“You have to sit in this regurgitated joke and find the light. “Revolution means shit to me,” says Drew of what it will take us to get through the currently tense global climate. And the state of the United States is just as exhausting as it was then, much to the annoyance of Broken Social Scene cofounder Kevin Drew. Fifteen years later, as indie kids who daydreamed to “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl” have their own children, the band is about to return with a new album, Hug of Thunder. The satellite bands found success in their own right-most notably Feist, who became a superduperstar after '1234' scored an Apple ad-and Broken Social Scene became a supergroup created in reverse, a bigger deal than many bands in their milieu. Their ambitious, cross-genre sound was bound together by an irrepressibly romantic spirit, embodying the noise and angst of a generation coming of age under the worst American president of a then-teenager's lifetime. A wildly positive review of the band's You Forgot It in People on a budding Pitchfork more or less put them on the map in 2002, and file-sharing spread their music faster than a major label could. One of the biggest acts to benefit from the internet’s indie rock boom was Toronto's Broken Social Scene, a collective of at least twelve musicians all with their own bands - Stars, Metric, Do Say Make Think, Apostle of Hustle-who had come together like a Canadian Voltron. While New York's rock scene boomed as the city recovered from the World Trade Center attacks, indie bands from scenes relatively unplugged from the major label circuit could suddenly get their music out with a few clicks of a button. At the turn of the millennium, the internet was a new and novel discovery vehicle for music outside the usual routes.

Broken social scene posters