Bands Might Be the Future of Electronic Music
In a music culture dominated by solitude and digital artifice, it's no wonder that artists are longing for connection and collaboration.
The other day, my wife came up to me, phone in hand, saying that she wanted to play me a piece of music that she’d been working on. It was just an unfinished demo, something that she’d made in collaboration with another artist on the other side of the world, but it had a bit of a moody alt-rock vibe, and shortly after the guitars kicked in, she started ad libbing some vocal melodies, right there in our kitchen.
“You want to be in a band so bad,” I said, and though I’d meant it as a joke, I quickly came to a realization: If she’d started making music in the ’80s, ’90s or even the 2000s, she almost certainly would have spent at least some time in a band, because that’s what most artists did back then.
Of course there have always been some musicians who preferred to work solo, especially when it came to genres like dance music, but the proliferation of digital production software—which effectively gives users access to the virtual equivalent of a high-end studio stocked with session players—has made it exponentially easier for artists to go it alone. Gone are the days when making and performing music generally required some sort of IRL collaboration, at least for anyone who wasn’t some sort of virtuoso. Creative solitude has become not just more efficient, but substantially cheaper than working in a group, and in the face of an ongoing cost-of-living crisis and an increasingly profit-oriented music business, solo artists have largely usurped bands as the dominant vehicles of contemporary musical expression.
That doesn’t preclude incredible music from being made (or performed)—I’ve seen some fantastic shows that involved little more than a single musician with a laptop, or maybe a few pieces of nondescript gear—but it does have some very real knock-on effects. For one thing, it makes being a musician a far less social endeavor, particularly on a day-to-day level. Bands provide strength in numbers, and in the context of a group, even most iconic musicians are part of a larger whole, freeing them from the full responsibility—both real and perceived—for every single detail of a project’s identity and output. Working solo, on the other hand, feeds into the industry’s preferred star model, not to mention clichéd notions of the singular genius, and while that may be great for those in search of fame—or simply a larger slice of the financial pie—it also puts a whole lot of pressure on individual artists. It’s no wonder that electronic music, a genre with an extremely high percentage of solo acts, has focused more and more attention on conversations about mental health in recent years.
Yet even when solo artists are on relatively stable emotional and economic ground, they still face another major challenge, one that’s far more practical in nature: Watching a single person perform on stage, especially one who’s just seemingly just pressing a few buttons, is oftentimes not a terribly engaging experience. Playing alone frequently requires a heavy reliance on prerecorded sounds, which can easily seem a bit cold and lifeless, and although adding some sort of live element, such as vocals or a “real” instrument, can improve matters, I’ve seen a litany of shows during the past few years that have felt like ambient karaoke. After years of pop artists being lambasted by serious music types for singing (often poorly) over canned backing tracks, we’ve now reached an era where critical darlings and Boomkat bestsellers are routinely doing the same thing.
This phenomenon is heavily rooted in simple economics. Although plenty of artists, even the ones who compose and produce their music alone, would likely love to tour with a band, the high costs of doing so make it all but impossible for most acts. Touring has become an exorbitantly expensive proposition, particularly in the post-Covid era, to a point where even established artists are spending less time on the road. (Back in 2022, Animal Collective loudly cancelled a planned tour, stating that they “were looking at an economic reality that simply does not work and is not sustainable” and that they “simply could not make a budget for this tour that did not lose money even if everything went as well as it could.”) Oddly enough, this reality hasn’t slowed the music industry’s ongoing push to concertize and festivalize the culture. With small- and mid-sized venues rapidly disappearing, even independent and “underground” musicians are now increasingly reliant on big rooms, festivals and other large-scale events to make a living. Playing at those kinds of events, however, only adds to the pressure, as audiences in those spaces tend to expect not just music, but a dazzling visual experience as well.
It’s funny, as much as I loathe EDM, that circuit has an intrinsic understanding of the modern live music economy, and long ago learned how to elevate “guys who are just pressing play” into an experience for which audiences would pay top dollar.
In the electronic and dance music realm, plenty of more credible artists have followed a similar route, dialing up the spectacle and presenting what in many ways is a sort of EDM Lite. That goes for everyone from Aphex Twin—check this clip of his 2023 Sónar performance—to the DJs appearing on Boiler Room, which has massively scaled up the production levels and set design of its broadcasts during the past decade. But what options are there for artists who aren’t interested in lasers and Co2 cannons? Adding visuals is one approach, and festival line-ups have begun to feature a growing number of live A/V shows. With the technological leaps currently happening in the visual realm, that trend is likely to continue, yet for those artists who aren’t interested in prioritizing projections and video screens, another way also seems to be emerging. It’s a back-to basics solution, one that addresses the practical demands of the crowd, and might also alleviate some of the stresses of going it alone.
They’re forming bands, or at least they’re talking about it.