Just When Everyone Told You Rock is Dead, Japandroids and Cloud Nothings Returned to Save It

Rob Slater on February 2, 2017

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Rock is dead. It’s gone and it’s never coming back.

All of rock’s fossils decided to drag themselves from the dungeon of irrelevance and it deemed it appropriate to spit on the genre and those emerging to carry the torch. Gene Simmons did it, Dylan did it, Flea did it and the Grammys told you they don’t give a shit about rock music anymore. Here’s the thing: They’re wrong. Rock music is alive and quite healthy as we charge into 2017.

You don’t need to look far to find that this year is already emerging as a standout one for rockers all around the globe. Two of the more recent offerings–Japandroids’ thrashing Near to the Wild Heart of Life and Cloud Nothings’ slicker Life Without Sound–will have you thanking whichever rock god you pray to that these two bands returned to elevate a genre so desperate for an injection of its own lifeblood.

Rock’s problem over the years became that bands started to fear making loud noises, a pillar of good, pure rock and roll. The White Stripes left us (for real), Trent Reznor put Nine Inch Nails on the shelf and Josh Homme broke from Queens of the Stone Age. Kings of Leon traded their fuzzy, garage punk for slick, manufactured pop rock and all of a sudden you had a period where Coldplay and The Killers represented what it meant to be a rock band.

2017 already seems to be the return of loud, unadulterated rock and roll. Japandroids are back with their first album in five years and already burnt down the stage on Colbert. The aforementioned Cloud Nothings are back with their first output in three years. Emerging UK duo Royal Blood (who killed the festival circuit in 2015) seem to be ramping up and 2017 will also bring us new music from Minus the Bear, The Orwells, Mastodon and more psychedelic offerings like King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Temples, Tame Impala-offshoot Pond.

The thing about rock and roll is that it’ll never really go away. Somewhere right now there’s an eight-year old kid plugging away on his Dad’s guitar, writing some of the most angsty lyrics you’ve ever heard. Something that’d make Morrissey question reality. Rock is the cockroach of music, it doesn’t die. Something that is organic and lives inside of the artist doesn’t ever die. It may change form every now and then, but it’ll always come full circle back to its roots like a comet and that comet is passing through in 2017.