Playlist: We still love you,New York

Comments this week by a renowned US critic that New York’s music scene hasn’t exactly been on fire of late, certainly raised a few eyebrows here at FL HQ.

In town for the Melbourne Writers Festival, The New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones said a rise in the city’s rental costs had resulted in a decline quality of music coming out of the Big Apple over the past 20 years. “It became so fucking expensive,” he told FL, “and good music is almost always going to be correlated with reasonable rents.

But while music from his hometown may not be “particularly important” to Frere-Jones right now, we couldn’t let his claim that New York hasn’t been producing the goods for two decades just quietly pass by. From The Strokes resurrecting rock’s bloated corpse to progressive modern pop acts like Dirty Projectors, Animal Collective and Chairlift, we’ve created a playlist that we think flies in the face of Frere-Jones’ claims.

Our selections are deliberately populist (I guess to prove a point!) and we’ve also included bands from Brooklyn. Why? Because it’d be like creating a Melbourne playlist without bands from Northcote.

Any glaring omissions? Let us know in the comments below.