The afterlife of an indie band.

In the summer of 1989, a band called Slaughterhouse played at the Pyramid, a club in the East Village. The band was generically noisy, and hostile in a manner that was common at the time, especially among groups that performed in the neighborhood. David Pajo, a young guitarist with Slint, a Louisville band that was scheduled to appear later that night, watched the show from the bar.

“Slaughterhouse had many televisions onstage with them,” Pajo recalled. “I remember a video loop of a girl opening her mouth while a guy pissed in it; a girl fellating a mule in a barn; and a woman putting her footless leg into another woman. Quite disturbing.” Partway through the set, Pajo left the club to check out the homeless people living in Tompkins Square Park. While he was gone, Slaughterhouse’s lead singer set his hair on fire and vomited. When Pajo returned, it was Slint’s turn to play. Brian McMahan, the group’s singer and second guitarist, carefully wiped the vomit from the microphone. The band’s members were wearing shorts and looked wholesome, as though they were on loan from a private-school squash team.

They performed songs from their album “Tweez,” and some longer, slower numbers, all executed with unusual precision. Few of the tracks featured singing, and what vocals there were seemed like an afterthought. As unlike each other as two rock bands could be, Slint and Slaughterhouse had roots in a subgenre of nineteen-eighties independent rock which was sometimes called “pigfuck” by the music press, and which was exemplified by Big Black, a band known for its harsh sounds and shock tactics. (The first edition of Big Black’s 1987 EP, “Headache,” came sealed in a black vinyl bag containing two photographs of a man who had recently removed his head with a shotgun blast.) But Big Black had also created some smart music, inventing a gloriously discomforting, trebly howl that made you feel as though you were being rubbed down with hot stones and ammonia.

Slaughterhouse must have looked at Big Black’s icky photos; Slint had listened to its music. “Tweez,” which was released in 1988, had been recorded by Steve Albini, Big Black’s singer and guitarist, who was also a contributor to Forced Exposure, a widely read fanzine. Albini was the Jackson Pollock and Clement Greenberg of eighties indie rock: he made important music and told people how to talk about it. When Albini announced in Pulse!, a free magazine put out by Tower Records, that Slint was the new band he was most excited about, fans paid attention.

By the time Slint appeared at the Pyramid, however, indie rock was undergoing a transformation. Big Black had broken up in 1987, and major-label bands like Nine Inch Nails were taking aggressive noise and violent subject matter into the mainstream. Slint had outgrown its noise-rock beginnings, and the slow, nearly wordless songs that the band performed that night were something new.

In the fall of 1990, with the help of an engineer named Brian Paulson, the group recorded a new album. But in January, 1991, a few weeks before it was to be released, and three months before Slint was to embark on its first European tour, McMahan quit the band. The tour was cancelled. Slint, it seemed, was history.

Then the album, “Spiderland,” appeared. On its cover was a black-and-white photograph of the musicians swimming in an abandoned quarry, their smiling faces hovering above the water. But the record was not the product of feckless youths; it was a foray, both brave and frightened, into adulthood. Just six songs and thirty-nine minutes long, “Spiderland” was sui generis, a series of compositions so studiously arranged that they sound as though they might have been notated, like classical music, __though they retain the rawness and intimacy of improvisation. Several of the tracks feature clean guitar arpeggios rotating over slightly dissonant bass pedal points, and build to glowing codas of resonant sound. All but one song is anchored by Britt Walford’s drumming, which rides the back edge of the beat but never falls off, creating a delicious tension. The few lyrics are nearly inaudible and sound like excerpts from short stories: a boy takes a girl on a roller coaster; a man leaves a party, thinking about what he should have said; and, on “Good Morning, Captain,” the album’s final cut, a sailor awakes after a shipwreck and is confronted by a small child looking for help.

During the nineteen-nineties, “Spiderland” sold steadily, a rare feat for an obscure, independent band that no longer existed and had performed live fewer than thirty times. (According to Nielsen SoundScan, forty-eight thousand copies of the album have been bought in the United States to date, but since not all independent record stores report their sales to SoundScan, the number may be much greater.) In 1991, Albini reviewed “Spiderland” for Melody Maker, a popular British weekly, calling it “flawless” and awarding it “ten fucking stars.”

Slint spawned so many imitators—Mogwai may be the best known—that the band became a genre within indie rock, a style in which boys, choked with emotion and capable only of murmurs or shouts, play each song more slowly than it wants to be played, and find deep significance in their every utterance. “Spiderland” deserves the overheated praise, but it was partly responsible for the enervation and increasing insularity of independent rock music during the nineties, a decade in which hip-hop, teen pop, and dance-hall, by contrast, became ever more formally omnivorous and pleasurable. The problem was that Slint did not create a simple, easily imitated beat like Bo Diddley, or an elemental song like the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.,” which anyone could learn to play. Slint—or “Spiderland,” because the two had become interchangeable—was like that grilled-cheese sandwich bearing the face of the Virgin Mary: an unlikely and irreproducible marvel.

After years spent dodging disappointed fans, the band’s members were persuaded by Barry Hogan, a British concert promoter, to perform together at a music festival in Camber Sands, England, in February_._ That appearance led to a twenty-two-date tour in the United States, during which Slint played before approximately twenty-four thousand people.

The reunion was strictly temporary; officially, Slint remains broken up. In mid-March, the group performed a three-night stand at Irving Plaza, in New York. The mood in the audience on the night I went was reverential and slightly tense, like a prom at which only boys—the crowd was disproportionately young and male—have shown up. There was some earnest shushing during the painfully quiet songs, the faithful apparently wanting to commune in peace with the human beings who had made that record.

The band played all of “Spiderland” and much of “Tweez.” The set began with Slint’s most satisfying song, “Good Morning, Captain,” a creepy vamp held down by a drumbeat that could readily be turned into a hip-hop sample. For six minutes, the track inched along until—in one of the evening’s few traditional rock moments—it exploded with two enormous, distorted chords, each separated by tiny pauses, as McMahan screamed, “I miss you!” The words seemed, in the context of the show, to be a proxy for all the stuff that boys don’t talk about: that excruciating weekend with your new stepfather; that scary walk in the woods; that rift with your best friend, whom you haven’t seen in years. As the band played, I scribbled down names and associations, few of them related to music: Samuel Beckett, imagined movie dialogue, and snippets of vaguely recollected episodes of “Wild Kingdom.” Instrumental music demands this kind of coloring in, and Slint’s triggers an ever-changing series of mental slides.

In the middle of the evening’s tumultuous closer, “Rhoda”—a song from “Tweez”—Walford twice screamed “One, two, three!” to cue the band back in. It was thrilling and a little startling, like watching an actor break character to pick up a stray prop. As Walford pounded away, McMahan and Pajo used their hands to make the only sounds that night which truly resembled singing, manipulating their guitars to create a noise like birdsong. The number ended abruptly, and a white screen came down, concealing the musicians. As the audience shuffled dutifully toward the doors, a faint echo of guitar feedback lingered in the air, and then died. ♦