British music mostly sounds like a boring mess right now. An on-going economic crisis, social unease, and political instability leave their mark on a former powerhouse of the international music scene. Even worse, Oasis are back, and the reunion of the Gallagher brothers isn’t even the only retromaniacal phenomenon in British music. However, something infinitely more weird and interesting has been bubbling up below the surface.
Mica Levi and Tirzah’s dance music-inspired alt-pop has become a blueprint for an entire generation, while Moin and drummer Valentina Magaletti with her numerous side projects are as prolific as they are innovative. Still House Plants made a name for themselves with jagged emo-jazz-rock and Daniel Blumberg’s erratic songwriting pushes the envelope. And while there is much that sets these artists and bands apart, they share a certain sensibility.
Their music is marked by a strict formal reduction, but also applies digital production methods established in other genres and/or improvisational techniques to more conventional forms and aesthetics. This means that they share a kinship with the original post-punk movement, though they have very little to do with how the term is used today: They revive its spirit without mimicking its musical stylings.
Post-Punk: The Genre That Wasn’t
In his book Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds explained the difference between punk and post-punk in terms of how both reacted to the dinosaur rock of their time. The former provided a »destructive response to boredom,« the latter a »constructive« one. Post-punk married punk’s »do it yourself« ethos to an »everything is allowed« attitude and challenged the foundations of rock music. That is why the term can refer to bands as diverse as Joy Division and The Pop Group, The Slits and This Heat, The Raincoats and The Fall.
Post-punk was a situation rather than a genre, but nevertheless was revived as a genre in the early and mid-2000s by bands that harked back to post-punk, thus »betraying post-punk, whose spirit was not to hark back,« as Reynolds put it. What’s more, these bands took their individual cues from some of post-punk’s most rock-ish groups, which is why Franz Ferdinand (Orange Juice), Editors (Joy Division), or the Arctic Monkeys (Gang of Four) sounded twice as retromaniacal.
This history repeated itself when a slew of bands emerged in the second half of the 2010s whose entire aesthetic could be summed up with the title of a single song by The Fall, among them Yard Act (»New Big Prinz«), Dry Cleaning (»Winter«), and Idles (»Totally Wired«). Other bands frequently named in the same breath, such as Squid, black midi or Black Country, New Road, had more in common with prog rock: They didn’t indulge in the »joyful amateurism« that John Peel saw in post-punk, but were seriously professional instead.
However, between those two revivalist movements, a new wave of artists, fiercely DIY-minded and uncompromisingly experimental, emerged. They do not at all hark back to post-punk or any other situation, but to enter into a dialogue with the present one. Their response to the tedium of today is as constructive as it is instructive.
Mica Levi and Tirzah: Production as Songwriting
Mica Levi grew up on UK garage and grime, but debuted with a guitar in hand. Levi, Marc Pell and Raisa Khan made a name for themselves as Micachu & The Shapes in 2009 with the album »Jewellery« at the long end of the first post-punk revival and amidst the noughties’ indie dance craze. What set the group apart was that they neither turned to the past nor tried to fill the dancefloor with rock fans in skinny jeans. The cues they took from dance music were more structural ones.
»Everyone in the band is a beat-maker, primarily,« Levi said in a 2011 interview. Much like dub-wise post-punk pioneers like The Pop Group or The Slits did with the recording studio, Micachu & the Shapes—since renamed Good Sad Happy Bad—used the laptop as a writing tool and thus eschewed the rock song structures to which most of their contemporaries still adhered. Accordingly, they even treated their instruments as objects with which to produce sounds rather than trying to play them as skillfully as possible.
The bands are a counterbalance to the »streambait pop« of the 2010s – happy-sad songs on mid-tempo house beats – that dominates streaming platforms.
This anti-rockist stance was further perfected by Levi. While they became widely known as a composer of atmospheric scores for movies such as »Under the Skin,« it was the production-as-songwriting followed in tandem with Tirzah that they established them as an indie innovator. Tirzah’s debut »Devotion« was marked by a focus on reduction and repetition, eschewing conventional song structures but not the emotional potentials of pop.
This approach echoes through Good Sad Happy Bad member Raisa K.’ 2025 debut »Affectionately« as well as Astrid Sonne’s »Great Doubt« from 2024 and OHYUNG’s recent album »You Are Always On My Mind.« But while the innovations of Levi and Tirzah became a formula, the duo stripped it down to its essence even further on 2023’s »Trip9love…???,« which for most of its runtime works with only a single beat.
This wasn’t a novel concept per se, but merged an existing tradition in dancehall and other dance genres with a new form of pop songwriting that stands in stark contrast to the »streambait pop« that proliferated in the 2010s thanks to Spotify, where it performed well: bland sad songs on mid-tempo house beats. Levi and Tirzah responded to this constructively by reducing it to its bare elements, and let something new emerge in the process.
Moin and Valentina Magaletti: The Collage Principle
Much like Micachu & The Shapes, Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead were beat-makers, primarily, before they turned into a band without ever abandoning the laptop. Like Levi, the duo debuted as Raime in the late 2000s and released a number of EPs before their critically acclaimed »Quarter Turns over a Living Line« album in 2012. While the duo’s bleak sound drew mostly on industrial and dance music, it also integrated live instruments.
The same year, Halstead and Andrews debuted as Moin with an EP and a split with Pete Swanson. This project’s aesthetic was even more stripped down, the key elements being mid-tempo drumming, droning guitars, and ominous vocal samples. Inspired by math rock and post-hardcore as well as, indeed, post-punk, they didn’t emulate those styles. »They’re essentially just structured like dance music,« Andrews said about the group’s songs.
Much like Levi before, Moin constructed their not-quite-rock songs like record producers rather than jamming instrumentalists, working in the box with samples rather than writing songs in the rehearsal space. This approach mirrored the principle of collaging distinct recorded materials into songs as spearheaded by post-punk progenitors This Heat, while also being compatible with Raime’s general modus operandi.
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It is perhaps no surprise then that Moin went on a prolonged hiatus while the main project Raime started to gradually sound more like the duo’s side project. Indeed, when Moin returned in 2021, this apparently marked the end of Raime, the two groups having been subsumed by the same aesthetic principles. Andrews and Halstead were also joined by their previous collaborator, percussionist Valentina Magaletti, as a full-time member.
Even after bringing more actual vocalists into the fold for 2024’s »You Never End« and touring as a four-piece band, Moin stayed true to their collage principle, building their songs as if they were playing »Lego with textures,« as Magaletti put it. This makes their sound distinct from its sonic and stylistic inspirations that they so readily wear on their sleeves, from The Gordons to Fugazi and of course Slint.
It is perhaps not incidental that all this took place when dance music became ever faster and more bombastic, a trend to which Moin present an antithesis. What’s more, the addition of Valentina Magaletti—whose side projects like Better Corners and V/Z follow similar approaches—also meant that Moin opened itself up to more experimental approaches and avant-garde techniques. They share this with others whose work is marked by a similar spirit.
Daniel Blumberg: Experimentation as a Tool
Much like Mica Levi, Daniel Blumberg has recently become a household name as a film composer. He originally started out in the noughties first as a member of garage rockers Cajun Dance Party and shoegazers Yuck before starting to release solo material in the early 2010s as Hebronix and later his real name. His trajectory as a songwriter led him from conventional indie rock to something more radical, or more precisely more radically reduced.
While his 2018 given-name debut album Minus still mostly followed a folkish rock template, it was already marked by the kind of experimentalism for which Café Oto has been a fertile breeding ground. Blumberg had been gravitating around the London venue for years, and what he learnt there rubbed off on his music. 2020’s »On&On« featured improvisers such as Ute Kanngiesser and Tom Wheatley, who added more chaos to Blumberg’s songs.
2023’s GUT marked the preliminary endpoint of a journey towards something even weirder. It features harmonicas as well as bass, electronic drums, and a synthesizer, however those are only used to fill at least some space between the vocal performance and underscore lyrics like »Nothing ever changes / In this world.« This rigorous minimalism helped Blumberg express themes of isolation and despair with few but very effective means.
What could be heard was a »joyful amateurism,« which for John Peel was the hallmark of the original post-punk movement – a kind of free jazz anarchism in a rock setting that didn’t give a damn about virtuosity.
Albums such as GUT share an emphasis on reduction with the respective approaches of Mica Levi and Tirzah as well as Moin, however Blumberg does not build upon the dance music-inspired concept of repetition. He instead follows the experimentalist idea of disrupting musical structures altogether through the practice of improvisation while also opening up the music to a certain degree of chance.
This imbues his music with a sense of instability that also bands like The Raincoats have played with, while both conceptually and sonically rubbing shoulders with post-punk’s sibling genre industrial, at least as it was spearheaded by Throbbing Gristle or groups like Test Dept. Indeed, Blumberg problematises the leitmotif of early industrial culture, the notion of control with his indulgence in unpredictability. He is not the only one who does this.
Still House Plants: Ignorance for Convention
At first glance, the London-based trio Still House Plants has very little to do with the aforementioned artists and groups apart from having released music through Moin’s go-to label AD 93 and having contributed a track to a Tirzah remix compilation. They reduce the standard rock instrumentation to its bare essentials—guitar, voice, and drums—and use it in chaotic ways—much like Blumberg, the three have been to Café Oto and it shows.
At first listen, the two albums that put Still House Plants on the map in 2020, Fast Edit and Long Play, sound like what happens when three Karate fans have a go at it with instruments that they are holding for the first time in their lives. These records were marked by the »joyful amateurism« that for Peel was the hallmark of the original post-punk movement, a sort of free jazz anarchism in a rock setting that didn’t care at all for virtuosity.
When the band released their international break-through album If I don’t make it, I love u in 2024, they sounded less chaotic and instead quite literally more composed, actually not very dissimilar to Moin. But David Kennedy’s stop-and-go drumming, Finlay Clark’s screeching chords and Jess Hickie-Kallenbach’s wailing sprechgesang still didn’t sound anything like the contemporary post-punk revivalists.
Considered in isolation, the basic elements of their music are also used by Yard Act, Dry Cleaning, or Idles, but the difference couldn’t be more pronounced. Where those bands, consciously or not, reproduce established formulas, Still House Plants refuse formulas altogether. Much like Blumberg, Still House Plants seem to let songs happen rather than writing them, less trying to circumvent convention rather than ignoring it outright.
Like the music of Mica Levi and Tirzah, Moin and Blumberg, this appeals to critics and fans alike precisely because it eschews the structures of contemporary pop and rock music, marked by a digestibility and retromaniacal replications of dead styles. What these artists and bands have in common then is that they formulate constructive responses to the tedium of their time. This doesn’t mean that they are part of a genre. But they do represent a situation.
This situation is different from the one that post-punk faced in late 1970s and early 1980s Britain. Monoculture has given way an archipelago of mainstream niches. Today it is not only dinosaur rock that truly exciting music has to grapple with. Instead, Levi and Tirzah take on streamlined pop, Moin stand in contrast to larger-than-life dance music, and Blumberg and Still House Plants formulate alternatives to formulaic indie rock and rockist post-punk. Their different responses to this boring mess remind us that another music is still possible.
