Indiecast · Amazon Music

The Arrival Of Ethel Cain And The Disappearance Of Chance The Rapper, Plus: It's Our 5th Anniversary!

August 15, 2025·55 min·4 clips

Indiecast hosts reflect on launching their podcast during the pandemic's peak, questioning if it was the worst time to start a music show.

The anniversary sneaks up first. Stephen and Ian realize Indiecast turned five without much ceremony, which pulls them back to July 31, 2020, Arcade Fire's The Suburbs, and the strange choice to start a music podcast during lockdowns. Very normal timing, obviously. The joke gives the episode its shape: two music writers checking what changed around them while still doing their usual conversational balancing act. Ethel Cain comes up. Chance the Rapper gets treated like a memory-hole subject, which says plenty about how quickly attention can vanish. My Chemical Romance gets put to a vote, sort of. Around that, the banter has the familiar sports-adjacent and record-collector texture, with Google Calendar jokes about Rogue Wave and Matt Pond PA sitting next to real arguments about taste. Then the critical-discourse section gets sharper. One host notices that Pitchfork favorites feel unusually detached from broader opinion, using a ranked album list and an Ice Age comparison as the way in. Consensus feels thin now. The explanation runs through money, weaker critical institutions, and social platforms splintering into smaller identity-coded rooms. BlueSky, Ghost, and Substack become part of the argument. Picking an app now can feel less like choosing where to post and more like making a moral statement. Exhausting, honestly. The show does not get misty about old Twitter, either. Back then, the correct take could harden fast, and dogpiles followed anyone who missed the memo. The tradeoff is messy. Less policing is better, but the old shared room made it easier to know where the music conversation stood. By the end, the episode loosens up again. A recommendation for Interior Live Oak from Casper Combs becomes a funny, slightly wistful aging-indie-guy moment about veteran songwriters now feeling like peer-age benchmarks. Indiecast lands where it usually does: recommendations, disbelief at time passing, and enough stray jokes to keep the whole thing from getting too solemn.

As heard by us

Indiecast turns five with Ethel Cain, Chance the Rapper, and a sharp, insider-friendly read on fractured music criticism.

Indiecast belatedly marks its fifth anniversary with the kind of loose, critic-brained episode the show was built for: Stephen Hyden and Ian Cohen look back at launching in July 2020, when lockdown made a new music podcast feel both absurd and necessary, then fold that memory…

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Why you'd press play

For anyone who has noticed Ethel Cain everywhere and Chance the Rapper nowhere, this is the episode.

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