A hodgepodge of hipsters in day-old garments gathered carefully collectively, taking part in obscure string and percussion devices for a efficiency on NPR’s Tiny Desk live performance collection. It was November 2009, and the band, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, was slowly tightening its chokehold on popular culture with its music “Residence.”
You understand the tune. It opens with the syrupy-sweet line, “Alabama, Arkansas, I do love my Ma and Pa / Not the best way that I do love you.”
Quick ahead to August 2025, a clip of that very same efficiency by the 10-member band has been making the rounds on X, the place a viral submit known as it the “worst music ever made.” In truth, the entire style of “stomp clap hey” music, an indie-folk hybrid that was fashionable within the late 2000s and early 2010s, has additionally been known as the worst of all time.
Characterised by cutesy lyrics, classic devices and dramatic choruses, stomp clap hey consists of acts like Mumford & Sons, the Lumineers and Of Monsters and Males. Their sound is strategically quirky and invokes the sensation of a sing-along, inviting listeners to stomp and clap with them.
So why, unexpectedly, has it turn out to be fashionable to disdain this micro-era of music?
‘No cool issue’
Oversaturation may additionally have performed a task within the rising ire for “Residence” particularly. It as soon as felt like the music was all over the place, although it was by no means fairly successful past different radio. That may, partly, be as a result of it appeared in so many commercials — even in latest years. We may by no means really escape the band’s clapping, shouting and whistling, their earnest warbling about how house isn’t a spot however an individual. All that publicity may need made us resistant towards it, although it isn’t even sufficiently old to purchase itself a PBR.
Beckoned by the brewing controversy over his previous music, Edward Sharpe bandleader Alex Ebert lately took to Instagram to refute that “Residence” is the worst music ever, crediting his group for uplifting the “stomp clap hey” style. This week, he informed Stereogum that he was used to criticism as a result of “the job of rock ‘n’ roll is to remodel counterculture into tradition,” however the “vitriol that we received from the gatekeepers of cool” was surprising.
Alex Ebert of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes performs on tour in 2011. (Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Pictures)
“I used to be anticipating a blowback, however I wasn’t anticipating, like, actual anger,” he mentioned of the preliminary critique his music obtained. “And their anger was virtually overridden by fashionable demand. I like this stomp clap style, which is a superb identify for it. We’re going to must satirically reclaim the pejorative, as you do. However I understand it’s little cathartic second, and I like the dialogue round it.”
Even of their prime, songs just like the Lumineers’ “Ho Hey” and Of Monsters and Males’s “Little Talks” have been mainstream however quirky. Jason Lipshutz, the chief director of music at Billboard, tells Yahoo that stomp clap hey bands had a ton of followers and loads of huge hits, however “there was no cool issue.”
“They have been perceived as very dorky on the time … there was a sense of inauthenticity,” he says. “They have been sort of fashionable however simple to clown on — particularly as a result of they didn’t ring true to precise, genuine folks artists.”
Although Mumford & Sons received Album of the Yr on the Grammys in 2013, music critics have been typically extra fond of folks artists like Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes throughout that period. Historical past is extra form to them as a result of their songs have been extra lyrically complicated and wistful in comparison with the “compelled anthemic songs of Mumford and the Lumineers,” Lipshutz says.
Nation rock band Mumford and Sons carry out in London in 2010. (Andy Willsher/Redferns by way of Getty Pictures)
What units stomp clap hey music aside from typical folks music is the fast-paced choruses and upbeat lyrics that observe the literal stomping and clapping. Nikki Camilleri, a music business govt, tells Yahoo that “indie-folk optimism” was at its hottest within the early 2010s, dominating commercials and music pageant lineups.
“Now, with the web in its cynical, irony-heavy period, that sort of earnest, campfire pleasure feels out of contact,” she says. “Folks hear it and consider advert jingles, quirky rom-com montages, and a really particular millennial nostalgia that’s simple to mock.”
Millennial cringe
Due to how rapidly the development cycle features on TikTok, we’re revisiting bygone eras earlier than we’re really prepared to understand them. It hasn’t fairly been lengthy sufficient for us to affiliate these musical stylings with the nice and cozy and fuzzy emotions of nostalgia that we now have for different millennial-dominated genres like recession pop or boy band music.
It doesn’t assist that, in our present algorithm-driven period on social media, damaging posts are rewarded. One thing about the very best music of all time in all probability wouldn’t have pushed as a lot engagement on X. The worry of being perceived as “cringe” has created an aversion to the earnestness that’s throughout songs like “Residence.”
The Lumineers rehearse onstage earlier than the 2013 Grammys. (Kevin Winter/WireImage by way of Getty Pictures)
However it’s not simply the algorithms. We’re residing in more and more pessimistic instances which can be at odds with the crunchy constructive vibes heard in tracks like “Residence,” “Ophelia” and “I Will Wait.” Music author Grace Robins-Somerville tells Yahoo that stomp clap hey music is related to “Obama-era optimism that now feels cringe.” Even when totems of that period are romanticized, like Katy Perry’s “Firework” or Glee, they’re nonetheless seemed again at with delicate disgust.
Although folks had a little bit of a resurgence on the charts lately with singers like Noah Kahan and Hozier, who additionally embrace woodland hippie aesthetics, they stand aside from their stomp clap hey predecessors. For starters, they’re unhappy. They’re of the present craving period: of males pining away for ladies and small cities, not hooting and hollering about love.
“They’re a bit of bit extra fashionable. The songwriting’s a bit sharper,” Lipshutz says. “I believe if Noah Kahan was the Noah Kahan Band, and it was 4 guys with beards as a substitute of 1 man with lengthy hair, he’d be handled otherwise — even when it was the very same music.”
Burly singer-songwriter music is again on the charts and commanding crowds, but when they have been standing in teams with banjos as a substitute of alone with guitars, we’d in all probability discover it much less honest. Possibly it’s our resistance to optimism, or perhaps it’s simply true.
