Few moments in 2000s indie were more explicitly “You had to be there” than Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s debut album. I mean this in a very literal sense: While prepping for this essay, I asked my wife — a fellow ex-Pitchfork contributor who started meaningfully paying attention to indie’s myriad trends and shifts just two years after the Philadelphia band’s self-titled 2005 bow — if they ever meant anything significant to her as a college-aged listener at the time. “Not really,” she shrugged with casual indifference.
