About a year ago, I wrote an image report about indie music aesthetics. It explored the semiotics of cool indie bands (triangles, blurs, pictures that look old), so-so indie bands (ultra-light Helvetica, faux Holga effects) and lame bands (important-seeming pictures of the singer, shitty acrylic art made by the singer’s friend). Since writing that, I’ve switched from being an entertainment journalist to working in marketing, so I’ve fallen behind with what the indie scene, but I still believe that you can, in some sense, judge an album by its cover. As an experiment, I’m going to grab covers from recent Pitchfork-buzzed bands I’ve never heard and guess what their music is like.

Jessie J kind of wants to be the next Katie Perry, with a sluttier Amy Winehouse edge and possibly a Janelle Monae thing that she doesn’t understand white chicks can’t pull off. She sings about dudes on motorcycles and losing her virginity in a McDonald’s drvie-thru.
Rating: 6

Other People are a bunch of white bros who want to be like Diplo. You think they’re really cerebral from their savvy pop-culture references and adept mish-mashing of genres, but then when you meet them in real life you realize that they drink a gallon of rum a day and can’t put together a sentence.
Rating: 8.6

Are you totally not sick of chillwave yet? Oh good, cuz here’s some more! But this is even more self-aware than the last kind of chillwave, so it’s even more post-modern.
Rating: 7.3

This album was primarily made with DJ and Korg iPad apps. The dudes who made it are addicted to amphetamines and jelly beans. It has a song called “Listening to The National at Taco Bell.”
Rating: 9.2

This band has a live painter. There is no bathroom in their venue so girls are out back peeing on the asphalt. Their music sounds like gunshots and dying birds, but in a mathematically rhythmic way.

Rating: 6.8

–Becky Lang