Playlists

I'll admit it: when I first started putting this playlist together, I wasn't aware of this term either. I had simply noticed a series of stylistic convergences among a diverse range of acts, a kaleidoscopic progressive/power-pop front spanning both well-known and lesser-known names from today's independent music universe. The nimble soft-rock of Bryan Scary seemed to me to fuse with the genre-shredding circus of Tally Hall, with the twee rock opera of Fishboy and the piano-rock tightrope-walking of Jukebox The Ghost, mapping out fertile ground for a set of musical values that can be summed up as follows: instrumental and compositional ambition, surprising harmonic choices, a strong focus on melody and immediacy, a taste for the outlandish and for storytelling, and, last but not least, nerdiness in spades.

It was only later, as I set about identifying other artists and deciding who to include and who to leave out among the many "candidates" that had come to mind, that I stumbled upon the odd neologism that gives this selection its title. And I realised that my creation already had a name, an enthusiastic fanbase, and, in some cases, streaming and view counts high enough to put the most celebrated alternative idols of the moment to shame.

"Fabloo" is the answer that, around 2006, Texan band Tally Hall started giving to anyone who asked what genre their music belonged to. Their idea – apparently – was to pick a nonsense term so people would stop trying to pigeonhole them into this or that category. The effect, in a way, was the opposite: the term itself became, for fans, the name of the musical territory whose prototypical (if elusive) representative is Tally Hall.

Starting with the band's collaborators, tour mates and the many side projects launched by its members, fans of the group gathered on Reddit have gradually pulled more and more projects into this new category, progressively outlining an aesthetic horizon that's as well-defined as it is varied. Bryan Scary and Jukebox The Ghost are among the key names, alongside viral idols Lemon Demon and Will Wood, the earliest incarnation of Fun. (before their stomp rock metamorphosis), as well as dozens of other projects with smaller streaming numbers but no less devoted followings.

The defining traits are, for the most part, those laid out in the opening. An oblique, irresistible catchiness that brings the music as close to the weirdness of Zolo as to the pomp/soft/flash-rock excess of the seventies that ran like a red thread through this column's first playlist. A nod to some of pop's most harmonically rich territories: the Beatles and sunshine pop above all, but just as importantly, Broadway-style musical theatre. The centrality, for many of these acts, of piano and keyboards. A near-omnipresent element, playful and postmodern, that breaks down the barriers between the more overtly revivalist proposals and the more futuristic ones.

The playlist aims to be an overview of the genre, but also a way of looking beyond it. It opens with the key names, but goes on to include precursors and inspirations too (the influence of the thoroughly Beatles-esque Jellyfish and the indie/piano-rock of Ben Folds is obvious), and folds in a few bands I've never seen mentioned in connection with the "genre" but which seem to fit it like a glove. Dowling Poole, Jackdaw4 and Ginger Wildheart form a network of interconnected names linking Bryan Scary to Cardiacs, offering further possible angles on the phylogeny of this sound.

Two other clear-cut choices set this compilation apart from a simple rehash of the "big lists" you can find elsewhere online: acts with strictly indie leanings have been excluded (Mother Mother, Autoheart, Saint Motel, I Don't Know How But They Found Me...), generally oriented toward a more guitar-driven or more synthetic sound, but less theatrical and less retro; on the other hand, some room has been left at the end for post-emo projects that, perhaps only through convergent evolution, share a certain kinship with the mood of the selection (this may interest anyone who enjoyed the interview with the curator of Altprogcore). Many other options could have been considered (the Lemon Twigs? Rosalie Cunningham?), but there were only twenty-five slots, and this is how it turned out.

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24/12/2025