Latest Release
- 19 APR 2024
- 2 Songs
- Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain · 1994
- Harness Your Hopes - Single · 2024
- Cautionary Tales: Jukebox Classiques · 2024
- Cautionary Tales: Jukebox Classiques · 2024
- Cautionary Tales: Jukebox Classiques · 2024
- Cautionary Tales: Jukebox Classiques · 2024
- Cautionary Tales: Jukebox Classiques · 2024
- Spit on a Stranger - EP · 2022
- Quarantine the Past: The Best of Pavement · 2010
- Live Europaturnén MCMXCVII (Version 2) · 2009
Albums
Music Videos
- 2022
- 2022
- 1994
Artist Playlists
- Indie guitar rock heroes with a ‘90s lo-fi slacker aesthetic.
- This is what moved the men who put lo-fi indie on everyone's radar.
- These slacker indie icons try harder than you might think.
- Spotlighting the rock grooves that caught the ear of Stephen Malkmus and company.
More To Hear
- Strombo delves into how the internet changed ’90s indiemusic.
- Strombo reflects back to 1995 when ’90s indie had its peak.
- Strombo digs into the scenes and cities that created ’90sindie.
- Strombo talks with the creators of the ’90s indie sound.
- Strombo digs into the ’90s indie sound and ethos.
About Pavement
If the indie-rock boom of the early '90s has a boy band, it’s Pavement: The sweet melodies, the carefree delivery, they way they can be the smartest guys in the room without making a point of it. At a time when some of their post-punk peers were still waging musical revolution, they embraced the rosy warmth of classic rock (Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain), and even at their most challenging (Westing (By Musket and Sextant, the stoned sprawl of Wowee Zowee) were more playful than rebellious, the sound of collegiate guys who liked sports and poetry in equal measure, who were always interesting but never pretentious. Courtney Love once described their frontman, Steve Malkmus, as “the Grace Kelly of indie rock”—an invocation not only of the band’s charm, but their poise and effortlessness. Pavement weren’t naive. But they sounded like winners without even playing the game. Their early music (1992’s Slanted and Enchanted in particular) summarized the best of ‘80s underground rock (the poetry of R.E.M., noise of Sonic Youth, sloppiness of The Replacements) while adding their own sweet-and-sour essence, turning out songs that transformed oblique poetry and fragmented of noise into lighters-up anthems (“In the Mouth a Desert,” “Trigger Cut”). Malkmus once joked that he realized he’d never be a real punk when he saw Henry Rollins of Black Flag squeeze a cue ball as a pre-show warmup. But even as their sound mellowed, the band retained an irreverence, delivering their grandest music—“Grounded,” “Type Slowly,” “The Hexx”—with a looseness that made them look humble: Not rock gods, but regular dudes you kinda wanted to root for. The band broke up after 1999’s Terror Twilight, reforming in 2010 and sporadically since.
- ORIGIN
- Stockton, CA, United States
- FORMED
- 1989
- GENRE
- Alternative