And she said, “Babe, Tumblr music is coming back!”
The trends of the Tumblr era coming back could have been seen from miles away. Publications like Vogue and Cosmopolitan have predicted the comeback of the sleazy indie style with over-saturated flash photography coming back for months. But what is also coming back with this trend is the melodramatic indie songs that made the era.
Iconic bands from the era like the 1975 and Arctic Monkeys are releasing new albums before the end of the month with similar sounds that are either a continuation of the era or a warm goodbye to the nostalgia of the sound that fans know and love.
The 1975 has been promoting the drop of their new album “Being Funny In A Foreign Language” all over TikTok by using imagery that resembles moments from their older music videos. Tracks from the new album are said to have the maximalist sound of the band’s debut album; some are even said to have synth-heavy instrumentals reminiscent of their second album. In some promotion videos, you can see the iconic dancing clown couple from the band’s music video “A Change Of Heart”. In contrast, most of the videos hold the trademark black-and-white videography that fans attribute to the band.
Arctic Monkeys released their new album, “The Car” on Oct. 21 and is said to have the band’s signature sharp songwriting and continuous innovation in sound throughout the album. This is going to be the band’s seventh studio album and is anticipated to be a treat for the fans who have stayed and matured with the band, while also being an excellent place to start for new fans of the band.
This trend can also be seen in emo and hard rock music as well. When We Were Young fest, a festival of iconic emo bands like My Chemical Romance and Paramore, had everyone in a frenzy when the announcement dropped. Though the festival was met with an air of hesitation, people agreed that the lineup was too good to be true and flocked to buy tickets and airfare to Las Vegas ASAP.
The want that people have for going back to their younger days seems to have exploded nowadays thanks to social media. Depending on what side of TikTok you’re on you can see people who grew up in this era of music starting to gatekeep the music as more and more people get into the bands that they once got made fun of for.
The trend of bands going back to their original sound and festival creators digging into old playlists of the mid-2010s is falling victim to the trend cycle, but for a completely different reason. Since the pandemic people fear that life as we knew it would never fully return to the same form it once held, so people go back to the days they lived when nothing else seemed to matter.
The pandemic was when a lot of young adults who had gone away to college were suddenly thrust back into their childhood bedrooms at their family home, and now their whole life is more or less remote because people were afraid of catching other people’s plague. This caused young adults, including myself, to go through every phase they went through when they were adolescents.
Most young adults today were teenagers when Tumblr was in its prime and are now at the age where they are prone to feeling nostalgic whenever anything from their younger years is brought up. The feelings people crave when they feel nostalgic are from the periods when they were feeling the worst, as no one liked being in sixth grade but now appreciates the memories of how easy it was compared to being an adult.
Most of this generation’s music taste peaked around 2014, and we still know this because everybody has that one middle school playlist. This period of music influenced a lot of young adults’ music tastes whether it was angsty British indie tunes or angry hard rock that most parents didn’t understand.
Whatever it was, whatever you listened to, the era is making a comeback and is going into another generation.
