It’s been a long journey to Garage Flower’s debut single. It was officially announced on 17 July, but just two weeks later, a scourge was unleashed on British music. In response to UK drill’s “UK poo” meme, TikToker Angus.Official coined “indie poo” for what he perceived as a naïve slew of new indie rock artists: Park Drive, Bilk, Andy Goodwin. The term spread like wildfire, overwhelmingly taken as an allegation of derivativeness. In the midst of a release campaign, the band that immediately became its face was Garage Flower. The controversy surged their single to number two on the physical sales chart before it even hit shelves. A reminder that in the social media age hate is the greatest fuel for success.
Garage Flower’s namesake single is a pastiche of late 1980s-mid 1990s Manchester, from vocalist Nathan Whitehead’s Liam Gallagher-ian nasal to the Stone Roses-esque swing. It uses Oasis‘ structure of a rhythm guitar driving the song while the lead jangles and intersperses blues licks.
However, the song’s speed and aggression feel foreign, more akin to early Title Fight’s hardcore leanings. The muting pattern of its main riff is particularly reminiscent of that band’s song “Symmetry”. Hardcore’s adoption of indie is so ubiquitous in the 2020s (High Vis, Turnstile, Militarie Gun) that it’s natural the favour would be returned.
The song’s highlight is undoubtedly its basslines. Joshua Ndombasi jumps across the fretboard, bringing ghost note-filled grooves that also serve as melodic hooks. The rhythm guitar even cuts out during the second verse to highlight this.
The “poo” elements here lie in the lyrical style, attempting an early Alex Turner-style Northern youth-culture adaptation of Libertine poeticism. However, in indie poo, the bucket-hatted, Strongbow dark fruits-drinking stereotypes of an indie kid and their government-neglected neighbourhoods are treated as an aesthetic and virality fodder. Not a tongue-in-cheek cultural critique.
Garage Flower’s debut track opens “I smoked a twifta this morning / And Quarry Hill is where I’m going.” “Twifta”, even in Leeds, is a fairly uncommon localism for a marijuana cigarette. “Quarry Hill” is one campus of Leeds City College. It is directly beside Playhouse Gardens, a popular hangout spot for twifta-smoking skaters.
The band’s allusions are slightly more cryptic than fellow poostars, but that isn’t saying much. Hear Goodwin sing “She turned up in her three stripes and a Fred Perry” or Ten Hands High tell “Baggy tees are as common as petty crime”. Whitehead’s most comparable lyric is “Now it’s a very happy Monday”, referencing the Happy Mondays. See also: “I’m in the garage with my flowers”, invoking the Roses’ archival album Garage Flower (1996), for which this group and song are named.
While these may lead listeners to believe the song is about life as a Leeds indie kid, it is just a backdrop. The song is actually about a relationship. Its lyrics are vapid, but to British youth, indie rock is pop. What distinguishes these from vapid pop lyrics, if not a rockist perspective that guitar music should be superior?
To analyse “indie poo” any deeper than “indie that is bad” is to expose the Strokes and the Libertines‘ descendants as the continuously domineering style of British radio rock for the past 25 years. In the early 2000s they called it the “garage rock revival”, but as it proliferated and developed a formula, it became “landfill indie”. Since then, many a young Brit’s first exposure to guitars has been landfillers like the Arctic Monkeys. Even in its apparent 2010s lull, newcomers Foals, the Vaccines and Catfish and the Bottlemen still occupied radio waves and countless Reading lineups.
Garage Flower’s home of Leeds was never short of the style, with Indigo Project, the Sheratons and Don’t Wake the Bear all drawing crowds recently. L’objectif even bordered on mainstream in 2021-2022, as Garage Flower’s brother band, the North, seem on the way to today. Technically, this isn’t even Garage Flower’s debut. Until July 2025, they were called the Liabilities, who released three singles and the EP Looking Back is Formidable (2024).
Indie poo is just this decade’s interpretation, the second landfilling of indie. It is informed by a zeitgeist of Oasis’ reunion and the death of Stone Roses bassist Gary Mounfield. Now, as much emphasis is put upon precursors Britpop and baggy as on the landfill itself. In Garage Flower’s case, this also includes the resurgent popularity of Title Fight. The allegations of being derivative are backlash to the nation’s overexposure, not plagiarism; Bayboards, the Guest List, and Strata are all clearly distinguishable. Is “Garage Flower” poo? Sure, whatever that means. Is it bad? No.