How some of the most derided bands of all time are making a comeback

The fate of the pop musician – at least the pop musician below the top tier of stardom – has historically been to fall from fashion. At some point in their rise they will be of the moment, the spirit of the age, and then they won’t be. At best, they’ll have a slow but perfectly lucrative fade, as their fanbase dwindles to the zealots. At worst they’ll become a punch line, a raised eyebrow: ‘What were we thinking?’ Every hit, every sold-out show, is just another step closer to irrelevance.

It may be that the single greatest artistic effect of the Covid pandemic has been to change that. Over the past few years, since we were all locked indoors, groups long since consigned to what Smash Hits magazine called ‘the dumper’ have begun to re-emerge. And all because kids with nothing to do for a year but make TikToks started raiding pieces of old music. The wispy, guitar-led 1990s genre known as shoegaze, for example, has become big business. Look at Slowdive, who reunited to mild interest a decade ago: they found themselves with a top ten album across Europe last year, and headlining festivals in front of real people this summer, after becoming TikTok sensations.

Or take the Canadian band Mother Mother, who had been making records for 15 years, to widespread lack of interest, until a bunch of their old songs blew up with LGBTQ kids during lockdown. By that point, their singer, Ryan Guldemond, had more or less given up thinking he’d get a second chance at fame. ‘We had been making valiant efforts to establish ourselves in territories other than Canada, but to no avail. You can only travel down that road so long before you, out of respect for rationality and logic, consider that maybe it is never happening.