Inside The Indie Sleaze Revival

NOTE: I originally wrote this article for VICE, for which I was to be compensated $125. After my submission I learned that the editor had checked into rehab for unrelated reasons. Attempts to reach someone else at VICE were unsuccessful.

Ask your favorite podcaster, e-girl, upskirt photographer or punk band their favorite area in New York City and they’re bound to tell you Dimes Square. The gritty, sprawling artists’ haven became the Mecca of noughties nostalgia when obscure relics such as The Strokes, Lady Gaga and NBC sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine were unearthed by Instagram influencers and teenagers being groomed by Instagram influencers.

Darvis Frizby, mastermind behind sleaze-pop project The Groper dips his cigarette in a glass of cantaloupe juice before lighting it, a delicacy known as Dimes Square Dinner. As he exhales he recounts how at a recent performance attendees were required to have visible signs of oral herpes. “And if you don’t have herpes, I’ll give it to you,” Darvis says with a grin.

The Groper’s debut EP Get On Yr Knees Baby Doll received a 4.5 on Pitchfork, with the reviewer questioning if lead single Blowie was literally just a slowed down !!! (Chk Chk Chk) track, a charge that was later proven in court. But the score feels less harsh now that The Groper have been asked to headline the Pitchfork Music Festival. “They’re good cunts, innit,” Darvis opines, slipping into the accent he picked up at boarding school in London.

Darvis is humble despite his family owning all of the shipping ports in Europe. “I sent father a notice through my lawyer that I would be taking a ten year sabbatical to become a celebrity. All my cousins have done it so it wasn’t a big deal”.

He shares a spartan $7,000/month penthouse apartment above a Shake Shack with his manager, coke dealer and stock broker, a man known as Ketamine Brian. “Brian’s the one who suggested I start a band,” Darvis admits. “[It was] a way to way to dilute the Google results for my name and the word groper.”

Later we attend the premiere of UNLIKE, a docu-satire directed by Florian Poot about a man trying to get canceled so he can lose his social media job and become homeless. “In our society, it’s actually the homeless who are the most privileged,” Florian tells me. The middle-aged director’s parents literally carry him atop their shoulders at the event, perhaps as a commentary on something.

But what does any of this have to do with Indie Sleaze, the music and fashion scene that took over the world and put NYC on the map? It becomes clear at the afterparty where I run into Scabby Rick, a man in his late 40’s who appears to be molting. He first gained notoriety in the early 2000’s as a party photographer who molested over a thousand girls, but he’s recently found a second life as a living connection to that fabled period.

Scabby Rick’s amateurish photographs aren’t why he’s here. He’s being paid by tech industrialist and host Gunther Kobalt to lend authenticity to the evening. “I’ll probably still be molesting girls when the Third Age of Indie Sleaze happens in 20 years,” he says with a laugh. Later I catch a glimpse of him wedged in the tiny space between a refrigerator and wall like an insect, possibly in a state of ecstasy.

At 2 AM, Darvis takes the stage. Less than eight minutes later his set ends and the small crowd of women pretending to be horny dissipate to eat french fries off the sidewalk outside like dogs — an Indie Sleaze tradition. Catching up with Darvis, he asks if I have any ketamine. I answer in the negative and suggest he ask Ketamine Brian. Darvis frowns. “That’s just his name,” he says.