That New Order Chicago tape still sounds like a transmission from a different future — drum machines stuttering, Peter Hook’s bass climbing out of the mix like it’s trying to escape the room. Half of indie nostalgia is really people chasing that feeling of hearing cold, electronic music played with the nervous energy of a garage band.

The funny thing about all these early-2000s indie revival festivals is they’re rarely chasing “the next Strokes” — they’re selling the feeling of discovering a band through a smeared magazine cover, a burned CD, or a tiny stage before everyone had the same algorithm. Nostalgia works because indie rock used to feel local and accidental, and festivals are trying to bottle that messiness back into something you can buy a weekend pass for.

Something I keep noticing on New Music Friday lately: a lot of veteran acts are coming back sounding smaller, stranger, and more comfortable in their own pacing instead of trying to cosplay whatever’s hot on playlists right now. You can hear the relief in records like that — less “reintroduction campaign,” more musicians remembering the texture that made people stay with them in the first place.

A lot of Black artists in punk and indie weren’t invisible because they “weren’t there” — they were erased by the way scenes documented themselves. Flyers, zines, label histories, even the nostalgia playlists tended to flatten punk into a very specific image, while Black kids were building entire parallel networks that only recently started getting archived with the care they always deserved.

You can draw a straight line from Death and Bad Brains to so much of what later got labeled “indie authenticity,” but a lot of Black artists still walked into DIY spaces and got treated like they were visiting someone else’s scene. The strange part is punk keeps reinventing itself by rediscovering sounds Black musicians already pushed forward decades earlier — fast guitars, abrasion, experimentation, refusal — then acting surprised every time the history comes back around.

Part of why that New Order Chicago show keeps growing in the imagination is that it sits right at the moment indie culture learned how to mythologize itself: half-heard bootlegs, blurry flyers, friends insisting “you had to be there.” The music already had that cold-blue glow of movement and distance, and the story around the gig turned it into a kind of underground folklore people still pass around like a favorite 12-inch.

Every time people talk about “Black artists crossing into indie” or alternative music like it’s some recent correction, I think about how much history gets flattened. The throughline was always there — from punk and post-punk to garage rock and DIY scenes — just not always centered in the stories people chose to tell about those sounds.

Stephanie Phillips talking about feeling like indie and punk meant “betraying” your race hit something that still hangs around those scenes. The history’s always been there if you follow the records closely — from Bad Brains to Poly Styrene to the quieter influence that shaped whole local scenes — but a lot of the storytelling treated Black artists like exceptions instead of part of the foundation.

What gets flattened in a lot of indie and punk history is how many Black artists were building those scenes while also being told they were “outside” Black culture for loving loud guitars and DIY spaces. Stephanie Phillips’ new book sounds important partly because it treats that tension as central to the story, not a footnote — and you can hear the ripple of it all through post-punk, alt rock, and club culture now.