Top 10 Sophisticated Indie Songs

'Indie' is an incredibly broad concept and contains many different niches. Sophisticated indie is in the spectrum of artists who are not so mainstream and harness their creativity in a way that imbues real emotion in their fans. Many on this list are talented in writing their own songs, playing multiple instruments, and kill it on vocals. They are the very soul of the indie movement.

Laura Mvula is a British singer/songwriter and pianist. While generally categorized in the contemporary R&B and soul genres, her use of hand drums and overlapping vocals gives her music an indie feel. "Green Garden" was released in 2013 on her debut album Sing to the Moon.

Mvula has a knack for style which shines through her music.

Cat Clyde is a Canadian musician. Her expertise is playing guitar, writing lyrics, and singing. A lot of her music is influenced by nature. She uses metaphors to exude emotion and, while her style is border-line country, her lyrics don't follow the simplistic template other indie-country singers do.

She is gaining some heat now, with her new album Ivory Castanets. Check her out on Spotify, she's a great find.

Sufjan Stevens is well-known from his 2005 album Illinois. He keeps us on our toes by switching up genres with every album—from indie rock to electronic to baroque pop. This track makes me want to road trip across the country, which is the sign of a good indie tune!

Donald Glover (AKA Childish Gambino) is a prolific writer, singer, rapper, and actor. While most people may not put him in the indie category, I think a lot of work he does exemplifies the very essence of indie. He bends, if not breaks, the status-quo and saturates his work in zealous honesty. His newest album Awaken My Love is vastly different from his previous work as a rapper, falling in line as a soulful R&B record with an indie twist.

It's time to head underground with another Canadian artist, Miss Emily Brown (now going by her birth name Emily Millard). I discovered Miss Emily Brown years ago and her hauntingly beautiful music has stuck with me since. This song tells a story, which is one of the reasons I categorize it as sophisticated. Instead of chanting "Hey-Ho," listeners follow a character arc accompanied by the ethereal sounds of a violin.

Borns has recently blown up with songs like "Electric Love" and "10,000 Emerald Pools." I discovered him while watching an episode of HBO's Girls —he wasn't so popular then but I was struck by his angelic voice and esoteric themes.

This is not the Mumford and Sons everybody knows from the radio. They collaborated with the (equally talented) Laura Marling and the Dharohar Project in 2010, but it isn't as widely known as their other albums. Their chemistry and eclectic sound produced four great songs that I highly recommend to anyone who appreciates music.

Thao and the Get Down Stay Downs has an interesting musical history. "Meticulous Bird" is a different sound for them but it's up-beat and quirky, much like the lead singer, Thao. Here is a link to an older song to give you an idea of who you're dealing with: "Bag of Hammers"

They use 'mouth clucking' as an instrument—you can't get more creative than that.

CocoRosie is a wonderfully strange group of artists with two lead singers and interchangeable band-mates. Bianca and Sierra Casady (Coco and Rosie—an amalgamation for the nicknames their mother called them) formed the band after reuniting in Paris. Sierra is a trained opera singer and Bianca does a kind-of avant garde, poetry-slam thing. They use unconventional instruments—children's toys, a snake charmer's flute, beat boxing, and an out-of-tune ukulele. People seem to shy away from their outside-the-box and in-your-face facades, but I find it refreshing in the endless sea of forced perfection the music industry embodies.

I have seen Andrew Bird live twice and each time he has played the same songs, but completely differently. He is the kind of artist that evolves his music over time—a song he wrote ten years ago could be on more than one album but you wouldn't recognize it. Bird is a looper, a whistler, violinist, singer, writer, guitarist, and overall my favourite sophisticated indie artist. Enjoy!