Björk is really doing techno in 2026. This isn’t a curveball: She’s been doing it longer than almost anyone. Her entire career is predicated on twisting and stretching club music into unrecognizable forms. Debut remains one of the most prescient and enduring house records in history; Post, one of the most adventurous; Homogenic, one of the most sweeping and cinematic.

Each of these records spawned multiple singles featuring spates of remixes by the most legendary producers in house, techno, and IDM (among others), pushing the form in a zillion directions. Even when she’s pivoted into more abstract, experimental terrain, she’s remained committed— more than any major pop figure besides perhaps Madonna— to the remix.

I’ve been lucky to witness loads of Björk’s DJ sets over the years: in 2010, at an auto garage in Bushwick; in 2013, at a Pitchfork Music Festival afterparty in Chicago’s Lincoln Hall; in 2014, at the Brooklyn metal bar, Saint Vitus; and— at least online— the solar eclipse rave she held this past week in Iceland.

It’s always sparklingly clear that Björk loves to DJ. She’s a delight to watch on the decks, smiling big in outrageous couture, bouncing happily to hard-as-fuck international rhythms delivered at breakneck BPMs. And yet, when folks hear “rave,” most expect functional dance music. That’s not always Björk’s definition, and that’s okay. Her sets are still wild, unpredictable, and gloriously fun.

Yet, because Björk has so many mindblowing remixes that absolutely destroy on a massive soundsystem, it’s fun to imagine a night where she pulls up with the heaviest-hitting club mixes of all her greatest tracks. Like how she dropped “Berghain” last week and sent the crowd into euphoric paroxysms, but stretched to fill an entire set. So, after years of listening through nearly all her hundreds of remixes, and always finding new favorites to get lost in, I decided to pull together a playlist of what that two-hour set might look like.

So, from Debut-era bangers reworked by Fluke, Underworld, Speedy J, and Masters at Work, to Post cuts respun by Todd Terry and Alan Braxe, to Homogenic glow-ups by Plaid and Skothus, to a spate of Volta-era indie sleaze reboots from Simian Mobile Disco, Modeselektor, XXXChange, and Soft Pink Truth— and even a couple throwbacks to her Sugarcubes days— here is Club Björk.

You can also find the Club Bjork playlist on Apple Music here.

^{My memoir, Weird Era: How Pitchfork Changed Music Forever, will be released on December 1st via Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Pre-order your copy here.}

I was seven years old when MTV entered my life. I was already consumed by music then, spending my days listening to records and the radio. But once my folks got cable TV, and I pressed in the digits on that clunky remote, clicking the set-top box over to Music Television, I was forever changed. It expanded music in ways I’d never imagined, allowing me to experience it more vividly, in ways that album artwork merely suggested. It also instilled my first impressions of New York City, beamed in between commercial breaks.

Three artists were ubiquitous then: Michael, reinventing himself with Thriller, was quickly ascending toward mythical status; Prince was well on his way to embodying the immortal silhouette of his Purple Rain era; and finally, in the spring of ‘84, there was Madonna.

Madonna was something that the others weren’t: a bona fide New York City club kid. She’d come up through Danceteria, the Funhouse, and Paradise Garage amid the death throes of disco, latching onto dance music’s latest iterations, freestyle and boogie. Like Prince, she gleefully flaunted her sexuality, inciting and embracing controversy; like Michael, her style was instantly recognizable, echoed by teens and twentysomethings across the globe. And she possessed something neither of the boys did: a streetwise brashness that belied her soft features. I was blown away.

Throughout the 80s, I absorbed every album Madonna released, memorizing her songs and videos. Those records— her self-titled debut through Like a Prayer— permanently imprinted on me, becoming as entwined in my DNA as any strand in the helix. But when I discovered alternative rock in the early 90s, my interest shifted away from her newer work, which was leaning deeper into house music. I was more interested in where music could go when freed from commercial restraints, falling in love with local music culture, college radio, and zines. Indie music was everything I’d searched for.

As I blasted Nirvana and Hole, the Breeders and Built to Spill, Guided by Voices and Yo La Tengo, I tuned out of my hometown pop station’s Saturday night broadcasts, which aired live DJ mixes from local clubs pumping C&C Music Factory, Black Box, and Crystal Waters. I still admired Madonna’s originality and fearlessness, and resonated with occasional hits, but her music no longer felt like part of my world.

As the years ticked on, we sadly lost Michael and Prince. Madonna endured but struggled to produce vital work. For years, her efforts were met with dashed hopes at best. I often wished she would stop chasing empty musical trends and make a record that looked back unflinchingly at her career, weathered and worn and true to life. So I was elated when, 10 days ago, Confessions II was revealed as her most autobiographical album, reflecting on her life while sounding as fresh and relevant on the dance floor as any she’s made. It’s also extended Pride month well into July.

My closest friends know that I came out as gay in the spring of 2022, and that by midsummer, I had fallen madly for my perfect guy. He’d discovered his sexual identity as a teen, and grew up immersed in gay culture the same way that I grew up immersed in indie culture. He had also discovered indie music through bands like Beach House and M83, but gravitated just as much toward gay clubs and drag shows. House music had always been a part of his life. He couldn’t imagine not recognizing the full magnitude of Madonna’s impact.

I’ve since explored Madonna’s catalog and classic house remixes with a newfound reverence, only just discovering and recognizing her ‘90s and early ‘00s output for the miracles that they are. Biases in music taste and gaps in knowledge can take a lifetime to overcome. Four years later, I’m still learning, but I’m also seeing through new eyes, from within this other culture. I now vividly recognize Madonna’s impact on queer lives, in part because I’ve come to see how she also spoke to that part of me at a young age, even as I failed to understand who I really was.

Still, I’d never seen Madonna live. I’d badly wanted to catch her Celebration tour in 2023, but with even nosebleeds priced at more than a grand apiece at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, I simply couldn’t justify the cost. In the days after that show, I found myself skipping past the highlight reels on social media, stricken by regret and the realization that, had Prince or possibly even Michael lived long enough to take victory laps of their own that year, I’d have moved mountains to see those shows. Somehow, I was still taking Madonna for granted.

Then, last Wednesday, she announced a party celebrating Confessions II at Knockdown Center in Queens. The moment that flyer hit my feed, I was prepared to do whatever was necessary to be in that room. No tickets were being sold. In classic New York club tradition, I only got in because I knew someone (big shoutout to the homie, Jeff K!)— but then, incredibly, all of my gay friends got in, too, and even some straight ones. Inside, free-drink coupons littered the bars. Madonna had covered all costs to throw this massive free party for anyone committed enough to find a way in, at New York’s biggest (and imo, best) dance club, bookended by sets from house legends Junior Sanchez and Honey Dijon.

As Madonna took the stage at 1 a.m., backed by longtime collaborator Stuart Price, the room erupted in glorious cries and cheers. She launched into a set of songs from Confessions II featuring instantly indelible lines that beg to be shouted aloud (“Everybody here is a work of art!” “Come into the club of love!” “School is in session!”). A half hour later, she closed with an extraordinary triptych that all but reduced the concrete hall to rubble and ash: “Get Together,” “I Feel So Free,” and finally, “Hung Up.”

Sharing space with this living legend, whose euphoric anthems felt in that moment like the apex of all that music can achieve, I thought back to the decades I spent aligning myself mainly with indie music. There’s not much about that mission I would change, because focusing all my efforts on lifting up the indie music community helped carve out space for so many misfit artists and listeners like myself. But I also recognize now how it excluded so many others. It took me decades to understand the language Madonna was speaking, and even longer to accept that it was my language, too.

^{My memoir, Weird Era: How Pitchfork Changed Music Forever, will be released on December 1st via Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Pre-order your copy here.}

I first read the term “indie sleaze” in DAZED around Halloween, 2021. I remember the season because the trend piece felt a little like a jumpscare: The movement Pitchfork fostered had returned from the dead, necromanced by Gen Z’s raised on MP3s.

“The [original] Indie Sleaze movement… championed a hyperactive aesthetic, pulling from the ‘80s as much as they did 90s grunge, capturing all the hedonism with spontaneous and provocative flash photography,” said the piece. “It was a mish-mash buffet of chucking, smearing, and clashing, and its lodestone was American Apparel.” Now, it was returning as a TikTok aesthetic, spurred on by influencers clocking “an obscene amount of evidence” that the old vibes were resurfacing.

This revival of mid-‘00s party-rocking occurred right at the stir-crazy, wall-climbing, tail-end of lockdown, as people were spilling back into the streets and packing out clubs. It also coincided with a time of renewed cultural sensitivity following a series of long-overdue reckonings: post-social distancing, post-#MeToo. The world was pent up and set to explode, but also wiser, more cautious, on edge. The era of drug-and-sex-fueled DIY club hedonism was long gone, but as for the image and style? We were so back.

It didn’t take long for music to catch up. One of the first acts to earn the “indie sleaze” tag, the Dare, channeled the spirits of early ‘00s disco-punks like the Rapture, LCD Soundsystem, and Radio 4— bands who, themselves, had refashioned ‘80s post-punk as party music for the post-9/11 years. I remember seeing the Rapture at Chicago’s House of Blues then, and being so electrified by how seamlessly they mashed dance rhythms and vintage synths into spiky indie rock that it inspired me to write this certifiably unhinged review, helping catapult their DFA debut to the top of Pitchfork’s best albums of 2003. That record, Echoes, fused rock with electronics so successfully that it now sounds commonplace, but at the time, it was thrillingly new— one of a few critical flashpoints that ignited an era of dance-punk, bloghouse, and new rave.

As the sleaze revival came into sharper focus, acts like the Hellp and Snow Strippers incorporated the kind of filthy, late ‘00s electro that sets off dance floors: Justice, Peaches, Soulwax, SALEM, Crystal Castles. These were sounds that triggered flashbacks to both childhood innocence and the before-times internet, evoking a time prior to the near-extinction of that special joy we once called “fun.” For a while, this movement seemed like just another short-lived trend, one that might produce a handful of era-defining singles before blinking out forever.

Instead, it’s proved far more durable than I could have imagined.

The genre’s early, post-COVID hype now feels like eons ago, and increasingly, so does the peak saturation of Bratmania. Yet, last month, trash-pop provocateur Slayyyter— the self-described Wor$t Girl in America— parlayed her “Beat Up Chanels” into one of the wildest pop albums of the year. (She’s featured on my latest What’s Good playlist alongside fellow revivalist Tiffany Day, who punches up the retro-sleaze vibe with Y2k pop radio hooks).

The themes remain the same, but enough has changed in the world that Slayyyter’s lyrics feel like pure fantasy. Between Gen Z’s apparent aversion to sex and alcohol, the fentanyl crisis, a floundering job market, and a whopping 28% inflation rate over the last six years, “Beat Up Chanels”’s big chorus resonates because it feels like an inventory of everything the modern world has pushed out of reach:

“Money, drugs, chains on my chest, that vintage Celine / Diamond grills, champagne bottles, swagger I bleed / I want sex, money, bitches, and the stickiest weed / I want a cigarette.”

Girl, same.

Oh, to party carelessly in the modern world, under constant threat of surveillance. To pony up the cash for a single night of bottle service with your girls. To step out of the club for just one moment and bum an analog burner off that cutie blowing candy-vape clouds on the dance floor. Dream, baby, dream.

Maybe it’s for the best that the past stays past: the original era was fucking destructive. I lived in Chicago for much of the ‘00s, only moving to New York in 2007, but on my first weekend as a Brooklyn resident, I hit Studio B in Williamsburg— then the unofficial stateside capital of new rave— to dance to Simian Mobile Disco and Crystal Castles. Lasers and smoke flew everywhere, lights glowed and flashed in technicolor, guys and girls grinded up on each other in neon shades, shirtless and sweating. I started to notice that hard drugs were always around, wherever I went, and before long, I was meeting people who were visibly fucked on them. By the time the VICE empire crumbled a decade later, enough damage had ripped through these scenes to spark an irreparable backlash.

If nothing else, it might be wise to update the terminology. “Indie sleaze” was coined to denote post-millennial style trends pioneered by low-life predators in high-level positions (Dov Charney, Terry Richardson, et. al.), and it both trivializes and glamorizes that sordid history of exploitation. It’s not an especially descriptive sonic classification, either; as with chillwave before it, it’s a goof that caught on. Like Memory Tapes’ Dayve Hawke told The Wall Street Journal in a 2010 chillwave primer: “I wish they’d come up with a better name if it’s going to be a real genre.”

I won’t pretend to have the rebrand handy, but we’re now five years into the “sleaze revival,” and its influence and popularity are still accelerating. It could sound like corrupted MP3s streaming off an Iomega Zip drive (Frost Children, MGNA Crrrta), or a Cybertruck launching through a glass skyscraper, but everywhere you look, the lineage is being scrambled: the grinding, analog grit of Fakemink and 2hollis; the detached cool of Otha and Fcukers; and increasingly, the dreamy indietronica of acts like Bassvictim and ear. More and more, the movement is coming to define indie music in the 2020s.

I’m amused by how much present-day Pitchfork hates this stuff. Admittedly, not all of it works for me—certainly not all of it is good— but I’m heartened that even the bands I can’t stand are reconfiguring those serrated, bitcrushed textures in service of pushing music toward its next horizon. There were times during the last decade when indie rock felt like it was becoming a heritage genre, something preserved in amber for a waning festival circuit. But sleaze has acted as a jumper cable, shocking the scene back to life by making it sound as ugly and synthetic as the world around it.

Frankly, it’s kind of a relief. I’d be miserable if indie music had ended up a museum piece; I’d rather it be a riot. The fact that it’s mostly made by (and for) much younger people than me only underscores the degree to which it’s thriving. I love that the old guard is still relevant, still cool, still around to see their DNA mutated by the new guard. And I like how, even in the flashiest, most maximalist sleaze-pop, the old punk spirit shines through. After all, the intersection where high and low culture meet has always hosted the best parties.

Yep, that’s me.

You’re probably wondering how I ended up there, at the reins of the internet’s most powerful music site during the mid-aughts’ indie rock fever dream. Queue a montage of festival wristbands, 503 server errors, and dubious facial hair. It’s a long story, but I promise it’s a good one.

Flash forward. The year is 2026. Pitchfork is celebrating its 30th anniversary, and the memoir I’ve been writing over the past few years is coming out in time for Christmas. It’s called WEIRD ERA: How Pitchfork Changed Music Forever (and you can pre-order it here).

It’s a funny title— or, it’s supposed to be. It nods to the shadowy second disc of Deerhunter’s Microcastle, one of my favorite albums of Pitchfork’s peak-indie years. The subtitle, How Pitchfork Changed Music Forever, is patently sensationalized and a bit of classic internet trollbait. But since Pitchfork has spent all these years drowning buzzbands in hyperbole, it felt only right to carry on the tradition.

If you read music criticism, you probably know that Pitchfork started as an outpost for mostly indie rock, standing in opposition to mainstream music culture. But as the site gained readers and influence, indie music began intertwining with pop culture in conspicuous ways.

At first, it was innocuous, soundtracking coming-of-age arcs in movies and TV series. Then, it became a force for political change, as bands like Arcade Fire and the National threw their weight behind Obama’s presidential campaign. By the 2010s, indie’s flagship bands were topping the Billboard charts and sweeping the Grammys— once-unimaginable feats. Before we knew it, Kanye, Beyoncé, and Taylor Swift were harvesting its talent, threatening to subsume indie into pop music’s DNA altogether.

We all know that story.

The story you haven’t heard is mine: the one about the amateur blogger whose tiny e-zine grew into music’s most polarizing tastemaker, able to make careers overnight or destroy them with a decimal point. WEIRD ERA tells the inside story of the arguments behind the ratings and reviews that led a generation of listeners to the music they loved (and hated!), the messy collapse of indie idealism, and ultimately, the painful necessity of ceding my company to the corporate machinery I’d spent my life trying to outrun.

Writing this book was a surreal reversal: After decades of critiquing other people’s art, I had to turn that same lens on myself. Luckily, I still had nearly every laptop and hard drive I ever owned. Over the years, I saved and cataloged thousands of emails, AIM chats, and the private staff message boards where our most infamous debates went down. Sifting through all that data was intense, and it threw me right back into the site’s glory days, when covering every new artist felt like a matter of life and death.

I wrote WEIRD ERA for Pitchfork’s readers, to demystify the methods behind the machine. But I also wrote it for myself, as a means of returning to the work I love. Some of you may know that I mostly stopped writing for Pitchfork in 2004. This book helped me, finally, to rediscover my voice. Since leaving Pitchfork, I’ve worked as a media strategist, a public speaker, and an artist consultant, and I still enjoy all of those roles. But it turns out that what I really want to do with my life is the thing I was doing all along.

So, welcome to Ethernet.fm. This newsletter won’t just be a post-script to WEIRD ERA or a promotional ticker. It’ll be an extension of my archives and a place to revisit (and re-evaluate) the music Pitchfork covered. It’ll explore new music I love, offering context for my monthly “What’s Good” playlists and DJ sets for The Lot Radio. And crucially, it will soon become a home for fresh perspectives from new and familiar voices. This is an excellent time to subscribe.

One final note: To celebrate WEIRD ERA’s completion, and to carve a new path forward, I’m making an important change. For almost three decades, my identity has been inseparably bound to Pitchfork. In fact, I’ve been online as “Ryan Pitchfork” for almost as long as the web has existed. Today, I’m retiring that moniker. You can now find me on the web at ryanschreiber.fm, and on socials as @ryanschreiberfm. (The name change is slightly delayed on Instagram.)

Thanks to my editor, Jackson Howard, for his expert guidance and unwavering belief in this project; to my story editor, Jayson Greene, for helping me carry it across the finish line; and to my agent, William LoTurco, for making it possible in the first place.

WEIRD ERA: How Pitchfork Changed Music Forever will be in stores on December 1, 2026, from Farrar, Straus & Giroux — but you can pre-order your copy now.