Those who are not so much in tune with the melodious world of music might innocently mistaken Indie music to be music with Indian influence (trust me, I’ve met several people who gave me that description). In actual fact, Indie is just an abbreviation of independent music which denotes that the musicians are not reliant to any commercial record labels. They do all their recordings and publishing of albums (or singles) DIY style.
In Malaysia, indie music is a giant on its own turf. To list down all local indie bands would take me ages. The growth in numbers of new indie bands are somewhat near phenomenal and so it is understandable that the types of music that they play covers almost all genres.
With that being said, however, Malaysian indie bands are in more often than not guitar-driven bands skewed towards all types of rock music. Alternative rock, progressive rock, industrial rock, punk rock and a bunch of other types of rock that I honest to God never knew existed. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t any who experiment with other musical influences like hip-hop and dance music.
Listen closely to most of the Indie bands and you’ll hear that most of them, either discreetly or in a more obvious manner are influenced by brit or American music when it comes to their song compositions.
Currently, among the top names in Malaysia’s independent music scene are Meet Uncle Hussain, Hujan, Estranged, One Buck Short, Estrella and the most recent chart climber, Bunkface.
Meet Uncle Hussain
Hujan
Estranged
One Buck Short
Bunkface
These four young lads had been jamming together since school and made their first appearance as an official band on Blast Off! (one of Malaysia’s battle of the bands competitions) and though they did not win then, they continued to pursue success driven by their love of music and performance. Finding aspirations from bands like Sum41 and Greenday, there’s no stopping them as they continue to produce more fresh and catchy songs that are more often than on the airwaves.
But that’s what Indie music really is to the young KLites. A fresh new sound of music that’s being played as it should be and not conforming to any cookie-cutter style, a melodious outlet where the generation that wants to be heard gets heard, and a revolution that reflects the KL youth like nothing before. Get ready KL, Indie music is taking over the future.
Head on to You Don’t Need TV for Fame for a little bit more on KL’s Independent music scene.