3 Songs From the 80s That Indie Fans Still Put on Their Playlists

Back in the 80s, if you weren’t listening to mainstream hits by major players like Madonna, Michael Jackson, or Whitney Houston, it’s possible you had some of these songs in your ears. Here are some indie staples that modern indie music fans still can’t get enough of.

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“Love Will Tear Us Apart” by Joy Division

This song is an indie staple. “Love Will Tear Us Apart” is dark and moody but also optimistic in a strange way. Ian Curtis, the group’s frontman, spoke to Louder about the magic of making music during those days.

“Strange as it may seem, there weren’t tape recorders in those days, so everything was in your head,” he shared. “That was one of the wonderful things about Joy Division: we didn’t have tapes of us rehearsing the songs; they only existed when you put the four people together.”

“In Between Days” by The Cure

This song was one of the first in a new era of The Cure’s music, one that would see songs like “Just Like Heaven” and “Friday I’m In Love”. When making “Inbetween Days”, frontman Robert Smith had started to become open to exploration.

“Realizing I had outgrown a lot of my musical prejudices was a big part of the change,” Smith wrote in the sleeve notes of the reissue of The Head On The Door. “The demo of ‘Inbetween Days’ is a good example of this. Up until then, I’d always thought of the acoustic guitar as a bit of a hippy instrument, not really something The Cure should use… But now I was determined to explore every possibility.”

“There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” by The Smiths

This song is undeniably one of the best indie rock songs of this decade. To this day, the track, originally from The Smiths’ album, The Queen Is Dead, is one of the group’s most enduring hits.

Even Johnny Marr, the band’s lead guitarist, commented on the unexpected impact of the song. “I didn’t realize that ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’ was going to be an anthem,” he told Joe Taysom. “But, when we first played it, I thought it was the best song I’d ever heard.”

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