Chicago, IL · indie rock

Liz Phair

1 upcoming festival

'Exile in Guyville' rewired indie rock's rules — blunt, brilliant, foundational, and still the reference point three decades on.

Liz Phair emerged from the Chicago indie scene in the early 1990s, moving from self-recorded cassettes to a debut album, "Exile in Guyville," released on Matador in 1993. Framed as a song-by-song response to the Rolling Stones' "Exile on Main St.," it paired lo-fi arrangements with unusually direct writing about sex, ambivalence and the men around her, and became a lasting reference point for indie rock songwriting.

She followed it with "Whip-Smart" and "whitechocolatespaceegg," then moved toward a glossier pop-rock sound in the 2000s, a shift that divided her audience. She has continued to record and tour, and also published a memoir.

indie rock