The Plight of Sad Girl Indie
She’s a songstress with unruly hair. She’s fragile and vulnerable, but also mysterious and mythicized. She’s probably white, and she’s definitely pining over a man. She’s “sad girl”—who happens to be a musician.
There’s a new brand of female songwriters in town, housed under the subgenre of sad girl indie. In a unique tension between indie sound sensibilities and an emotional hook that allows for surprising commerciality, singers like Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, Clairo, Mitski, and Snail Mail, are homogenized into one moody playlist.
The sad girl indie genre operates under the many opportunities and obstacles of genre marketability, except this time around, the box that genre puts artists in is gendered. The box soon becomes a trap to ensnare, devoid of creative expansion.
Part general character archetype and part mood, the “sad girl” is an online phenomenon. NPR dubbed 2021 the year of the sad girl in music. The concept of “sad girl,” who mixes heartache with poetry, could be applied to a larger meme lexicon of “sad girl autumn” and “sad girl hours.”
But the concept of sad girl indie didn’t succumb to the rise and fall of internet trends, instead becoming a buzzy subgenre. Anastasia Scholze, a Musicology graduate student with a research focus on women in music, describes sad girl indie as a spin-off of singer-songwriter, with simple instrumentation that ranges from folk guitar to quiet electronic—and “women obviously.”
Scholze gets a lot of her sad girl tracklist, particularly favoring Phoebe Bridgers and Clairo, from TikTok “and whatever algorithm I’m plugged into.”
“What I would say is unconventional about the idea of sad girl indie is categories like independent music and alternative music, generally aspire to be less specific,” said Sarah Suhadolnik, a University of Iowa lecturer currently teaching a class on music and gender.
To Suhadolnik, the term indie, as it rose to prominence in the 90s, represented any music that wasn’t commercial like rock or pop but didn’t fall into a contained, measured sound like jazz or heavy metal. Indie often fell under lyrical angst, but the more introspective musings of heartbreak stem from the generic label of the 70s songwriter with the likes of Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez.
“The thing about singer-songwriters is, over time, their music tends to become more complex, tends to evolve, tends to attack more sophisticated issues,” Suhadolnik said. “While if you are locked in girl zone, the expectation is relationships, essentially fodder for high school gossip and college diaries. That’s essentially where you’re allowed to go and no further.”
Three powerhouses of the sad girl genre—Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker—created the supergroup boygenius in 2018. The band is a zestful gender-flipped Crosby Stills & Nash, a 70s supergroup that often leaned into dramatic emotions. CSN member Stephen Stills penned an over 7-minute musical suite, complete with four sections, on his impending breakup with Judy Collins; it became “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” one of the band’s two Top 40 hits.
In a more modern comparison, male songwriters Elliott Smith and Conner Oberst sound eerily similar to those in the sad girl indie space, with hushed vocals and dark, lyrical feelings. But they’re not labeled as sad or actively gendered to describe their music. Sad boys are simply indie. Conversely, sad girl indie is a term loaded with preconceptions of immaturity and brokenness.
In a 2018 interview, boygenius members ruminated on the internal strife of the sad girl label. “I actually only have one sad song,” Dacus said. “That’s the emotion we can allow for girls, that’s the emotion we can understand.”
Fellow member Baker talked about having to be more intentional about penning hopeful songs after her album Sprained Ankle immediately led to sad girl categorization. The overarching agreement from all three artists was the main utility of the subgenre: marketing. Flattening down to a wistful archetype that fits neatly into a one-note emotion is aggressively marketable.
The oversimplification is unromantic and devaluing (Dacus likened it to “selling mattresses”). The sad girl indie label not only boxes the artist into sadness, but also diminishes the dangers of sadness. As Bridgers puts it in that 2018 interview, it’s wanting to “sell depression in a funny way.”
In fact, when reports of an engaged Phoebe Bridgers hit the tabloid headlines in late April, instead of the typical celebrity relationship buzz, a surge of social media posts signaled Bridgers’ engagement as a time for mourning. To fans, the singer in a happy relationship apparently means no more sad songs. Popular TikTok videos grieving the news used Bridgers’ “Moon Song” in the background, highlighting a very particular verse: “You are sick and you’re married and you might be dying.”
Despite the limiting and sexist implications, sad girl indie remains wildly marketable.
“Branding is such an essential thing in internet land than it necessarily has been in popular music historically,” Suhaldolnik said. “If they’re completely without categorization, they remain hard to find on the internet.”
Spotify’s “sad girl starter pack” playlist has over 300,000 likes. The user-generated playlists can get even more specific—think “sad oat milk indie girls” and “sad indie girls to cry yourself to sleep to <3.”
“It’s interesting how many people are making playlists on Spotify and just any streaming service that are so niche. There’s all the TikToks that show different playlists for different moods and fanbases,” Scholze said.
Genre began as a practical utility to describe an album’s sound for organizing a record store or informing a radio DJ. Now, listeners must do their own searching on streaming platforms. With so much music, searching “indie” probably won’t get the searcher far. The playlist boom changed that—genre now represents more of a vibe, a mood, and an atmosphere. Sad girl indie as a compact describer is deeply moody and highly searchable.
Musician Mary Bozaan, whose solo music was recently featured in the TV show “Good Trouble” and is part of the bedroom pop duo Tall Doozy, calls music streaming promotion “the bane of my existence.”
“It’s pretty compulsive. At this point, it’s just like a video game. Am I winning? Am I losing?” Bozaan said.
In Bozaan’s experience, if the music doesn’t fit a particular genre, the song won’t get picked up by the streaming algorithm, in turn, becoming a cycle of discouragement. According to Bozaan, sometimes the label artists put their music under is meaningless beyond being a marketing tactic.
“My friend playlisted one of his songs as Christian in genre, which he is very, not Christian. And it blew up in a Christian playlist,” Bozaan said.
Although Bozaan would categorize her music as more indie or avant-garde pop, she feels categorizing in hyperspecific genres decides a whole musician’s repertoire before the music itself has a chance to grow.
“I’m not against genres as a language to help us speak about things and where things came from and movements in influence,” Bozaan said. “But I think the way that playlisting works these days is a lot more about the benefit of what genre you are. You’re trying to squeeze yourself into a genre to get into someone’s playlists and algorithms.”
The playlist nature and gendered categorization can also create spaces and community for women. To Suhaldolnik, sad girl indie functions as a community for women in the 2010s, like girl groups did in the 60s. The Shangri-Las sang about the popular boy in school giving the good girl his class ring and picking her up from school. The Marvelettes waited on a boyfriend’s love letter from the postman. The 60s girl groups, with their beehive hairstyles and go-go boots, almost exclusively sang about the boy in class, but they were groups of women singing songs for women.
“You can’t get more stereotypical than that, but for the first time, teenagers had teenage songs performed by teenage girls, and they could actually dress up like their favorite artists,” Suhaldolnik said.
Grouping women together via sad girl indie as a prominent commercial subsect, rather than remaining in the underground world of the typical indie genre, also creates a more natural presence for female music. Instead of women being a natural, equal contributor to music, the few women prominent enough in large genres like rock, are often tokenized in an effort to make up for the lack of gender diversity after the fact.
“When we’re talking about histories of music and just history in general, we’ll talk about men making music, and we’ll insert in women,” Scholze said.
In one sense, sad girl indie promotes more women in music and creates that singular space for women musicians to be surrounded by fellow women. But the aspect of gender is still pronounced and casually marginalizes musicians under a patronizing label. Like the rom-com film genre, media that’s female-centric is often devalued and less worthy of serious critical evaluation.
As fans worry that Phoebe Bridgers will start writing happy marriage songs and a classically somber Lorde’s recent pivot to bubblegum pop on Solar Power garners criticisms of soullessness, there’s nowhere to go once you’re the sad indie girl.
“For these artists, their first album, or first two albums if they’re lucky, is gonna define who they are to their largest audience. Anything beyond that will either deliver what their fanbase expects or if it doesn’t, it could frustrate them and could mean they lose their fans,” Suhaldolnik said. “They’re either behaving emotionally in the way you expect them to, or they’re behaving without emotion, which makes them somehow less womanly.”
Elisabeth Oster 