hm. are these phenomena (indie bands upstreaming and scoring radio hits and expanding their fanbases; cult favorites being revived by music writers on a nostalgia trip) new? or just new to you?

I don’t think it’s so much the newness that’s the issue as it is the breadth of it. The ability of so many of these bands to be ubiquitous for a sustained amount of time (without necessarily being Death Cab) is a product of the Internet. Otherwise they’d all have put out two albums, done maybe one big tour and called it a day, which plenty of bands still do.