🎸 If Indie Sleaze Was 3 Novels… By Women!
Hello, and welcome to pleasure reading. I'm your host, Amelia Hruby, and this is a podcast about the pleasure of reading, where I share curated reading lists, author rankings, chats with my bookish friends, and more. If you too take pleasure in reading, I hope that you will subscribe and share the show with a friend. Cheers to your next best book. Hello, and welcome to Pleasure Reading, a podcast about all the things we love about books, including curated lists on fun topics like books about girl boss influencers, books for romantic witches, and today, books that feel like indie sleaze, which is a subcultural phenomenon that I will explain in just a moment.
Amelia Hruby:I'm your host, Amelia Hruby. I am the founder of Softer Sounds Podcast Studio, and this podcast is my current passion project because I love reading and I love collecting books on a shared theme. And now I love sharing that with you here on this show. Today's topic is both a little tongue in cheek and very close to my own heart and background. So in this episode, I am going to share three books that I think are beautiful odes to indie sleaze culture.
Amelia Hruby:Now what is indie sleaze? Let me read you a few sentences from the rough trade website. Rough trade is a record label that is a part of this subculture, and this will explain, I think, what it was like, what it is like, what it has been like. Indie Sleeze is sweaty floors, skinny jeans, and angular indie rock. The term indie sleaze was coined in 2021 to encapsulate the grimy, energetic, carefree sound and aesthetic of a scene which emerged in the early naughties, which is just the early two thousands.
Amelia Hruby:The music of indie sleaze all shared a distinctive hedonistic aesthetic, one which prevailed in the music videos and the fashion of its artists, in their low maintenance, sometimes kooky clothing, and party chic. With its primary origins tracing back to a wave of New York City indie rock bands with a post grunge attitude, like the strokes, yeah, yeah, yas, and Interpol, indie sleeves broadened over time to become an umbrella for various styles of indie music. The era gave us many albums characterized by their fusion of dance and punk, while at the same time, many indie sleaze artists were better defined by their pure rock and roll energy. So that's just a quick overview from Rough Trade of what indie sleaze is. I do think it's important to note that when this subculture was, I guess, happening or popular, it was not called indie sleaze.
Amelia Hruby:It was just like life and music. And it got the name indie sleaze in 2021 as they say, when there was a sort of like revival or throwback nostalgia for this era. Funnily enough, not from those of us who lived it, but from a sort of a gen z community who wanted that sort of optimistic messy party lifestyle. Again, even in the face of the aftermath of the pandemic and eventually Trump's reelection and everything that we're dealing with this year in 2025. So why am I making a podcast episode about Endy Sleeves?
Amelia Hruby:Well, I myself was very into this culture, especially as I was graduating high school and entering college. People say that Endy Sleeves lasted from the early two thousands until roughly, like, twenty twelve, twenty thirteen. And in those final years of it was exactly when I was going to clubs, seeking out DIY shows, traveling from my college in North Carolina to New York City to go to clubs and listen to music. And it was very much the aesthetic and the music and the party scene that characterized my own college years. So I definitely have firsthand memories of this scene and what it was like, maybe not so much in New York City, but where I was going to school in Raleigh, and then when moved to Chicago after that.
Amelia Hruby:And at some point last year, I watched the documentary Meet Me in the Bathroom, which charts the rise of the scene, particularly through bands like The Strokes and LCD Sound System and Yeah Yeah Yas. And that kind of got me back into the feeling of it all. It definitely made me nostalgic for it all. And so this year, I started seeking out books that either encapsulated or took place in these years, in this time, in this culture. Now when I first googled Andy Sley's novels, what came up was a bunch of Reddit threads where people were just, like, recommending, like, Chuck Palahniuk and other dude authors that I was really not interested in reading, and I'm still really not interested in reading.
Amelia Hruby:So I kept digging. And over the course of the past six or nine months, I found three novels, all written by women, all debut novels, in fact, that all take place in this sort of time period and this type of music scene. And they are all, as I've already said, written by women, but they also all feature young women as their main protagonists. So these are all women in their twenties trying to figure out what they're doing with their life, going to a lot of shows, imbibing in a lot of alcohol typically, not always, but typically. And I love these novels because they really reflect the scene, including some of the, like, seedier sides of its misogyny and sexism and the way that substances were rampant in many of these scenes and what happened in their aftermath.
Amelia Hruby:So in this episode, I'm going to tell you about these three books that I've read over the past few weeks and share a little bit about what I think is great about them, maybe some things that weren't quite for me about them, and maybe it will inspire you to pick up one or more of them, which you can do at the links in the show notes. We'll begin with Lo Fi by Liz Riggs. I do not remember how I found this book, but I was definitely really attracted to the cover, which is a beautiful, like, purple lavender magenta color with lo fi written in big white text on the front, and the eye is actually a lit bit lighter. It definitely felt immediately like I knew what this book was about, and I got it from the library right away and dove in. Let me read you the synopsis so you can get as excited about it perhaps as I did.
Amelia Hruby:Most nights, you'll find Alison Hunter at the venue, the kind of sweaty Nashville spot that's on the circuit for bands like Bon Iver and Death Cab. Sounds glamorous, but not for Al, who stamps hands at the door with Julian, the quiet coworker who treats her like a little sister. When she can sneak off, she bums drinks from the tattooed bartender and watches the bands, wondering if she'll ever finish a song of her own after a disastrous first attempt to play in public. When a once in a century storm hits and her lead singer ex boyfriend shows up at the door, Al finds herself stuck in a perpetual cycle of late nights, new flings, and old flames. Obsessed with the disappearance of a troubled indie star, she slowly starts to lose it herself until one reckless night threatens to derail everything.
Amelia Hruby:As propulsive and sexy as the rasp of a static driven amp, lo fi is an open hearted tribute to the messy truth of the creative life, the clash of lust and love, and the yearning to be heard. So as the synopsis points out, this book centers around Alison Hunter who goes by Al, and we meet her in Nashville where she has moved after college. She went to school in Michigan. She relocated to Nashville, and she works at a music venue and kind of haunt of local artists and music industry people. We learned pretty early on that Al is a musician, but she is terrified of performing.
Amelia Hruby:And she tried to go to an open mic and perform once with her friend Sloane, but it didn't go well. And now she is even more terrified to perform anywhere. So she only plays music when she's home alone. But she spends most of her time out of the house, either at work, at the venue, or going to local coffee shops, or hanging out at local bars, going to shows, trying to get into VIP things. She's definitely in love with music and the music scene that's all around her in Nashville.
Amelia Hruby:And this book really takes place inside of those shows and at those venues and at house parties. And as it does that, it kind of charts Al's relationship to a few different men that she encounters along the way. So even in the synopsis, we heard about Julian, who is her coworker and becomes a love interest over the course of the book. We also heard about the tattooed bartender. His name is Colts, and she has some experiences with him.
Amelia Hruby:She is also obsessed with that troubled indie star who goes missing. His name is Justin. And of course, then there is her ex or sort of ex, definitely someone from a situationship that she's in, Nick, who is in a band that's becoming more and more popular and has been get booking more shows, getting into the festival circuit, and circles through Nashville every so often just to kind of disrupt Al's life, it seems. I mean, Nick is going there to play music, but every time he comes into town, he texts her. They have some type of encounter, and then he leaves again and doesn't speak to her for weeks or even months.
Amelia Hruby:So I really related to this book, I think most of all three, because it did take place in the South, which is where I was going to shows and doing these sorts of things and falling in love with bartenders and boys and bands. And I really could just picture myself in so many of the experiences that Al had, and in the way that she was kind of floating through. She didn't have a lot of purpose necessarily in the book. She's lost the connection to her music in a way that maybe used to motivate her, and she just continues to kind of float and then eventually spiral as her mental health kinda declines until as the synopsis previews, something happens, and she decides to kind of turn things around and get a little more sober and find a little more purpose and start making more intentional decisions. This book to me really speaks to those post college years where you don't know what you wanna do with your life yet, so you just immerse yourself in something you love, like music, and try to make that work even though you don't really know what that means.
Amelia Hruby:This book definitely also charts the sort of what we might call boy craziness of some people's twenties. I mean, mine included. I wanted to share this passage from one of the earlier chapters where Al is talking about why her aunt thought she might want to move to Nashville because her aunt lives there and is a stylist, I believe, in the city. And here is what Al says. She thought I liked the town, but mostly I liked the boys.
Amelia Hruby:The baristas who always had a day's worth of scruff and Saturday nights free, The skinny guys in leather jackets drinking two for one beers at the dive bar down the street. The songwriters with vintage instruments who weren't famous themselves, but wrote songs for people who were. The drummers with sleepy eyes and calloused palms. The guitarist with front man energy and long fingers. The lead singers with full lips and perfect voices and charm and overdrive.
Amelia Hruby:Even the law students drinking at the bars on division and staying until last call with their flavored vodka and low calorie beers. The bartenders who actually played the drums, played the drums for a friend, played the cello, played the upright bass, played the banjo, played pedal steel, played the fiddle, played the session fiddle, played the harp. I loved them all. None of them had real jobs, but they all had good hair. If that passage is really boring or disinteresting to you, you probably will not like this book.
Amelia Hruby:But if you, like me, spent your early twenties falling for all of these types of boys and honestly trying to kind of escape yourself in relationships with them, then I really do think that you will love Lofi by Liz Riggs. It is the story of a woman who finds herself even as she loses herself, who loves music, and who eventually finds her way into her own songs. This book also has little playlists throughout where Al is going through something and then collecting a list of songs that meet that moment or that experience for her. And in the show notes, I have put a link to a Spotify playlist that includes all of the songs that Al mentions in the book, and I highly recommend it for listening while you read. My next pick for If Indie Sleez were three books by women is a very new novel.
Amelia Hruby:It just came out a few weeks before I'm recording this, and that is Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley. Now, first of all, I have to say, I love the cover of this book because it has a playlist right on the cover. And what you will soon discover is that each of these novels has a playlist in some capacity, either written throughout the book or collected at the end or in this case, literally on the cover. Similar to lo fi, deep cuts takes place in the music scene, does chart sort of the career of a boy in a band who goes off to become much more famous than when our two main characters met. But this one starts on the West Coast and takes place a little earlier.
Amelia Hruby:So let me read you the synopsis so you can get a sense of this book. It's a Friday night in a campus bar in Berkeley, Fall Of Two Thousand, and Percy Marks is pontificating about music again. Holland Oates is on the jukebox, and Percy, who has no talent for music, just lots of opinions about it, can't stop herself from overanalyzing the song, indulging what she knows to be her most annoying habit. But something is different tonight. The guy beside her at the bar, fellow student Joe Morrow, is a songwriter, and he could listen to Percy talk all night.
Amelia Hruby:Joe asks Percy for feedback on one of his songs, and the results kick off a partnership that will span years, ignite new passions in them both, and crush their egos again and again. Is their collaboration worth its cost, or is it holding Percy back from finding her own voice? So as you just heard, the two main characters in this book are Percy and Joe. Percy is a music writer who becomes a trend spotter, and she is really guided through life by her taste. She has impeccable taste in music.
Amelia Hruby:She's always taking apart songs. She doesn't play herself, but she loves being surrounded by music. And when she meets Jo, who is a musician, they form a sort of songwriting partnership at Berkeley where they're both in school. There's also a third character here who doesn't get mentioned in the synopsis, but that is Zoe, who is Joe's girlfriend. They had been friends since they were very young, and she's the one who got him to go to Berkeley to begin with.
Amelia Hruby:And she forms a friendship with Percy as well, and they kind of become this trio throughout the course of the book. Deep Cuts charts really Percy's life, but also her relationships to Joe and Zoe throughout college. And then to New York where Percy gets an MFA in writing and eventually to life back on the West Coast where she lives and works as a trendsetter, as I mentioned. Because this book moves from coast to coast in that way, you get a taste of different music throughout the indie sleaze scene from the early two thousand when the plot starts to the late twenty teens when that scene sort of fades out or transforms into something else. But I loved about two thirds of the way through the book, closer to the end, I think, where the author Holly Brickley directly addresses Indy Sleez.
Amelia Hruby:We get this sort of experience that Percy has where she goes to a party, I think in Miami, and dances to this music and has this, like, amazing night and really reflects on the scene that has gathered around the musicians there. And then Holly Brickley kind of pops in with this sort of, like, from the future voice from Percy that we have throughout the book. And I wanted to read the paragraph where Percy kind of breaks in to the past to narrate what she had experienced from her vantage point in the free in the future. So she says, years later, the scene I hadn't inhabited that night and so many of my nights on the job was christened indie sleaze by the Internet. Entire Instagram accounts were devoted to remembering the era.
Amelia Hruby:I showed up in the flash heavy photos occasionally, usually in the background with my giant backpack. Indie sleaze is remembered as an attitude, a fuck it all embrace of grimy fun, as well as a musical moment defined by the party friendly indie acts of the odds. Yeah. Yeah. Yas, MIA, CSS.
Amelia Hruby:This is accurate, but incomplete, admitting the massive amounts of eighties and nineties Britpop those kids consumed every night like so many cans of caffeinated malt liquor. History always forgets that it doesn't exist in a vacuum. New order was everywhere. Age of consent seemed to play automatically upon entering a bar, and the unknown pleasures t shirt was ubiquitous. There was erasure on sunnier days, orange juice and echo belly for the more informed, and above all, if you ask me, there was pulp.
Amelia Hruby:I didn't write about indie sleaze that night in the Miami hotel room because it didn't exist yet, at least not by that name. But I wrote about how Britpop was everything that year. I wrote that only the English could capture the ironic humor, style, and detachment necessary for a young person to survive the odds in America. So that is Percy's perspective as a music writer and journalist on what the indie sleaze scene was and what it became in retrospect. I think that this book is really at its heart a romance kind of masquerading as literary fiction.
Amelia Hruby:The relationship between Percy and Joe is the heart of the book, and it is beautifully wrapped in music throughout the story. So that is deep cuts by Holly Brickley, and I highly recommend checking out the playlist as well, either from the cover or the link in the show notes. And then finally, my third recommendation for if indie sleaze were a book by a woman is I love you so much, it's killing us both by Mariah Stovall. I worry that including this book here might actually offend the punk sensibilities of its main character or author, but I do think it takes place in this same era. And it also, like deep cuts, moves from the West Coast to the East from the suburbs of LA to New York City.
Amelia Hruby:So we get this sort of, like, bicoastal relationship to indie music or music from the early odds. So once again, I'll read you the synopsis of this book so you can get a sense of if I love you so much, it's killing us both might be for you. Set in the suburbs of Los Angeles and New York City, I love you so much, it's killing us both is an immersive journey into the life and mind of Khaki Oliver, who's perennially trying to disappear into something. A codependent friendship, an ill advised boyfriend, the punk scene, or simply the ether. These days, it's a meaningless job and a comfortingly empty apartment.
Amelia Hruby:Then after a decade of estrangement, she receives a letter from her former best friend. Fiona's throwing a party for her newly adopted daughter, and wants Khaki to join the celebration. Khaki is equal parts terrified and tempted to reconnect. Their platonic love was confusing, all consuming, and encouraged their worst impulses. While stalling her RSVP, Kaki starts crafting the perfect mixtape, revisiting memories of formative shows, failed romances, and the ups and downs of desire and denial, while weighing the risks and rewards of saying yes to Fiona again.
Amelia Hruby:One song at a time from nineteen eighties hardcore to twenty tens emo, the shared and separate contours of each woman's mind come into focus. Will listening to the same old songs on repeat doom khaki to a lonely life of arrested development, or will hindsight help her regain her sense of self and pave a healthy path for the future with or without Fiona? So as explained there, this book is about Khaki Oliver, who, when we meet her, is a 20 living in New York City who doesn't really love her job, doesn't totally know what she's doing with her life, is just hanging out in 2022 listening to her favorite music. As she's doing that, she does get that baby shower invitation from her friend Fiona, and we immediately know this was unexpected and perhaps undesired. From there, we pretty quickly travel back in time to 2011 when Khaki was starting college just East of Los Angeles.
Amelia Hruby:So we meet her at this small liberal arts school that she's going to as she's also, like, traveling three hours by bus across the city to go to punk shows in warehouses. This book, even more than the others, I would say, is obsessed with music because our main character is so obsessed with music. I really enjoyed Kaki because she has a pretty abrasive quality. She does not care about making herself palatable to other people necessarily. And in fact, she often talks about just being generally confused why people spend so much time on this, which had me thinking about my conversation with Bailey Lang in the last episode where we talked about implicit representation of neurodivergence, particularly this one passage I wanted to share where Khaki goes out dancing with friends and has a sort of confusing encounter for herself.
Amelia Hruby:So here's what the author writes. Vera and her friend Natalie were already there in bikini tops and bandage skirts. Natalie greeted Cameron with an approximation of a shimmy. Vera grabbed my wrist and insisted on deconstructing my disinterest in dancing with her. She thought I was self conscious because I didn't know the song playing.
Amelia Hruby:I did know the song playing, and I liked it. But dancing to it in this environment where everyone was on display would have made me uncomfortable. But that fact itself didn't make me uncomfortable. I accepted my natural inclinations where others were determined to change them. And maybe I avoided telling people how I felt because when I tried to, they didn't believe me, as if I had nothing better to do than invent multilayered fictions beneath which to hide my true feelings, which wouldn't make sense because if I were lying about my feelings, I would lie toward normalcy, not away from it.
Amelia Hruby:I didn't tell Vera this. I didn't understand why Cameron was allowed to not want to dance. She gave up and released my carpal bones. So that feels like a good insight into Kaki's mind to me where there's this sort of like, she is who she is, and she's fine with that. But she struggles to get other people to understand that or at least to understand that she's okay with it even if they understand that, like, she may be different from them in some way.
Amelia Hruby:And her relationships throughout the book all kind of take on this form where she attaches herself to people for different reasons, and there are all these conversations where they're like, what are we doing? Why won't you open up? Do you even care about me, etcetera? We learn throughout the book that this likely really stems from the very codependent friendship she had developed with Fiona that we learn a lot more about in the second part of the book. And something I did not know going into the book that I think is really important to mention is that there is very explicit representation and talking about and living through an eating disorder in this book.
Amelia Hruby:And I honestly was not quite prepared for that and was a little overwhelmed by how it went on. So I think it's really important to know going in that also characterizes a lot of the codependence of Khaki and Fiona's friendship. But I think that there is a sort of almost inherent queerness to this book in the conversations and relationships between characters, and how Kaki and Fiona's relationship is so enmeshed and entangled, and in the ways that Khaki tries to discover herself in so many different scenes. I loved when she goes to punk shows and talks about how much she likes moshing and how all of the men there apologize to her the whole time, but it's exactly what she's there for. I also appreciated some of the encounters she had in college where people would point out some of the deeply misogynistic punk lyrics that she was singing or enjoying, and she kind of resists any sort of feminist interpretation of them, although that shifts over the course of the book.
Amelia Hruby:So I think that this novel is just a really nuanced look, maybe more at the punk scene that is merging alongside the Indy Sleez scene. But because they happen in the same time period, it felt really connected to me and like it could really be at home in this list. So that is I Love You So Much, It's Killing Us, both by Moriah Stovall. And that is our list for this episode. So just to quickly recap, my take on If Indie Sleeves were three novels by women includes three books, Lo Fi by Liz Riggs, Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley, and I Love You So Much, It's Killing Us Both by Mariah Stovall.
Amelia Hruby:I would say if I had to sort of sum up the place that each of these took in this episode, I think that Lo Fi is like the one that's about a musician and takes place in the South. So this is definitely the one where the young woman who is the protagonist steps forward as a musician herself, which I really appreciated. She's not just on the fringes of the scene, but she actually makes her way, or is starting to make her way more toward the center by the end of the book. Lofi is also a pretty, like, dreamy, hazy read, which I enjoyed, but may not be quite to everyone's taste if you're really into a super plot driven novel. Then Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley is going to be our West Coast to East Coast love story, where we really see this dynamic between Percy, the writer and music critic, and Joe, the boy in the band, and how their relationship evolves from college into, like, a decade of their careers.
Amelia Hruby:This one is great for anyone who loves a bit more of a plot, who wants to kind of see the characters move through, or if you're a writer yourself and you love books about writers, you'll definitely get that from Percy's character. And then I love you so much, it's killing us both by Moriah Stovall. This is for all my punks out there, for all of the weirdos in the scene, the people who feel like they don't quite fit in, but the scene is obviously for them. That is definitely who this book is for. And I don't think I even mentioned it previously, but this is a book by a black author featuring a black protagonist.
Amelia Hruby:So we also in this see more conversations about race in the music scene, and I would say all three of these books definitely bring in conversations about gender and question the male dominance of indie sleaze and other music subcultures, I would say. So those are her books. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode and indulging me in my love of indie sleaze and my own personal nostalgia as I moved through these books. I really enjoyed all three of them, and I hope that you will consider picking up your own copies. If you use the links in the show notes and purchase them from my bookshop page, I will receive a small affiliate payment as thanks for the book rec.
Amelia Hruby:And if you're not gonna buy the books, get them from your local library, support these authors in other ways. And if you wanna support this podcast, I would deeply appreciate a five star rating and review in Apple Podcasts or Spotify. That helps me show other people how much you love the show, and that helps me keep it going. Coming up next, I think I'm gonna do an episode on my February and March reading, and then this spring, I have some more fun lists coming, including one on books about time. So that will all be here soon on Pleasure Reading Podcast, But until then, here's to your next best book.