“Stomp, Clap, Hey!” A Short-Lived Genre

Between 2009 and 2012, a new genre of poppified folk burst into the mainstream. Amidst a sea of bottle-popping rappers and Coldplay clones came a deluge of banjos, dobro, and fiddles that took the genre to heights of popularity unseen since the ’60s and ’70s. The subgenre had no name at the time and was generally lumped in with the Indie folk genre. Looking back at the era, this label is frustrating. It lumps these bands together with more introspective folksters of the era like Sufjan Stevens and Bon Iver. So one user on X took to their keyboard to come up with a name:

This post blew up the internet, and the name stuck. Over a decade later, we finally have a name for the music that plagued the airwaves for years: Stomp Clap Hey. Let’s take a look at the origins and impacts of this pesky genre and what it means for folk moving forward.

Where Did “Stomp Clap Hey” Come From?

It’s easy to forget how different it felt in 2011. The war in Iraq was ending. America had climbed out of a recession. A kind and attractive president made a lot of people feel comfortable (perhaps naively) about the plights of the world.

What better time, then, for a violently happy genre of music to make us stomp and clap along?

Ground zero for the stomp clap pandemic is California-based folkies Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros’ runaway 2009 hit “Home.” All of the musical elements are there: the faux-Appalachian accents, the vintage instruments, the cutesy lyrics promising “Home is wherever I’m with you.” The song was a logical and commodified extension of the twee folk that popped up in the blog era with bands like The Moldy Peaches.

Rallying Cry

Within 3 years, we had the song that defined the genre, “Ho Hey.” The Lumineers turned up the positivity and introduced a key element: vintage fashion. This got kicked into overdrive when English folksters Mumford & Sons put out their biggest hit “I Will Wait” just two months later and added oiled-up beards and vests to the look, forever tying the sound to early 2010s “hipster” culture.

These bands garnered a string of hits and spawned a ton of imitators. Everywhere you looked, people sported flannels, brown boots, beanies, and vests. This aesthetic flared out into other venues like coffee shops and, most famously, the millennial burger joint: the now parodied home of over-priced burgers, exposed ductwork ceilings, brick walls, and scan-only menus, parodied as “two guys with a crazy idea.”

The Fall

One of the strangest elements of the genre was how short-lived it was. By 2015-2016, you hardly heard music of this style anymore. Unlike the popular understanding that Grunge music killed Hair Metal, no big narrative surrounds the fall of Stomp Clap Hey. To hazard a guess about cultural reasons for the fall, one could look at cynicism and hip hop.

The political landscape was a lot more dour by 2017, with a nasty and scandal-ridden election just behind us, violent alt-right protests, and the Me Too movement making us reckon with the realities of some of our favorite idols. In 2017, hip hop officially surpassed rock music as the most popular genre, largely as a result of Kendrick Lamar’s recent mega hit albums To Pimp a Butterfly and Damn. It’s not hard to see why. Lamar’s (at the time) pessimistic, sharply intelligent, and unabashedly political songs met the moment in a way a guy with a guitar going “but I can write a song!” could not.

The Future of Folk

If there was any hope for nostalgia for stomp-clap music, it was killed just this year, when New York comedian Kyle Gordon released his hilarious song “We Will Never Die.”

This biting parody takes all of the music to task, parodying the clothes, instruments, and the chants of “Ho, hey.” It ties it to the annoying trend of “millennial humor” and pushes the optimism so far that he and his friends are shouting, “No one we know will ever die!”. Though it’s a light-hearted parody, you can feel the resentment of the forced positivity.

So, with Stomp Clap Hey dead, what’s the path forward for folk music in 2025?

Bearing the torch are the indie folk-rockers of the Asheville Sound. MJ Lenderman is the indie darling of the day, taking folk back to the heavy sounds of Neil Young and Drive-By Truckers. You’ll notice that his lyrics, far from the optimism of Marcus Mumford, are deeply cynical and world-weary. His former band, Wednesday, pumps out great folk rock as well. These Asheville bands haven’t broken into the mainstream. It’s unlikely that they will. But it’s always nice to know that such a legendary genre is living on.

-Christian Flynn

Photo: Mumford & Sons (Stefan Schäfer, Lich via Wikimedia Commons)