Why Are So Many People Dancing (Or, Rather, Flailing) To One of the Saddest Indie Rock Songs?

If you’re on Instagram or TikTok these days, you’ve probably seen multiple videos of people doing a strange, noodley dance to a sad song where the singer is lamenting how there’s “nothing here to care about.” That, my friends, is what people are calling the “Pinegrove Shuffle.”

Pinegrove is an indie-rock band from New Jersey whose sound has been likened to a mix of country and emo. They’ve written a lot of downer tunes that elicit the same feelings as other bands of the same genre do; similar artists that come to mind are Pinback and The Microphones. I first discovered Pinegrove in college, when my peers and I were all listening to bands like this, and I actually had to take a step back from this genre because it was bumming me out too much.

Yet now, here are these people, outwardly getting their freak on to “Need 2,” one of Pinegrove’s saddest songs:

Something I find really intriguing about the younger generation is how they’re approaching sad music. Instead of leaning into it and indulging in their feels, these guys are making a meme out of it. Plenty of people have commented on this generation’s insistence on absurdity as a means of finding comedy and levity in the difficult world we live in, but this recent trend is especially bizarre to me. When I was a kid, we usually talked about these kinds of bands with a hushed reverence, a shared excitement over finding people who listened to the same sort of music. Yes, we would sometimes joke about them—like the time my friends and I laughed over an acquaintance saying that Father John Misty would, and I quote, “make a very good lover”—but we never really took things to Pinegrove Shuffle levels.

Every time I open my Instagram app, I see at least five videos of people doing the Pinegrove Shuffle. And they are all utterly sincere, while at the same time being so absurd and silly. I really can’t overstate just how much this trend has taken off, which absolutely blows my mind. We’ve got all the major music outlets covering the trend, and we’ve even got some animators recreating it just for funsies:

Now, it might seem on the surface that this trend is deflective, or mocking in tone. It might seem like it’s poking fun at the experience of getting in your feels too much. But there’s something kind of surreally beautiful and sincere about the Pinegrove Shuffle. I don’t want to read into it too much, but in a way, it’s providing people an opportunity to share in the value of sad songs like “Need 2” without getting in their heads too much.

In fact, moves like the Pinegrove Shuffle take the sads out of our brains and put them into the body, giving us a tactile way to work through our emotions. In that way, it kind of reminds me of that kind-of-serious joke that people make about needing to “take a stupid walk for your stupid mental health”: Life’s a downer and sad music reflects this, but if you groove around and shimmy with it, you might just feel better. And you might make other people feel better, too. And altogether, you all might feel so much more connected for it.

(Featured Image: Joe Cappa/Garrett Lee)