We used to make things in this country, dammit. Young misfits often lionize the Clinton years as the last golden era, a time when quirky alternative rock bands could conquer the airwaves and win the hearts of America’s weird kids before the internet shattered the monoculture along with greater social cohesion. The ’90s might not have seemed like a chill time to anyone who actually remembers the simmering tensions that led to L.A. riots and the Waco disaster, but reality has never stood a chance against nostalgia, especially when it’s held by people who weren’t there.

Looking back can curdle into a trap, but you’ve gotta start somewhere. Musical revolutions often begin with kids who achingly worry they just missed out on everything and have no choice but to try their best to recreate it. The Indianapolis five-piece Wishy dreams bigger than the rest of its revivalist peers, with the 2024 debut Triple Seven standing out from the TikTok-driven shoegaze craze by marrying sheets of feedback to swoon-worthy pop hooks. For follow-up Nature’s Pill (Winspear), it misremembers the 120 Minutes canon all at once, nodding to the snotty harmonies of Superchunk (“All the Rage”), dropping Madchester grooves under pop-grunge guitars (“Sensational”) and even skipping ahead to the ‘00s revival, finding the missing link between the Strokes and Paramore (“Shift”).

As the aforementioned Strokes proved two decades ago, the secret to bringing what now counts as classic rock into the present is to freshen it up by getting the details wrong and then using it to express modern anxieties. Co-front people Kevin Krauter and Nina Pitchkites wield distortion-soaked melodies as a way to expose and explore the confusion and miscommunication that seems ever more prevalent in our dissolute age, with Krauter bemoaning on “Mona Lisa” that “my God it’s such a mess now / why can’t we just be honest about it?” with the sort of bashful swagger that once would have earned a band some serious rotation on a WB teen drama.

Best of all is Pitchkites’s blissed-out Vaselines mashnote “Lovesick,” an ode to supercharged romantic second-guessing (“don’t the right words always seem so wrong?”) that feels current and timeless.

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