The clue’s in the name. Taking the mantle from The Velvet Underground, The Dandy Warhols took pop art to the charts in the mid 90s, painting neo-psychedelia, shoegaze and garage rock on a power pop canvas to craft big indie hits that were designed to make fun of big indie hits. From hipster upstarts to “America’s answer to Brit-Pop” to collaborating with Bowie and mellowing into acid-washed nostalgia, The Dandy Warhols danced through their 25th anniversary year to celebrate a career spent at the very top of the underground.
Courtney Taylor, Zia McCabe, Peter Holmström and Eric Hedford formed the band in Portland in 1994, releasing their first album Dandys Rule OK? the following year. Part dirty shoegaze, part slacker pop pastiches of their biggest influences, the band announced their debut with their own TV theme song. Already a feature on the Portland alternative music scene (where they were famous for chaotic live shows that usually ended up with everyone in the room naked), the Dandys got picked up by Capitol Records and primed for major commercial success.
Realising too late just what they’d bought, Capitol shelved the band’s next record (later released in 2004 as The Black Album) and steered them towards something with broader appeal. Giving them Dandy Warhols Come Down instead, the suits only sort of got what they asked for – releasing an album as full of bouncy pop hooks as it was drowned in feedback, with lead single Not If You Were The Last Junkie On Earth kept off the radio with an endless chorus of “heroin is so passé”.
Luckily for Capitol, the gamble worked. Returning in 2000 with Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia, The Dandys leaned hard into satirical pop to deliver a third album carried by the biggest hit single of their career, the retro Stones anti-anthem Bohemian Like You. Used on everything from phone adverts and Buffy The Vampire Slayer to a conservative party conference (cue the inevitable lawsuit), the track ironically helped the Dandy Warhols’ cross over into the same mainstream they were poking fun at – and helped the album certify gold in the UK.
By 2003, the band were working with Nile Rodgers, Duran Duran's Nick Rhodes and The Lemonheads’ Evan Dando on their fourth album Welcome To The Monkey House, as well as supporting David Bowie on his A Reality tour after he watched them play Glastonbury. Giving the band another massive chart hit in We Used To Be Friends (a favourite for Veronica Mars fans), the album deepened their stoner synth-pop sound into something with more edge.
2004 saw re-releases (The Black Album), compilations (Come On Feel The Dandy Warhols) and documentaries (the Sundance winning Dig!) before the Dandys returned to their experimental roots with Odditorium Or Warlords of Mars – a record that felt like a sidestep to whatever alt-rock off-road the band were headed down before Capitol first put them on highway to chart success.
Finding some kind of middle ground with 2008’s Earth To The Dandy Warhols, the band returned with a more focussed, slightly more accessible pop record that still found room for genre-hopping (and one 15-minute long French spoken-word synth jam) – making it back on the Billboard 200 and spawning two remix EPs.
For the next few years the Dandy Warhols took stock of their legacy. Recording a TV theme and making contributions to tribute albums before taking time out for solo projects, the band were back in the studio together in 2012 for their eighth full-length, This Machine. Mellower than anything else they’d ever attempted, the album threw out the irony and chaos of their earlier work for something more gently cohesive, a maturing trajectory that continued with 2016’s Distortland.
Of course, growing old gracefully was never in the cards for The Dandy Warhols, and 2019’sWhy You So Crazy saw them firing in all directions once again with everything from 30s jazz pastiches and psychobilly hoedown singalongs to caustic pop satires. As ever, no one knows where The Dandy Warhols are headed next.
