Broadcast built pop out of a past that never happened

Some bands sound like the future. Broadcast sounded like a future somebody promised in 1968 and then quietly cancelled.

They came out of Birmingham in 1995, built around Trish Keenan's cool, unhurried voice and James Cargill's crate-digging ear. Their reference points weren't other indie bands. They were the strange edges of the 60s: The United States of America and their one self-titled album of synths and detournement, library-music LPs, the theme tunes to public-information films, ye-yé, the kind of records that turn up in charity shops with no sleeve. Broadcast took that material and made something new that insisted it was old.

The library and the séance

The early singles landed first, later gathered onto a compilation that still works as an introduction.

Work and Non Work (1997) collects the EPs that got them signed to Warp, and it already has the whole formula: analog warmth, a drum machine kept low in the mix, Keenan singing melodies that feel snipped from a soundtrack you half-remember. Then came the first proper album.

The Noise Made by People (2000) is the sound of the group finding its exact temperature. It's pop, more or less, but pop recorded in a room with the curtains drawn. Nothing is loud. Everything is deliberate. You can hear the tension that would define them: gorgeous tunes wrapped in a faint dread, as if the music knew something the lyrics wouldn't say.

Two people and a room

Haha Sound (2003) pushed harder into the group's noisier instincts, letting the electronics fray at the edges while Keenan's melodies held the centre.

By then the lineup had thinned. What had been a band became, for practical purposes, the core duo of Keenan and Cargill, and the next record leaned into that.

Tender Buttons (2005) is the one people reach for first now, and it's the starkest thing they made. The arrangements strip back to a hard drum-machine pulse and buzzing synths, and Keenan writes at her most direct, partly in the shadow of her father's death from cancer. The title comes from Gertrude Stein's 1914 book of cubist prose poems, which is the perfect flag for a record that keeps ordinary words and rearranges them until they glow. It sold modestly. It has aged like almost nothing else from that year.

Investigating witch cults

Then Broadcast did the thing that turned a cult band into a keyword.

Broadcast and the Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age (2009) is a collaboration with Julian House of the Ghost Box label — twenty-three tracks of séance chants, snapped tape, nursery-rhyme fragments and half-formed songs, sequenced like a haunted radio you can't switch off. It's the record most often filed under hauntology, that odd 2000s current of British music obsessed with the ghosts of a postwar future that never arrived. Critic Mark Fisher wrote about the scene as if Broadcast were its beating heart, and this album is why. If the idea grabs you, our field guide to hauntology maps the whole strange terrain, and the softer, prettier branch of their family tree lives in our dream pop guide.

January 2011

Keenan contracted H1N1 flu on a tour of Australia. It turned into pneumonia. She spent two weeks in intensive care and died on 14 January 2011, aged 42. She was, by every account, in the middle of the band's most fertile stretch of writing.

That's the cruelty of it. Broadcast weren't a legacy act coasting on old ideas. They were still tightening the screws, still finding new rooms to record in. The catalogue stops mid-sentence.

The afterlife

The one finished record left in the vault came out first.

Berberian Sound Studio (2013) is their soundtrack to Peter Strickland's giallo-obsessed film, released posthumously — short cues of dread and static that prove how much of their gift was pure atmosphere. Cargill has since opened the archive at a careful pace, releasing session tapes and, in 2024, two collections of Keenan's home demos that show the songs she was still shaping when she died.

And the audience never left. Broadcast are one of those acts whose reputation grows entirely through word of mouth and scrobble counts, passed between listeners on Last.fm and YouTube long after the press moved on. They belong to the exact catalog-nerd instinct this whole site runs on: you find them, you go quiet for a while, and then you can't stop talking about them.

Where do you start with Broadcast, and which record do you defend to the death — the pop of The Noise Made by People, the chill of Tender Buttons, or the haunted collage of Witch Cults? Rate them below and make your case in the comments.