Indonesian's music enthusiasts' taste and how it shape the scene; what indifference I have towards it.

Hi, I'm back again. See that long title? I'm bad at making catchy titles, so I'll settle with that. And of course, this post is going to be about just that.

I'm genuinely happy with how the music scene in Indonesia has turned out. The idea of chasing that "band dream" or carving yourself out as a music artist feels like a real, tangible thing now, doesn't it? Going to gigs, concerts, festivals, and things alike has become the go-to "healing method," as the younger demographic would call it, and honestly, I'm completely here for it.

So now, you might ask: what's the indifference about? To put it simply, it's about the product that comes out of all this. What kind of music is actually dominating the airwaves these days? Well, from my own little research—which included asking some friends in what I'll generously call a survey—the answer is, overwhelmingly, melancholic music. The resurgence of "galau" pop; ballads soaked in heartbreak, longing, and nostalgia. This, by far, has become the biggest commercial force in the Indonesian music landscape.

As Efek Rumah Kaca once put it in their song Cinta Melulu: "Nada-nada yang minor, lagu perselingkuhan. Atas nama pasar semuanya begitu klise," and "Lagu cinta melulu, kita memang benar-benar melayu, suka mendayu-dayu." That song captures it almost too well: the oversaturation, the predictability, the market-driven sameness of it all. Think of artists like Nadin Amizah, Bernadya, Juicy Luicy and the many others who have come to define this sound. I'm not saying it's bad. I'm saying there's very little breathing room in between. Everything is minimalist, perhaps, piano-driven, designed for the curated sadness.

I don't have much basis for this theory, but I feel like it traces back to how colonial power worked its way into even something as intimate as music. If you're not familiar: local mainstays like Dangdut and Koplo were more or less designed to be the "trash" music of the lower classes, a cultural boundary drawn by those in power and quietly maintained ever since. It could have been subverted, turned into something revolutionary even, but the minimalist sound and the lack of creative ambition from the giants of those genres didn't exactly help push Indonesian music forward. It became the norm, and norms have a way of quietly desensitizing us to the very idea of progression.

I don't want to come across as your typical insufferable prog listener, though I'll admit I am very much one, and my worry is that more adventurous music simply wouldn't find its footing here. The consequence being that more creative bands slowly suffocate, and eventually, everything starts to sound like a variation of the same song.

There was a moment, not too long ago, where an alternative movement made some real noise in the scene. It went by the name "Anak Senja"—Indonesia's own strain of indie kids, or what I'd call proto-indie performatism. But by all means, it followed the same narrative. The melancholy was still there, just wearing different clothes: folk elements, bedroom pop, a certain lo-fi intimacy in place of the industry sheen of mainstream pop. The indie-ness of it was what captured people, more than anything beneath the surface.

Let's look at the modern-day mainstream rock bands, and ask yourself: can you name at least five that have something genuinely distinct about them? There's The SIGIT, with their stoner, psychedelic hard rock; The Panturas, who managed to drag surf rock into the mainstream with a kind of effortless cool; and then there's Sigmun, one of my favorites right now, whose progressive, psychedelic sound reminds me, for reasons I can't quite articulate, of early Pink Floyd. And that's roughly where the list starts to struggle. I'm scraping the barrel, and there's only mold in it.

I've also been spending time with bands like Discus, Alam Raya, and perhaps the most prominent of the lot, Harry Roesli, particularly his album Opera Rock Ken Arok, and I genuinely enjoy the strangeness of it all. I know this kind of music wouldn't sell here, and I'm not naive enough to think otherwise. But if we keep repeating that sentiment, keep treating it as some immovable truth, then what I said earlier stops being a worry and starts becoming an obituary. Gone would be any local equivalent of the ambition that drove Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Yes, or Rush. Even in the indie rock space, a scene that's thriving in the U.S with bands like The Strokes, Arctic Monkeys, Geese, and their kind, Indonesia's answer is, at best, Reality Club, or The Adams, only slightly.

There is, however, one surge worth acknowledging on the technical side of rock in the 21st century: the math rock phenomenon. Bands like Murphy Radio, Elventwelfth, and Hulica generated a real buzz for a while, and rightfully so. But looking back at it now, the hype has largely settled, and those who stuck around are mostly what I'd call the FACGCE masses, a shorthand that will make immediate sense to anyone who's spent time in that corner of the internet, and will mean absolutely nothing to everyone else.

And in true Indonesian fashion, the genre didn't stay isolated for long. It got folded together with Midwest emo and Shoegaze into one loosely defined, loosely held community that I've taken to calling the "loser nerd" scene, which do have a name here: the orang kalahan; I say that with some affection. But the broader point holds: even this more adventurous pocket of the rock landscape eventually got absorbed into a collective identity, its edges softened, its distinctions blurred, until the music almost became secondary to the aesthetic of listening to it.

Let's zoom out a bit and talk about Jazz, because this is where my research got genuinely interesting. Jazz, as you may already know, arrived here through colonial hands. Dutch sailors brought it to the Dutch East Indies along with recordings and instruments, planting it in soil that would prove both fertile and, later, forbidden. A fun fact I came across in Indonesia Expat's article, which serves as the backbone of this section: in 1920, W.M. van Eldik formed the Black & White Band alongside his 17-year-old brother-in-law, Wage Rudolf Supratman, now better known as the composer of Indonesia Raya. The national anthem's composer, moonlighting as a jazz musician. There's something quietly poetic about that.

Then came the ban. President Soekarno outlawed Jazz and what he collectively dismissed as "Ngak-Ngik-Ngok" music, a term that swept up Western pop, jazz, and rock under the umbrella of cultural imperialism. In his view, these were sounds that colonized the ear. The consequence, in my own reading of it, was that Jazz never got the chance to sink into the broader public consciousness. Instead, it retreated. It was kept alive in small, private circles of academics and social elites who had both the means and the shelter to maintain their prohibited Western tastes. When it resurfaced during the New Order, the Suharto era, it came back wearing a different kind of exclusivity, branded more firmly than ever as the music of the educated and the cosmopolitan.

And that, to me, is genuinely saddening. Because Jazz, at its core, is one of the most radical and restless art forms ever conceived. You only need to look at Miles Davis dismantling his own sound every decade, or Sun Ra building an entire cosmology out of his music, or the raw harmonic freedom of Ornette Coleman, to understand what the genre is capable of at its outer edges. But here, that conversation rarely happens. Jazz gets reduced to cool, unobtrusive background noise in a café, or gets folded into the soft nostalgia of city-pop. The ceiling stays low, and most people don't even know there's a ceiling.

And lastly, let's talk about metal, which feels only right given that it's the scene I most closely associate myself with. To understand where it stands today, you have to go back to its earliest form here, which wasn't metal at all, strictly speaking, but Punk and Hardcore. Most notably, the underground scene of Bandung. GOR Saparua, in particular, holds a kind of sacred place in that history, the temple of Bandung's underground, Indonesia's answer to CBGB OMFUG, if you want a reference point.

Now, you might expect me, at this moment, to start pulling out names like Opeth, Dream Theater, or Gojira, and make the case for progressive metal. But that's not where I'm going. What I actually want to talk about is Death Metal, because it represents, perhaps surprisingly, the most vital and self-sustaining scene in Indonesian metal. (And totally not because I'm biased).

Take Seringai, for instance, whose earliest material carried a stoner metal weight with a distinct punk undercurrent running through it. But something happened between the 80s and 90s that fundamentally reoriented the extreme music landscape here, and that something was tape trading.

In that era, one record managed to travel across the entire archipelago through hand-to-hand tape copies, becoming the first of its kind to achieve that kind of widespread reach: Harmony Corruption by Napalm Death. That particular blend of death metal and grindcore influence didn't just find an audience here. It became a blueprint. The seed from which Indonesia's death metal scene would grow. The source was from Arian 13 himself, a member of Seringai, in a Vice interview.

Now, I love Napalm Death dearly, but that particular moment in history would quietly redirect the course of Indonesian metal away from the high-concept, technically demanding direction that bands elsewhere were beginning to chase. Take Death, for example, a band that treated the genre as something worth intellectually expanding. That impulse never quite took root here in the same way. Indonesian death metal largely settled into the territory of Brutal Death Metal, with prominent bands like Jasad and Siksa Kubur planting their flags there. And yet, even within that space, they didn't push toward the more technically layered end of BDM. Instead, they gravitated toward the groovier, heavier swing of Slamming Brutal Death Metal, or Slam for short. A sound built, more often than not, for the moshing masses: beatdowns, slowed tempos, the physical satisfaction of a breakdown landing just right. There are technical moments, certainly, but they're not really the point.

What's quietly disappeared in the process is a generation of young guitarists with their eyes fixed on becoming the next Chuck Schuldiner or Muhammed Suiçmez. I don't want to be entirely ungenerous here. Deadsquad deserve their credit, having explicitly cited Necrophagist and Spawn of Possession as touchstones, and meaning it. But looking at the landscape as it stands today, I can't quite find the next Atheist, the next Cynic, or even the next Decapitated waiting in the wings.

And that's basically all the yapperoonies I have to offer on this particular corner of the internet. After this, I'm going to go lie down and listen to the complete discographies of Opeth and Pink Floyd, in full, without shame nor apology.

And lastly: stop doing the "Cari suara lu," and start finding some music theory, yeah? Okay, bye.