Stephen Malkmus

The Arc of Stephen Malkmus

The pivots — what forced Stephen Malkmus to reinvent.

1. 01

   The Post-Pavement Rebound

   The transition from Pavement to the Jicks was supposed to be a solo bedroom pop experiment, but Malkmus ended up hiring local Portland players like Joanna Bolme to salvage the tunes for the road. The 2001 self-titled debut and Pig Lib in 2003 traded the scrap-metal noise of his old band for clean, interlocking prog-rock jams. You can hear him rediscovering the joy of clean guitar tones and Grateful Dead-style improvisation without having to play the indie spokesperson. It saved him from becoming a nineties museum piece.

2. 02

   The Beck Intervention

   By 2011, the Jicks were spinning their wheels in comfortable mid-tempo indie rock, so Malkmus brought in Beck Hansen to produce Mirror Traffic. Beck forced the band to cut the endless jam sessions and focus on tight, three-minute pop songs with dry, radio-ready drum sounds. Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney played her final drum tracks with the band here, hitting with a clinical precision that anchored Malkmus's loosest vocals in years. The result was their most focused record since the debut, proving he could still write a hook when someone kept him on a leash.

3. 03

   The Attic Synthesis

   After moving to Berlin and getting obsessed with European electronic music, Malkmus bypassed his band entirely to record Groove Denied in 2019. Armed with vintage synthesizers, a drum machine, and a copy of Ableton, he made a weird synth-pop record that horrified Matador so much they delayed its release for a year. You can hear the isolation in the tracks, which sound like a middle-aged dad playing around with techno loops in a freezing cold attic. It broke his creative logjam, leading directly to the acoustic, 12-string psych-folk of Traditional Techniques a year later.