Alt-J On Pitchfork: “It’s Like The Music Actually Offends Them

October 7, 2014

Alt-J drummer Thom Green says the UK indie trio pay little attention to their own record reviews and speculated that it could be the reason why their albums have been savaged by influential music site Pitchfork. Speaking to Music Feeds, Green said the band haven’t relied on blogs to achieve their success.

“We know that obviously everybody is entitled to their opinion,” Green recently told Music Feeds’ Marc Zanotti. “We write the music that we want to write and if people like it, then that’s amazing, if they don’t then that’s their opinion and that’s fine as well. We don’t expect people like it,” said the drummer.

It’s precisely such sentiments that saw the band’s 2012 debut, An Awesome Wave, lambasted by Pitchfork reviewer Laura Snapes, who in her review criticised the band’s unwitting reputation as “the new Radiohead” after frontman Joe Newman told Interview mag, “We just try to play music we like to hear.”

“Obviously, being in the position we are now, we get reviewed a lot and we end up seeing those reviews, so it is hard to ignore, but it also doesn’t really affect us,” Green told us. “We make sure it doesn’t. Luckily, we don’t rely on reviews from magazines. I’d like to think that we’ve done a lot of groundwork so that we have fans who appreciate music and that’s what we try to think about when we’re writing.”

Addressing the hostility from Pitchfork, which saw new album This Is All Yours described as the height of the band’s “incompetence”, Green said, “I don’t know where that comes from. I don’t know if we’ve done something to offend them personally. It’s like the music actually offends them, which is just absurd.”

“I think the only thing that we could’ve done,” the drummer opined, “…they just don’t like the fact that we’re nice guys or the fact that we’re doing quite well without Pitchfork, without relying on people like Pitchfork.” He added, “It’s almost like they don’t understand why we’ve had this success without blogs.”

Alt-J will conclude their short run of sold-out Australian shows tonight at The Enmore in Sydney. They are set to return Down Under later this year for headline sets at Falls and Southbound festivals and Sydney’s Field Day. Stay tuned for Music Feeds’ full interview with Alt-J’s Thom Green.