It’s become a truism that rock is, if not dead, then at least suffering an identity crisis. Nowhere does this seem clearer than in the Billboard rock charts, which are currently dominated by an uneasy mix of Queen hits, recent releases from old hands like Weezer, and new music that seems to belong more to electronic or pop music than to rock.
This new generation of rock, it might seem, rests on the success of rap and electronic music, borrowing artificial beats and slick production to make itself more palatable. Greta Van Fleet, the rock newcomers who happen to sound quite a bit like Led Zeppelin—and the genre’s only representative on this year’s 30 Under 30 Music list—are hailed as the saviors of rock ’n’ roll largely for playing instruments on stage.
The actual state of the genre, though, is less dire than it seems. Two songs at the top of the charts are showing that rock can absorb elements from rap and electronic music without losing its identity. Imagine Dragons’ “Natural” and lovelytheband’s “Broken” have been dominating for months, and these songs represent a new phenomenon: rock artists taking what they’ve learned from rap and electronic music and moving away from it, back towards something that actually sounds like a group of people in a room making music.
Listen closely to the beat in Imagine Dragons’ 2012 hit “Radioactive.” Then listen to “Natural.” You’ll notice a difference in the percussion. “Radioactive” is completely electronic; there’s not a trace of a drum kit to be heard. Like all classic EDM beats, this one comes in with a long synth buildup, and is surrounded by wobbling, tectonic wubs in the bass. The thumping artificial drum creates the backbone of the entire song. “Radioactive” is an electropop song with guitars.
“Natural,” though, is a different animal. In this song, the band takes the bombast and signature rhythm from their years making electronic music and bangs them out on real drums (or, at any rate, something that sounds a lot more like real drums). Gone is the impossibly low low-end. Here, now, is the distinct sound of a snare. In the pre-chorus, drumsticks click behind the melody. For a band that made its name on drum machines, copying EDM, this is a significant shift: away from electronic and back towards rock.
“Broken” performs a similar move, from a different angle. “I like that you’re broken, broken like me,” it says. “Maybe that makes me a fool.” It goes on: “I like that you’re lonely, lonely like me / I could be lonely with you.” The song is riding on the coattails of a long list of thematic forebears in pop and rap. As Chris Deville of Stereogum put it in a July article: “Thanks to the rise of figures such as the aforementioned Drake, his frenemy the Weeknd, and the Weeknd’s duet partner Lana Del Rey—coinciding with a burgeoning mental health crisis—glamorous despair-fueled hedonism has been the wave.”
The current wave of pop and rap artists selling sadness is in part derived from the popularity of emo rock a decade ago, but lovelytheband are not at the top of the charts because they’re borrowing from Dashboard Confessional; they’re there because they’re swimming with the current. lovelytheband, which shares its no-capital-letters aesthetic with the songs of sadness guru Billie Eilish, has drawn on this trend, but made it rock. They’re playing real instruments in a room, and if you pay attention to the percussion, you’ll hear a real kit for almost the entire song.
“Natural” is taking production techniques and instrumentation from EDM and turning them back into rock. “Broken” is doing the same thing with an aesthetic that rap and pop currently own. These two songs are coming from different angles, but in the middle, where they meet, might just be a genre moving back to its heart.
