Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion

by Chris DeVille

Overview

The definitive history of twenty-first-century indie rock—from Iron&Wine and Death Cab for Cutie to Phoebe Bridgers and St. Vincent—and how the genre shifted the musical landscape and shaped a generation

Maybe you caught a few exhilarating seconds of “Teen Age Riot” on a nearby college radio station while scanning the FM dial in your parents’ car. Maybe your friend invited you to a shabby local rock club and you ended up having a religious experience with Neutral Milk Hotel. Perhaps you were scandalized and tantalized upon sneaking Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville from an older sibling’s CD collection, or you vowed to download every Radiohead song you could find on LimeWire because they were the favorite band of the guy you had a major crush on.

However you found your way into indie rock, once you were a listener, it felt like being part of a secret club of people who had discovered something special, something secret, something superior. In Such Great Heights, music journalist Chris DeVille brilliantly captures this cultural moment, from the early aughts and the height of indie rock, until the 2010s as streaming upends the industry and changes music forever. DeVille covers the gamut of bands—like Arcade Fire, TV On The Radio, LCD Soundsystem, Haim, Pavement, and Bon Iver—and in the vein of Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties, touches on staggering pop culture moments, like finding your new favorite band on MySpace and the life-changing O.C. soundtrack.

Nerdy, fun, and a time machine for millennials, Such Great Heights is about how subculture becomes pop culture, how capitalism consumes what's “cool,” who gets to define what's hip and why, and how an “underground” genre shaped our lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250363398
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/26/2025
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336

About the Author

CHRIS DEVILLE is the managing editor at Stereogum, where he has written extensively about the full spectrum of indie music for the last twelve years. In 2014, he launched The Week In Pop, a column exploring mainstream music from an indie fan’s perspective, and he has profiled bands like Tame Impala and Run The Jewels. Chris has also been featured in outlets like The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone and The Ringer. He lives with his family in Columbus, Ohio.
Chris DeVille is the managing editor at Stereogum, where he has written extensively about the full spectrum of indie music for the last twelve years. In 2014, he launched The Week In Pop, a column exploring mainstream music from an indie fan’s perspective, and he has profiled bands like Tame Impala and Run The Jewels. Chris has also been featured in outlets like The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone and The Ringer. He lives with his family in Columbus, Ohio.

Editorial Reviews

"DeVille’s love for indie rock makes this comprehensive genre account a playful read... DeVille’s book relies heavily on his personal and professional knowledge and highlights the impact of indie music journalism. Readers interested in music history and those wanting to read about their favorite 2000s-era indie bands will enjoy DeVille’s work." —Library Journal

"For fans old and new, Such Great Heights offers not just nostalgia but insight into what indie rock once was—and what it might still be." —Booklist

"DeVille’s book is beautifully argued and free of strong opinions about particular bands or subgenres; he is here as a historian with admitted skin in the game—he’s a fan of the genre who observes, neutrally, how it has changed. This work is filled with smart arguments, gentle wit, and admirable acumen. A must not just for rock fans, but for anyone interested in the intersection of music and culture." —Kirkus

"a comprehensive and colorful account of the rise, fall, corporatization, and partial revival of indie rock... the breadth of DeVille’s knowledge is impressive, and his analysis of what subcultures both lose and gain when they enter the mainstream is astute. Readers nostalgic for the days of the Postal Service and Passion Pit should take a look." —Publishers Weekly

"In the future, when the history of early 21st century indie rock is taught in schools, children will need a textbook to educate them in the ways of The Shins, Death Cab For Cutie, and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. And those adorable cybernetic babes decked out in space suits will reach for one learned text: Chris DeVille's Such Great Heights." —Steven Hyden, author of There Was Nothing You Could Do and Long Road

"For those of us who lived through the indie boom and obsessed over every new micro-scene and major release, Such Great Heights is as passionate and comprehensive as that cultural moment deserves — but even the blog-agnostic will find tons to latch onto in Chris DeVille’s writing, which is at once funny, authoritative and full of touching anecdotes. Such Great Heights is a wonderful read, and the type of snapshot that any type of music fan will find accessible." —Jason Lipshutz, executive director of music at Billboard and author of It Starts with One

"What does indie mean to you? A ‘90s Pavement fan, a Millennial Seth Cohen devotee, and someone who owns every vinyl variant of Taylor Swift’s Folklore—they’d all have vastly different definitions, but they’re passionate just the same. In this anthropological exploration of 21st century indie, Chris DeVille chronicles the genre’s ascension from blogs and bars to conquering pop’s stratosphere. Or wait—did pop conquer indie? The truth lies somewhere in between, with this book as your guide to every iconic album and preposterous crossover moment from Kid A to when Grizzly Bear captivated Jay-Z." —Chris Payne, author of Where Are Your Boys Tonight?: The Oral History of Emo’s Mainstream Explosion, 1999-2008

"After its Nineties apex, alternative rock scattered in every imaginable direction. With Such Great Heights, Chris DeVille provides a detailed road map for music fans wanting to track its subsequent peregrinations. A sure-fire candidate for the rock-book canon." —Tom Beaujour, New York Times bestselling coauthor of Lollapalooza and Nöthin' But a Good Time

"Chris DeVille not only writes a super entertaining and detailed history of our favorite music, he manages to tell the story of our lives over the last three decades, as the monoculture splintered into a million microcultures. Best New Reading, 9.5, docking a half a point only for how many times I had to put it down and queue a song up." —Dave Holmes, former MTV VJ and author of Party of One

"Indie is a nebulous, baffling term that arguably means nothing anymore but still means everything to the rapt 21st-century music lovers exhilarated by every hot new band, every chaotic new subgenre, every bomb-throwing new blog, every rhapsodic Pitchfork rave or cruel Pitchfork takedown. Whether you think you know everything or worry you don’t know nearly enough, Chris DeVille is a super-smart, tough-minded, but resoundingly empathetic critic and deep thinker with an encyclopedic knowledge but an infectious zeal that can make you hear your favorite song in an entirely new way. This book is a 10." —Rob Harvilla, host and author of 60 Songs That Explain the '90s

"Such Great Heights is a smart, visceral and deeply detailed recounting of one of the most impactful movements in music. Chris DeVille brings a critic's eye, a music fan’s heart and the insight only someone who lived and loved this music could. A must for both the 'before they were famous' fans and new audiences alike.” —Marissa R. Moss, author of Her Country

"Chris's book is much more than just nostalgia for the remembered aughts. It's a valuable document of an era that transformed the way we think about and consume music and culture." —Bill Barnwell, ESPN writer and host of The Bill Barnwell Show

From the Publisher

2025-05-15
A journalist asks: What happened to indie rock?

There was a time, about 20 years ago, when “Such Great Heights,” a song by indie-pop outfit The Postal Service, was inescapable. The song hit the Billboard Hot Singles chart, unusual for an indie song at the time, and was featured in the filmGarden State and in the seriesGrey’s Anatomy. It makes sense that music journalist DeVille would use the song as the title of his book, which explores how, in the early 2000s, indie rock “reached an exponentially larger audience and was utterly transformed in the process.” Indie rock was named after its original home in independent music labels, but at some point it changed to a label-agnostic genre that, DeVille writes, was marked by “a family tree of musical aesthetics” that started with late-1960s bands the Velvet Underground and the Stooges. DeVille traces 2000s indie rock to its “dance-party era,” when fans bopped along to the Dismemberment Plan, and through its forays into subgenres garage rock, “blog-rock,” “bloghouse” (associated with the “indie sleaze” era of fashion), indie folk, and more. He writes about the genre’s watershed moments: its popularity with television producers, who included indie songs in series likeThe O.C. andGossip Girl, and the surprise Grammy wins of Arcade Fire and Bon Iver. Indie rock, DeVille writes, “meant so many things that it came to mean nothing.” He doesn’t bemoan this, noting that the changes “started pulling the genre away from traditional white male power structures and toward the historical have-nots.” DeVille’s book is beautifully argued and free of strong opinions about particular bands or subgenres; he is here as a historian with admitted skin in the game—he’s a fan of the genre who observes, neutrally, how it has changed. This work is filled with smart arguments, gentle wit, and admirable acumen.

A must not just for rock fans, but for anyone interested in the intersection of music and culture.

Kirkus Reviews