National Skyline - This = Everything | 2000s Album Podcast

Remember when the millennium bug was supposed to crash civilization? While Y2K came and went without apocalypse, something more profound was happening in the cultural underground. In small studios across America, a generation of musicians was discovering that you could build entire worlds with nothing more than a drum machine, a guitar, and ambition. This was the early 2000s—a time when the digital revolution was democratizing music production, when bedroom producers could compete with major labels, and when the most interesting sounds emerged from the spaces between genres.

In Champaign, Illinois, a college town already legendary for spawning Hum’s space rock behemoths, something quieter but equally ambitious was taking shape. Jeff Dempsey, fresh from his tenure as Hum’s bassist, had retreated to his 24-track home studio with a vision that would blur the lines between organic and synthetic, between the cosmic and the intimate. The result was National Skyline’s This = Everything, an album that captured the exact moment when indie rock’s post-grunge hangover met the dawn of digital possibility.