How ‘Looking For Alaska’ Captures The Best Of The 2005 Indie Music Boom

For the many followers of bestselling author John Green, dreams really do come true. Following movie adaptations of Green’s beloved novels The Fault In Our Stars and Paper Towns, his fan favourite debut, Looking for Alaska, has finally made it to our screens.

Fourteen years after hitting bookstores, the story has been transformed into a brand new series, which has just dropped on Stan. Looking for Alaska is produced by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, the teen drama dream team responsible for The O.C. and Gossip Girl.

Looking for Alaska follows Miles (Charlie Plummer), a Florida transplant newly arrived at Alabama’s Culver Creek Preparatory High School. Miles quickly wins over his roommate, Chip (Denny Love), with an esoteric party trick: he can recite the last words of countless famous people.

Chip, who everyone calls The Colonel, gives shy, skinny Miles the nickname ‘Pudge’. He also inducts Pudge to his smart-talking clique: Takumi (Jay Lee) and the elusive, wounded Alaska (Kristine Froseth). The series gives earnest weight to the trials of teenage life, as Pudge’s world is upended by a terrible tragedy we see foreshadowed in the opening scene.

As much as Looking for Alaska taps into eternal teen stuff, it’s also a story firmly rooted in its time. The series keeps the book’s 2005 setting, including a whole lot of period-appropriate touches like Mapquest, pay phones, and parents owning The Da Vinci Code audiobook in a CD box set. No-one has an iPhone to quickly fire up Google, but they do have killer playlists on chunky iPods.

Best of all, the show’s attention to detail extends to the great music of the moment, nailing the very specific era of indie angst that Pudge and Alaska inhabit. That spot-on 2005-ness is teased in the series trailer, which features a haunting cover of ‘An Honest Mistake’ by mid-aughts sensations The Bravery. It’s immediately clear: music looms large in this world.

To fully appreciate the Looking for Alaska soundtrack, it’s helpful to remember where we were at in 2005. By any measure, it was an epic, hard-to-summarise flashpoint for indie music.

The Bravery fit in a bracket of danceable guys-with-guitars albums from the early 2000s, including Bloc Party’s breakout Silent Alarm, Franz Ferdinand’s You Could Have It So Much Better, and Art Brut’s Bang Bang Rock & Roll. In 2005, LCD Soundsystem’s self-titled debut announced one of the decade’s defining bands, along with form-bending albums like Gorillaz’s Demon Days and M.I.A.’s Arular. Established indie heroes The Decemberists, Spoon, My Morning Jacket, and Sleater-Kinney also delivered new LPs that year. In short, music was doing damn well.

While Looking for Alaska unfolds in steamy rural Alabama – a world removed from the indie hotbeds of New York, Los Angeles, and London – the series is a love letter to the mid-aughts sound.

Early in the first episode, we hear the deeply nostalgic strumming of José González’s ‘Crosses’, from his 2003 debut album, Veneer. Over that first hour, as Pudge grapples with the alliances and rituals of his new boarding school, we get time-capsule anthems like The Killers’ ‘All The Things That I’ve Done’ (who, in 2004, was immune to Hot Fuss?) and Rilo Kiley’s tear-jerking ‘With Arms Outstretched’.

Then, during a pivotal classroom scene, up swells the soft, sentimental croon of Ben Gibbard on The Postal Service’s ‘The District Sleeps Alone Tonight’. It’s a perfect alignment of scene and song – something Looking for Alaska does time and again.

It’s not all earnest, either. The series also has fun with the outright jams of the day, cueing 50 Cent’s ‘P.I.M.P.’ as Pudge fumbles to dress for a date and Gorillaz’s ‘DARE’ as the friends plot a counter-attack on the school bullies.

Watching Looking for Alaska, you’re struck (and maybe a little terrified) by how faraway 14 years ago feels. Even as 2005’s technology and fashion choices have aged awkwardly, there’s no doubt its music holds up.

The era’s particular strain of in-my-feelings sincerity still resonates in some of 2019’s biggest acts. Take this Looking for Alaska-inspired Spotify playlist: it’s not hard to draw a line from The Bravery to The 1975, José González to Frank Ocean, or Rilo Kiley to Florist. It’s also notable that several of 2005’s flag-bearers, like Gorillaz, Bloc Party and The National, still play their evergreen songs to sold-out crowds.

Just as Green’s story and characters benefit from the eight-episode treatment, so too does the nostalgia-spiking soundtrack. Looking for Alaska is loaded with music cues, so it’s never long before the next “Oh, this song!” moment. The CD players and iPods might be obsolete, but some endorphin hits never age.

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(Lead image: Steve Dietl / Hulu)