Dead Oceans

This September, the Grammy-winning indie folk star Phoebe Bridgers will play two back-to-back shows at Game Bridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis.

I wonder how many fans in attendance will know that the label that helped launch Bridgers' career, Dead Oceans, is headquartered just an hour south of Indianapolis in Bloomington, Indiana.

Dead Oceans is part of Secretly Group, the Bloomington-based independent music company that also includes Secretly Canadian and Jag Jaguar.

This year, Secretly is celebrating 30 years of independent music.

The label began in Bloomington in 1996 when Eric Weddle, Jonathan Cargill, and brothers Ben and Chris Swanson founded Secretly Canadian.

It was like Foxing just put all their blood, sweat and tears into this fantastic record that people who liked Radiohead and TV on the radio and Sufjan Stevens and all this stuff should have loved.

And it's like the indie world was just like, sorry, you're not in Dead Oceans.

next and it really sort of represented there is a ceiling for bands with the E word and I just love how hard they pushed on this record despite all these factors working against them and I think that it is a record that would surprise people who don't think they like emo but like other types of ambitious melodic rock music and I'm hoping that the combination of those five kind of shows a lot of different aspects of, because the amount of types of music represented in this book and in this wave of whatever, it's countless.

It's so far beyond bands that sound like cap and jazz and American football.

That they are both on Interscope? No, not really.

Actually, Phoebe's record is on Dead Oceans.

Boy Genius is on Interscope.

No, the thing that they have in common is health issues.

Like, you know, think about it.

She is signed to the label Dead Oceans, which is an independent label, and she's currently predicted to sell over 100,000 copies of the album first week, which is like bigger than some pop star numbers.

I mean, that's huge.

I think that like she has, you know, she's also like, she's an indie artist who's doing arenas on her third album.

Speaking of community and melting brains, we have to talk about the return of the Queen.

After years of opening for the biggest pop stars on the planet, Phoebe Bridgers has finally delivered Lost Weekend on Dead Oceans.

It is a record that feels like a quiet exhale after a four-year sprint.

Under the Radar gave it a 9 out of 10, and it has earned every bit of that praise.