Post-Rock

London, 1977. Brian Eno and David Bowie hunched over a mixing desk, making Low—its side two a suite of instrumental pieces where texture mattered more than riffs, where atmosphere replaced showmanship. Two decades later, critics would call it proto-post-rock. But the real starting point was a basement in Louisville's Highlands neighborhood, 1986. A few hardcore kids were getting bored.

Slint formed that year in Britt Walford's parents' basement, out of the remains of two local bands, Squirrel Bait and Maurice. Brian McMahan and David Pajo had been pushing toward something more angular, more obtuse—playing with dynamics and silence in ways that made their bandmates uncomfortable. When Pajo showed up to Maurice rehearsal with the riffs that would become 'Darlene,' the singer didn't know what to do with it. “I guess they just wanted to rock, you know, like more so, and we were just getting into weirder stuff,” Pajo recalled. The Minutemen had shown them you could be punk without being loud all the time. When Maurice's other members bailed, Walford and Pajo kept the stranger material. They called themselves Slint, named after one of Walford's pet fish.