.
