We went through a genuine indie sonic aesthetic in the 2010s (a bunch of Vampire Weekend / MGMT soundalikes) and nobody wants to honor it at the level of, like, 80s synthpop or 90s grunge.
I would call this genre something like "hipster runoff," inspired by the eponymous publication and by this line in a review of Reptar's Body Faucet:
>an acoustic reggae cover in a crack den. … Afrobeat-tinged equivalent of landfill indie
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/jun/28/reptar-body-faucet-review
The strongest knock you can make against this stuff is that it's unoriginal. SO FUCKING WHAT. Nobody cares that all of the synthpop of the 80s was downstream from Kraftwerk. A sound is not a patentable invention. This isn't science, it's a scene.
The second-strongest knock you can make against this is that it's all bro-y, the kind of stuff you'd hear blasting out of a frat house while guys named Trevor smoke salvia inside. Again, SO FUCKING WHAT. That's not considered a knock against other art
