Galaxie 500

Three Harvard friends who made three slow, reverb-soaked albums with Kramer between 1988 and 1990, split before anyone noticed, and became one of the most influential bands in indie rock.

Origin
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Years active
1987-1991
Genres
indie rock, dream pop, slowcore
Labels
Aurora, Rough Trade, Rykodisc, 20/20/20

Harvard

Dean Wareham, Damon Krukowski and Naomi Yang met at the Dalton School in New York in 1981 and went on to Harvard. Wareham, born in New Zealand, had played with Krukowski in a punk covers band at college. In 1987, back in Cambridge, the three formed Galaxie 500, named after a friend's Ford, with Yang on bass; she had never played music before and learned over a summer. They admired the Velvet Underground and Jonathan Richman.

They sent a three-song demo to Kramer, the producer who ran the Noise New York studio and the Shimmy-Disc label, and he agreed to record them. In a few hours in February 1988 they made Tugboat, their first single. Kramer worked fast, in one or two live takes, kept mistakes, and poured reverb over everything. He produced all their records, and his sound is tied to the birth of slowcore.

Three albums

Today (1988) came out on a tiny label set up to release it. Melody Maker called it an astonishing debut, and Thurston Moore the guitar record of the year. Rough Trade signed them for On Fire (1989), now their best-loved record, which went to seven on the British independent chart; they toured Europe with Kramer on sound and recorded two sessions for John Peel. This Is Our Music (1990), named after an Ornette Coleman record, closed with Yoko Ono's Listen, the Snow Is Falling, sung by Yang.

In spring 1991, after a long American tour and with Columbia interested, Wareham phoned the others to say he was leaving; their last show was at Bowdoin College on 5 April. He said later that he had not thought of them as important, and that leaving was a relief. Rough Trade went bankrupt the same year, and Krukowski and Yang bought the masters at auction.

After

Wareham formed Luna, and later Dean & Britta with Britta Phillips; he still plays Galaxie 500 songs in nearly every set, and setlist.fm logs Tugboat more than two hundred times across all of them. Krukowski and Yang became Damon & Naomi, ran the small press Exact Change and the label 20/20/20, which now looks after the catalogue, including a 2024 set of every studio outtake. The trio has never reunited.

AllMusic's Jason Ankeny argued they were arguably as influential on indie rock as the Velvet Underground were on later rock, with a lasting mark on shoegaze and slowcore; Low are among the bands that followed them. Neutral Milk Hotel's Naomi is about Yang. Wareham's memoir Black Postcards (2008) and the oral history Temperature's Rising (2013) tell the story.

Members

Records

Songs

Low, The Velvet Underground, Luna, Spacemen 3

Where to go next

Official

  • Galaxie 500 on Bandcamp The whole catalogue, including the Peel sessions and outtakes.
  • 20/20/20 Krukowski and Yang's label, which looks after the catalogue.

Reference

Discography and data

Writing and criticism

Interviews

Live performance archives

Film and video

Fan sites and communities

  • A Head Full of Wishes The long-running site for the band and everything after, with a database of every song and show.

Sources

  1. Galaxie 500, Wikipedia
  2. Galaxie 500, Contemporary Musicians
  3. Dean Wareham, Wikipedia
  4. Kramer (musician), Wikipedia
  5. This Is Our Music, Wikipedia