A couple autumns ago or so, while Mimi Parker‘s passing was still fairly fresh on my mind, I explored more in-depth the entire early-‘90s “slow-core” scene from which that most Mormon of Indie-bands Low first emerged; I put “slow-core” here in scare-quotes, because pretty much every band that was grouped under that moniker resented and rejected it, Low included.
Nevertheless, despite all their protestations, there really was a surprising number of very similar-sounding alt-rock bands that emerged across the U.S. in the early-‘90s–Low in Minnesota, Codeine in New York, Bedhead in Texas, Redhouse Painters in Atlanta and San Francisco, even arguably Galaxie 500 in Boston–who all purposefully played at a slow tempo with minimalist arrangements. Hence, it was not difficult for critics and aficionados of the era to group all these disparate acts together, especially since all these same bands, no matter how much they each resented getting pigeon-holed as “slow-core”, otherwise seemed to get along swimmingly with each other (e.g. Codeine and Low played together on the same Joy Division tribute album; the drummer for Codeine later joined the Kadane brothers’ second band The New Year after Bedhead broke up; Mark Kozelek of Red House Painters produced the first LP of Alan Sparhawk‘s side-project Retribution Gospel Choir; Marc Kramer, who produced all three Galaxie 500 albums and their spinoff Damon and Naomi, also produced Low’s first two albums, and etc.). If these bands didn’t like being called a scene, they all sure still acted like one.
My exploration of the era was also helped along by the fact that the entire ’90s “slow-core” scene has been enjoying a bit of a rediscovery among certain Gen Zers lately. A 2023 Guardian article for example tracked the scene’s long-range influence upon hipster Zoomers, as did a 2024 Chartmetric article, which cites the Spotify numbers to back it up. Yet intriguingly, per both articles, the by-far most influential “slow-core” band of all—at least among the TikTok generation—is one I hadn’t catalogued at all yet: Duster, an Indie-trio out of San Jose, California that formed in 1996, released a pair of non-charting albums in 1998 and 2000 (Stratosphere and Contemporary Movement, respectively), and then quietly disappeared for nearly two decades.
That timeline alone is of interest to me, because as I’ve noted before, Low was a relative late-comer to the whole “slow-core” scene as well; of those five bands I listed up top, Low was the last to drop their debut record. In fact, two of those bands (Codeine and Galaxie 500) had already recorded their final album by the time Low released their first—that in fact part of what made Low such a fascinating outlier was in how they were the only one of those groups to not only survive but thrive beyond the ‘90s—yet here we find Duster getting started the latest of them all, in 1998 (Low already had three LPs, two EPs, and a live album out by then), but still ended up vanishing at the end of the ‘90s all the same. For whatever reasons, outside the notable exception of Low, “slow-core” was never built to last beyond the Clinton years.
But then again, Duster eventually proved to be an exception as well; after a near two-decades-long hiatus, they finally released their third, self-titled album Duster in 2019, and then promptly dropped another two records after that in rapid succession (Together in ‘22 and In Dreams in ‘24), quickly surpassing their entire ‘90s output combined. They returned to pick back up the “slow-core” banner, just before Death itself finally forced Low to lay it down after nearly twenty years of carrying it alone.
Yet this sudden return for Duster wasn’t out of the blue: it seems that legions of Indie-kids by the late-2010s were using snippets and samples from their first two albums to soundtrack artsy little slice-of-life videos on their TikTok channels (to the point that a sardonic YouTube tutorial could even refer to Duster and “slow-core” as “Sad Tik Tok Slideshow Music”). As that otherwise-effusive Chartmetric article I cited above acknowledges, “perhaps the genre is celebrated more for its utility in making memes and slideshows […] than for its artistic merit”, meant more for background music than any active-listening.
And that is admittedly how I generally listen to Duster as well: background music while doing something else–usually grading papers or doing chores or getting the kids ready for school—never as headphones music in and of itself. In fairnesses, that seems to be how Duster actually prefers it. Even the official YouTube video for their first LP Stratosphere (linked up top) imagines the album artwork as though it were a moving landscape viewed from a car or train window on some long road-trip—mayhaps through the eternal emptiness of the Midwest or the California Central Valley or thereabouts—with the music itself merely serving as the soundtrack while you’re driving and meditating and contemplating the world outside and within, not for its own sake. In contrast to Low or Codeine or Red House Painters–wherein the listener is implicitly invited to inhabit the cavernous silences between the notes directly, and thereby relegate the whole rest of the outside world to background noise–Duster is content to instead be the background noise itself.
And that’s not a bad thing at all! Brian Eno famously made an entire career out of innovating Ambient music that was explicitly intended to be played in the background. Heck, most genres of music end up in the background anyways, whether intended or not. Duster is in illustrious company indeed if their goal really was to make the background soundtrack to your life.
As was the band’s choice to sing and perform in as deadpan a manner as possible. All those other acts I listed up top are still plainly trying to emote in their restraint; even Bedhead, the most deadpan of them all, was clearly trying to communicate their very real grief at the loss of their father through music. Duster by contrast barely seems to sing—they sometimes just play instrumentals entirely—and in either case with as little emoting as possible. TV static, or a car engine rumbling on a freeway, or the hum of household appliances, appears to be their sonic ideal here. But that’s not to say there’s no emotion or passion here—on the contrary. It was TS Eliot who wrote in 1922 that, “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality”. He wrote that in the immediate aftermath of WWI and the Spanish Flu, when the passions of humanity had nearly torn the world apart and cost the lives of millions (no wonder then, that so many Gen Zers have gravitated towards Duster: in the aftermath of COVID, the ongoing climate crisis, and the global resurgence in authoritarianism and white supremacism, they have had ample occasions to desire escape from their emotions, too).
It’s tempting to call such an approach to art cowardly or irresponsible, save that withdrawing from mere emotionalism is also a core tenet of the restored Gospel: Joseph Smith too said that the Holy Spirit has no other effect on you than that of “pure intelligence” flowing into you. One can perhaps have an emotional reaction to this pure intelligence, but the emotion itself is not the Spirit.
Such, by the way, has been the longstanding objection among many parents and youth alike against EFY and its successor state FSY: that these events conflate and confuse a sort of cheerleading emotionalism with a sincere spiritual experience. For just as anyone who can be reasoned into the church can be just as easily reasoned out of it, so too can anyone emoted into the faith can just as easily be emoted out of it. It requires something deeper than either to engender sincere conversion; it’s why D&C 50:17-20 so starkly warns:
17 Verily I say unto you, he that is ordained of me and sent forth to preach the word of truth by the Comforter, in the Spirit of truth, doth he preach it by the Spirit of truth or some other way?
18 And if it be by some other way it is not of God.
19 And again, he that receiveth the word of truth, doth he receive it by the Spirit of truth or some other way?
20 If it be some other way it is not of God.
This Spirit is something that you often don’t notice—that in fact most people don’t usually notice (much like the music of Duster and “slow-core” generally, I suppose)—but that nevertheless embeds itself into the background, and gives meaning to everything we see, no matter how seemingly ordinary. Such an awareness of the Spirit that permeates all things can in fact sanctify even the blandest view from your car window, and make it feel alive again with the grace of God.
This awareness is not itself an emotion, but can elicit an emotional response if you let it—just as the background music of Duster is in no way emotional, but can elicit the most powerful emotions if you have the patience to let it work within you. It is this implicit sense of how the Spirit permeates and sanctifies the background that makes Duster just as much a “slow-core” band as Low, and that in the best sense of the term—and is perhaps also why they were the only other “slow-core” band besides Low to survive and transcend the ‘90s.