Were the 2010s the best years for pop music yet?

Telegraph

04-03-2025

How old were you when you realised the cultural mainstays of your youth – be it music, art or literature – were no longer 'cool'? That the bands and books that once signified teenage rebellion – reviled by your parents and the establishment – were now instead considered 'worthy' by critics?
I found myself grappling with that depressing realisation while reading music journalist Liam Inscoe-Jones's fascinating Songs in the Key of MP3: The New Icons of the Internet Age. It's a book which dives into the origins and eventual successes of five pivotal indie musicians – Devonté Hynes, FKA Twigs, Oneohtrix Point Never, Earl Sweatshirt and SOPHIE – while exploring how changing technology shaped their art. These artists, though far from household names, were enormously influential, their work inspiring some of the world's biggest stars (Charli XCX, Madonna and Lorde, to name just a few).
Each came to fame at some point during the Noughties or 2010s, when social media was in its infancy – namely MySpace, Tumblr and for artists, the music-streaming site Soundcloud – meaning that suddenly, teenagers were no longer limited to consuming their favourite music from the repressive confines of their bedrooms. Instead, the advent of MP3 players, iPods and iPhones made it possible for young people to cart about thousands of songs in their own pockets. Music was changing – whether for the better is an eternal debate – and Inscoe-Jones's five artists were at the centre of that paradigm shift.
The book begins, loosely, around 2006, when the Arctic Monkeys managed to upend the way charts worked with their industry-shattering, multi-million-selling debut studio album, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, and fellow indie artists like Florence Welch and Bloc Party were luring teenagers to indie club nights in their droves. Enter Hynes. The now 39-year old Ilford-raised musician and producer has still never had a Number 1 single, headlined Glastonbury nor won a Brit Award. But as Inscoe-Jones convincingly argues, Hynes has been one of popular music's most prominent architects for almost two decades, first with his dubiously named indie band Test Icicles and later the folk outfit Lightspeed Champion, and then with his critically-acclaimed production for the likes of Solange Knowles, Sky Ferreira and Britney Spears.
Things got particularly interesting in 2009, when Hynes abandoned Lightspeed Champion to perform under the alias Blood Orange, swapping his twee bow ties and folk sound for Nineties streetwear and the all-American genres of funk, soul and disco. What ensued was some of the finest pop of the 21st century, especially on his 2011 single Champagne Coast and Everything is Embarrassing, Ferreira's 2013 alt-pop smash. Operating sneakily on the periphery of commercial and indie music, Hynes became a 21st-century polymath, as likely to be caught reciting spoken-word poetry in Brooklyn dive bars or sitting front-row at various fashion weeks as performing at festivals.
The other four artists similarly carved out their own spaces in the industry. FKA Twigs found an early audience for her fusion of R&B, electronica and indie on Tumblr, as did Earl Sweatshirt, who earned his name in hip hop as part of the zeitgeisty collective Odd Future. Electronic artists Oneohtrix Point Never and SOPHIE, meanwhile, had their careers boosted by sets clipped and shared to SoundCloud. They've also all remained successful, albeit in the indie sphere. Only SOPHIE's brilliance was cut tragically short, when she died in 2021 of a sudden fall, aged just 34.
What makes Songs in the Key of MP3 so original is not its dissection of technology, nor its plethora of interviews with artists, fans and industry types, but its choice to focus on these five artists above any others. It takes a certain courage to write a book about music that doesn't centre on legacy rockers – Lennon, Dylan or Cobain, for example – and with whom, perhaps, come guaranteed sales.
But it also left me wondering whether musicians of the five's ilk could break out and sustain careers today, when the internet has progressed at a rate none of us saw coming even a decade ago. When I was a teenager – one of the many getting drunk in grotty venues in Birmingham and London at those early Hynes gigs – social media was an accessory to everyday life rather than the number one priority. Today, by contrast, teenagers are more inclined to scroll through videos of gigs on TikTok than attend them. Reading Songs in the Key of MP3, you see that the internet in the 2010s was full of possibility – partly because we didn't care too much about it. But for music today, you wonder: could it be the death knell?