10 years ago, Marnie Stern resided near the top of a pile of players that – following the vacuum of early-00s ‘landfill indie’ – redefined the role of the alternative guitar player.
In doing so, she set something of a template for the current generation of math-rock virtuoso wunderkinds, lawlessly intersplicing genres, time signatures and blazing two-hand tapping techniques into two-minute maelstroms. However, unlike today’s digital native guitar heroes, she did it with a punk-rock scrappiness that you rarely hear from such technical players.
