Fifteen years later, the cultural tables have definitively turned.Īnd no big-ticket rock band in the last five years has carried Coldplay’s influence quite like Mumford & Sons, the previously shuffling folk-rock troupe led by Marcus Mumford, who unwittingly led the EDM-reactionary “real music” movement in the early 2010s. There’s a revealing sequence in the just-released documentary Head Full of Dreams as the band performs at the 2001 KROQ Weenie Roast sandwiched in between ultra-masc acts like Sevendust and SR-71, their sensitive pop-rock is met with boos and debris hurled at the stage. Much-maligned British polymaths alt-J have spent much of this decade sanding down Radiohead’s Kid A-era abstractions to resemble smooth, uninteresting steel, and Coldplay’s influence also looms large, years after they finally managed to escape their own post-Radiohead shadow.

The reach for streaming-algorithm brass rings has often been prescribed as the cause for this sudden dip in aggression and subsequent sonic flattening-but there’s precedent at play here too. Even Arctic Monkeys-a band that spent much of the past 16 years wielding six-stringed weapons with such old-fashioned macho swagger that they dressed up like goddamn greasers to promote 2013’s AM-have packed up their guitars and launched themselves into zero gravity, lunar taquerías and all. Save for the occasional nostalgia act attempting to rattle the terra firma, most radio-ready bands in the ailing musical genre have recently ditched the riffs for glassy keyboards, echo-soaked percussion, and vocal affectations as wispy as the white trail of an e-cigarette. Modern rock isn’t dead-it’s just weightless.

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