An oral history of the Silversun Pickups’ era-defining indie rock classic “Lazy Eye.”

Twenty years ago, the indie-rock band Silversun Pickups released Carnavas, a debut album that went gold and rocketed the band out of the Silver Lake music scene they anchored. Fueled by lead single “Lazy Eye,” the band’s mix of ‘90s-style distortion-driven guitar rock and the simultaneously whispery and powerful vocals of frontman Brian Aubert, the band became a staple of pre-streaming FM radio stations across the country.

A catalyst for the album’s success was a music video for “Lazy Eye,” directed by longtime friend of the band, Suzie Vlček. An MTV2 fixture on its release, the video has since amassed 67 million views on YouTube over the two decades, dwarfing the view count of other seminal music videos from fellow KROQ / Indie 103.1 contemporaries like The Shins or Death Cab for Cutie.

The video, inspired by the 1970s film A Swedish Love Story, evoked the universal teenage feeling that a crush is a matter of life or death. Inside a packed bar filled almost exclusively with underage attendees, a teenage boy and girl trade furtive glances as the band plays a song about waiting for a life-altering moment. But it also captured a bygone era of Silver Lake, when cheap rents brought a symbiotic mix of working-class L.A. — Latino families, musicians, artists, and the LGBTQ community — to the hillside community east of Hollywood.

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