(All original photography by Peter Gotta)

First thing’s first: Prophets of Rage did not set the world on fire. It’s highly probable that even hardcore fans of Public Enemy, Rage Against the Machine, and Cypress Hill don’t remember the supergroup was something that happened if they knew at all. The Prophets — comprised of Chuck D, B-Real, DJ Lord, and Rage sans Zack de la Rocha — only existed from 2016 to 2019 and only produced one EP of mostly inferior remakes by their respective original groups, then an album. The 2016 Make America Rage Again tour didn’t stop Trump from being elected, and these legends were devalued further when they were announced as Avenged Sevenfold’s openers on a tour that didn’t end up happening anyway. After two more one-off singles and an aborted second album, De la Rocha reunited with Rage Against the Machine in 2020 and Chuck D and B-Real announced correctly that they were merely keeping his seat warm. Relistening, though, the album had some okay songs (“Who Owns Who,” “Living on the 110,” “Strength in Numbers”), and their final release, “Made With Hate,” might have been the best thing they ever did.

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Angine de Poitrine (Photo by Constantin Monfilliette)

50. The Rolling Stones

From: London, UK

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: Because every 20 years they make a record worth hearing, even though every single track on Foreign Tongues is too long. It reimagines Amy Winehouse “Miss You”-style, that’s good for something, right? And if “Mr. Charm” reimagines “Star Star” as “Star Star,” well, better that than “Angie,” no?

What Have They Done for You Lately: Not only does “Hit Me in the Head” have “one of these days gonna fall down dead / it will go a lot quicker if you hit me in the head” and rhyme “puke” with “abuse,” it has Charlie Watts.

49. Butthole Surfers

From: San Antonio, TX

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: Because a quarter-century after their last LP, the Cronenbergs of rock have finally released the proper follow-up to their mutant radio hit “Pepper” and it’s the avant-sellout bricolage “Pepper” deserved to be on, a Check Your Head from dudes who really need their heads checked.

What Have They Done for You Lately: After the Astronaut is like an evil Cornershop album, a traffic jam of trip-hop and White Zombie riffs that’s dated in all the most mesmerizing ways; “Imbuya” emerges from a time capsule where the Prodigy were still storming MTV, while “Junkie Jenny in Gaytown” is a ballsy stab at a bhangra chant.

48. Stuck

(Photo by Vanessa Valadez)

From: Chicago, IL

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: “Today’s solutions are tomorrow’s problems” is the understandable credo of what’s sure to be a whole generation of alt-rockers naming their releases things like Do Not Reply and Content That Makes You Feel Good and Stuck will still be better and tighter at it than most. From its whirring dial-up synths to post-punk hooks where you least expect them, this year’s Optimizer wasn’t being completely sarcastic about its ambitions.

What Have They Done for You Lately: The wound-up Les Savy Fav successor “Net Negative” and the freakshow riff in its knotted chorus are net positives.

47. Team Dresch

(Photo by JJ Gonson)

From: Olympia, WA

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: Because these “queercore” punk legends came away from a spirited anniversary tour playing their only two albums in full every night (the raw Personal Best and the great Captain My Captain) wanting to make a third and now they’ve done just that 30 years after changing the lives of countless riot grrrls, LGBTQ youths, and allies with good ears.

What Have They Done for You Lately: The upcoming Furthermore updates 1995’s still-too-valid “Hate the Christian Right!” with the equally angry “Growing Underground,” some more melodic moves reminiscent of Kaia Wilson and Melissa York’s tenure in the Butchies (“And Now Your Face”), and both of the drummers they’ve ever had, a move that remarkably, they’re not the only reunited band on this list to think up.

46. Scarab

From: Philadelphia, PA

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: Stereogum’s Best Hardcore Album of 2025, Burn After Listening was eight songs in 13 minutes typified by and peaking with “Ugly.” “Feed pure violence into your heart,” Tom Breihan beckons; I agree, reminds me of Slipknot’s Iowa except the hour-plus Iowa keeps on stabbing long after you’ve bled out. This doesn’t (complimentary).

What Have They Done for You Lately: “Ten Foot Shadow,” which sounds like being thrown from a rollercoaster and ends before you splat the ground.

45. WU LYF

From: Manchester, UK

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: “Love don’t have to be so hard,” rasp the soulful wannabe enigmas slash reluctant arena theoreticals too warm to disappear or even obscure themselves forever. To sweeten the deal, the more tuneful and legible of their two albums in 14 years is the one not recorded in a church. Far be it from me to argue they should have spent that sabbatical doing something other than being a fool for love while the world burned for a significant portion of it. But the grandiosity of their sound, hearts, and track lengths suggests the long-awaited A Wave That Will Never Break may have gotten its own Wikipedia page if they had anything new to say about their subject.

What Have They Done for You Lately: I’ll settle for 11 minutes of “Tib St. Tabernacle” half-appropriating Geese: “these hard times call for furious dancing.”

44. Goetia

(Photo by Travis Stone)

From: Washington D.C.

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: Not to be confused with the Memphis thrash band (thanks Encyclopaedia Metallum!), there’s nothing wrong with a little death metal from D.C. to subsidize being governed by a death cult from D.C. And after a few EPs, they finally managed to cull together 32 minutes of speed-horror debut full-length, entitled (close enough) Mortuary Cult.

What Have They Done for You Lately: Harmonized a few queasy guitar solos and unleashed a little necksnapper called “Posthumous Execution” that could pass for hardcore. Though I don’t know why they called a track “Excarnation” when “defleshing” is way more death metal.

43. Man/Woman/Chainsaw

(Photo by Emma Swann)

From: London, UK

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: Two decades ago, you couldn’t throw a pint glass without hitting a band like this — especially in Canada but we’ve also learned not to count out Los Campesinos! — with six members on multiple instruments (most strikingly violin) and sharing multiple vocal duties. Their pile of press includes references to post-punk and Black Country, New Road but long-anticipated full-length debut Cannonball is much more polished and disciplined, even if it vacillates from a country opener (“Only Girl”) to a tango (“Flick of the Wrist”) to a witchy waltz with a title you wouldn’t expect (“Get Up and Dance”).

What Have They Done for You Lately: The gradual fist-pumping swell of “Nosedive” is destined to follow big-tent indie standards like “You! Me! Dancing!” and “Wake Up” to encores in sizable venues.

42. Um, Jennifer?

(Photo by Eva Smittles)

From: Brooklyn, NY

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: Fig Regan and Eli Scarpati have been cursed with catchy toons since at least last year’s Um Comma Jennifer Question Mark, which strung together winsome bits with the amateurish charm required to put across titles like “Girl Class” and “Old Grimes.” This year’s five-song Dirty Twice EP rocks harder, polishes shinier, and skronks with the atonal shrapnel required to put across a title like “Bushwick Ratbag.”

What Have They Done for You Lately: The sticky impostor syndrome battle royale “Jodie Comer” lingers in the mind like ghost pepper on the tastebuds.

41. Dry Cleaning

(Photo by Max Miechowski)

From: South London, UK

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: I lumped DC into what I call talkwave even though this South London quartet towered over art-rock contemporaries like Squid and Black MIDI and fellow chatterboxes Black Country, New Road and Yard Act. Florence Shaw still talks even if there’s not much of a wave anymore; even Yard Act has upped the singing these days. And Tom Dowse is still a more inventive and recognizable guitarist than their obvious precedent Life Without Buildings had on hand.

What Have They Done for You Lately: Secret Love is Shaw’s quietest album and Dowse’s catchiest. Admittedly, the latter’s become so potent at his hook riffs/loops/repetitions that it now tends to drown out the former. But the overall effect is you won’t care because the strange juxtaposition always sounds good.

40. Parts & Labor

From: Brooklyn, NY

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: One of the most underrated bands from Brooklyn’s Pitchfork/Vice indie-cultural peak era 20 years ago combined BJ Warshaw and Dan Friel’s jailbroken-circuit electronics with roaring anthemic choruses and the frantic drumming of great music journalist Christopher Weingarten, who was replaced by the more tempered Joe Wong after his departure. They decided if they’re gonna come back it’s got to be big: a double album, epic song lengths (including “Endless Cycle,” a four-part, collectively 20-minute first single), and both drummers.

What Have They Done for You Lately: Set of All Sets is propulsive enough to support its ambitious architecture, especially on “Haunted Limbs,” which would make a hell of a renewal anthem a new generation of democratic socialists: “that work is long.” It ought to hold fans for another 15 years at least.

39. Telehealth

(Photo by Mikayala Neves)

From: Seattle, WA

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: Because the most withering band name in years belongs to the Devo derivatives of the quiet-quitting era you’d hope, monotoning about being a “glow-up survivor” in the “clean coal dust bowl” (and don’t forget “flora, fauna, Dolce Gabbana” or “calling the cops / artisanal hops”).

What Have They Done for You Lately: This year’s Green World Image is so on-the-nose it’s a zit, but that doesn’t mean you’re too good for “Kokomo 2” (“Aruba, Jamaica / they’re tracking your data”) or “Things I’ve Killed” (“no kings just queens / gimme that guillotine”).

38. Imperial Triumphant

From: New York, NY

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: Only in the bizarro world of “blackened death metal” does wacko post-Mike Pattonness beat the meat-and-potatoes grind of, oh, Sanguisugabogg (always wanted to type that). So this nutjob trio, who has (separately) covered “Night in Tunisia” and teamed up with Kenny G, evokes the pre-Patton Dillinger Escape Plan on 2025’s Goldstar locked in battle with Sun Ra Arkestra, twisting eventfully in the nick of time to come out the other side jamming on history’s first great metal riff.

What Have They Done for You Lately: No, not Sabbath — “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).”

37. Imperial Teen

From: San Francisco, CA

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: Imperial Teen’s previous album way back in 2019 may have nailed them with “We Do What We Do Best,” but the forthcoming All Over You is this fantastic foursome’s meatiest work since the unassailable four-album run that took them from 1996 to 2007 by exploiting Velvets-style two-chord minimalism in the service of power-pop bubblegum and gradually piling on the synths. “We’re so alive in overdrive,” the current single correctly predicts.

What Have They Done for You Lately: All Over You has more out-and-out (and out-and-proud) anthems than any IT since The Hair, The TV, The Baby and the Band, but the best of the best is “Kiss It Goodbye,” which ascends to the heavens in metronomic, multitracked lockstep that could reverberate across arenas if they didn’t prefer dives.

36. The Mountain Goats

From: Durham, NC

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: With John Darnielle you can’t look a gift horse in the mouth. His poet-laureate rep precedes a National Book Award nomination and several boomboxes worth of sui generis singer-songwriting that eventually lured Jon Wurster out of Superchunk, and even his most gnomic works (last year’s Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan, say) have pleasures for those of us who don’t hang on his every word. But they’re not always great and when they’re great they don’t always rock, so the surprisingly grunge-themed new Days, which has its share of both, is his most patently crowd-pleasing since 2022’s action-packed Bleed Out, down to its stunt promo for “Candlebox” by opening a few dates for the ‘90s also-rans.

What Have They Done for You Lately: The Afropop-like swooning bass that anchors “Best Hard Rock Albums 2013” and “Going to Fennario” back-to-back is merely the tip of the iceberg as regards two gorgeous new standards in a rich and vast oeuvre.

35. CS Cleaners

From: Brooklyn, NY

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: For three or four songs their debut What’s This? couldn’t make me happier: twin-guitar tonal fuckery, gulping Richard Hell adenoid upfront, “Rot Collector” applying the pull-off precision from New York Dolls’ “Babylon” to Parquet Courts’ motorik morse codes. Thought CS could be shorthand for “from CBGB to Sunbathing Animal” before the second half spaced out.

What Have They Done for You Lately: The miraculous, hiccupping single “Come & Go” comes on like the Hives’ unapologetic bravado applied to Richard Lloyd and Tom Verlaine’s dueling-lightsaber lead constructions: “come out on top / while you’re kicking rocks.”

34. Sugar

From: Athens, GA

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: Because Bob Mould’s second band was every bit as excellent as Hüsker Dü on their two-and-a-half albums in two-and-a-half years: Copper Blue, Beaster, and File Under: Easy Listening. What they couldn’t replicate in fury they made up for with his stepped-up tunesmithing (Grant Hart wrote the Dü anthems you sang along with) and, finally, the sky-swallowing production Mould’s guitar always deserved. For the first time in three decades they’re touring, off of hopefully more than just three good new standalone singles.

What Have They Done for You Lately: Say this: if “Long Live Love,” “Keep Looping,” and especially thunderous throwback “House of Dead Memories” were noise-pop as surging and spectacular as “Your Favorite Thing” or “Tilted,” they’d be at the top of this list.

33. Westside Cowboy

(Photo by Emma Swann)

From: Manchester, UK

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: Their jangling, jittery collective pulse reminds me of Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever if a little more demure and rife with harmonic guitar tricks that grew up on Isaac Brock. So if any of that turns your head you’ll fancy a bite.

What Have They Done for You Lately: For an unremarkable title like It Goes On, Westside Cowboy’s debut is more than self-assured, especially in its rhythmic propulsion, but also with the melodies intensified on top, especially “Worried Age,” a tumbling and accelerating duet between Reuben Haycocks and Aoife Anson-O’Connell that sounds like the first of many encore staples they have in them. And the irresistible simplicity of “Pin Up Boys” proves they can do it scrappy, too.

32. Girl Scout

(Photo by Lamia Karic)

From: Stockholm, Sweden

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: Ordinary Swedish alt-rockers with a confident hit ratio peaking with 2024’s rapid-fire “I Just Needed You to Know” and its better-than-ordinary parent EP Headache finally unveiled Brink, a debut album that plays more like a sophomore one. Strong but not stronger, ever so slightly more sophisticated in its structures, arrangements, and production, they pile on the reverb masquerading as heft that they temporarily nail down with songs as good as “Uh-Huh” and “Operator.”

What Have They Done for You Lately: “Same Kids” is the new-wavey bid for a hit single that will endure long after the promotion budget’s depleted.

31. Militarie Gun

From: Los Angeles, CA

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: While it bloats inadvisably towards the end and fumbled the opportunity to be titled God Owes Me Money, Turnstile’s chief rivals in the hardcore-to-arena-rock pipeline avoided the sophomore slump with God Save the Gun and its myriad highs from the big speller “B A D I D E A” to the warping chugger “Maybe I’ll Burn My Life Down” to the unconventional Blink-182 shoutalong “Throw Me Away.”

What Have They Done for You Lately: The loop-heavy trip-hop hesher “Kick” sums up their world-fucked ethos: “if I kicked you in the face, I’m sorry / But I would do it again.” I’d love to hear Elton John remix that one.

30. Pony

From: Windsor, Ontario, Canada

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: Throughout the 2020s, Sam Bielanski and Matty Morand have been challenging Charly Bliss’ throne for live-action-Josie-and-the-Pussycats-core supremacy on three airtight albums now but the new Clearly Cursed finally emerges the victor.

What Have They Done for You Lately: Come to think of it, they’re also coming for Bully and vintage that dog. on the honey-dripping crunchfest “Every Little Crumb.”

29. The Paranoid Style

From: Washington D.C.

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: I almost need them to make a bad album because I’m tired of writing the same things, but Elizabeth Nelson’s just not cut out for it. That spiel again: witty rock critic cum hyper-referential bandleader with turnt-up guitarist hubby continue to turn legends into peers by gigging with the Hold Steady, duetting with the Wrens’ Charles Bissell, and employing ex-dB Peter Holsapple. This year’s Known Associates once again ODs on Live Stiffs musically and lyrically offers up wink-nudge delights for a demographic best described as “excited for a song entitled ‘Elegant Bachelors’.” Now with 38% more sax!

What Have They Done for You Lately: Lodged “White Wine Whatever” (and all attendant musings about “a U.S. Open of Klonopin in hell”) firmly into your skull, which is saying something on an album that also includes “A Barrier to Entry” and “Shut Up and Deal.”

28. Heavens to Betsy

(Photo by Chloe Aftel)

From: Olympia, WA

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: For the first time in over 30 years, Corin Tucker’s first band is touring, and they’ve unearthed a whole album’s worth of uncollected and sometimes unreleased recordings to follow up 1994’s great Calculated with Baby’s Gone in October.

What Have They Done for You Lately: If the classic, previously demo-only “My Secret” and the never-before-heard “Ain’t Never Goin’ Back” are any indication, there could be another Sleater-Kinney-grade batch of revelations in Tucker and Tracy Sawyer’s backlog.

27. The Cucumbers

From: Hoboken, NJ

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: Life partners Deena Shoshkes and Jon Fried declined to go full-time when they were Run-D.M.C.’s labelmates in the ‘80s, but they did consecrate “My Boyfriend,” a classic so indelible it enjoyed some MTV rotation. It’s becoming an event again whenever they make music for fun, as on 2023’s impressive Old Shoes and this year’s dynamite As You Heard Me, which a subtitle notes is the soundtrack to Fried’s short story “Hello George.” For once a concept album is reverse-engineered songs-first, doubly an advantage because they’re wonderful without any need to be much else.

What Have They Done for You Lately: Shoshkes’ “There’s a Crop Circle on My Daddy’s Land” gets fictionalized as a charting country hit because it’s totally plausible, though the sly “Delete” could be on its tail.

26. Lime Garden

From: Guildford and Brighton, UK

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: On Lime Garden’s surefooted sophomore outing, Maybe Not Tonight, Chloe Howard combines the droll quaver of 2014 Kae Tempest with the pained sustain of Standard Fare’s Emma Kupa, but if that’s too obscure for you, try Lola Young fronting Wet Leg. A good, promising record from an upper-percentile occupant of future indie landfill lists, especially on the funky “Cross My Heart,” the poppy “Undressed,” and one of the absolute best songs of the year, which no one seems to have pushed as a single…

What Have They Done for You Lately: In the tradition of “Dancing on My Own” and “Tonight I’m Getting Over You,” Howard’s amazing “Always Talking About You” tries to manifest an almost entirely quotable version of herself: “I wanna be an asshole and I still wanna win,” “I want everyone to say that’s that bitch,” “and I want to make all the businessmen hard.” But she can’t do any of that if she’s always talking about you, stupid!!

25. Nuclear Tomb

From: Baltimore, MD

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: This “weirdo thrash” outfit from B-More cites both crust punk and Rush, plus “psychedelic violence” and apparently a different kind of “skronk rock” than, say, James Chance. But if they’re progressive anything on 2026’s Epoch Inhumane, they keep almost every track around three minutes and the twists and turns aren’t overly technical, mostly just there to thwart rampant ADHD. They strike with more venom and internal wiring than Blood Incantation and I don’t think you’ll have to worry about hearing Rush.

What Have They Done for You Lately: Sequencing “Terminally Emboldened” and “The Coward’s Curse” right next to each other; after all, aren’t those two sides of the same coin?

24. Body Type

(Photo by Jack Saltmiras)

From: Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: This quartet’s 2023 breakthrough Expired Candy is the one to beat, but no one is weaving more thoughtful and unexpected time-release guitar hooks into otherwise foursquare rock that would make the Coathangers proud. The new Tally is admittedly slower and subtler, but so’s their very best tune, “Tread Overhead,” meaning let them cook.

What Have They Done for You Lately: If Tally’s closing diptych of “Do You Want to Cry Your Eyes Out?” and “Everything All in a Row” is too lovely for you, try the unsteady riffs of its title vamp.

23. Gogol Bordello

(Photo by James Todd Miller)

From: All over tbh

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: The best live act on Earth never gets the chance to be exhausting when they only rattle off two fistfuls of anthems every 3-5 years, and their voracity for new sounds to subsume is second only to their momentous momentum. So the synths and circular New Order melodies on their first album since 2022’s Putin-infuriated Solidaritine mesh refreshingly with Gogol’s natural wedding-band pulse, and the title We Mean It, Man! might as well be referring to recruiting Bernard Sumner as a duet partner.

What Have They Done for You Lately: You heard me, synths and circular New Order melodies. Of course you’re curious; proceed directly to “Ignition.”

22. Mekons

From: Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: Because these uncompromised leftist cowpunks are perhaps the greatest of the still-at-it bands, currently touring Horror, their best album since, well, their best album, 2002’s OOOH! (Out of Our Heads). It’s probably not a coincidence that these freedom fighters conjure their strongest and most furious material during a “War Economy,” which in keeping with the theme of Horror includes “The Western Design,” “Private Defense Contractor,” and who could forget “Sad and Sad and Sad?” See them before the world ends.

What Have They Done for You Lately: I nominate Horror’s rousing “You’re Not Singing Anymore” to join the ranks of “Last Dance,” “Ghosts of American Astronauts,” and “Millionaire,” as in “I love a millionaire,” which they now perform as “I hate a billionaire.”

21. Eddy Current Suppression Ring

(Photo by Chris Middlebrook)

From: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: These minimalist Melbourne stumblebums reemerged from the garage for just the second time in 16 years for the only acceptable reason: they discovered new riffs and wanted to show us. And more than ever, the delight on In Light of Recent Events is in the winging-it, banana-peel sound of them, like it’s always a pleasant surprise or gasp of relief when they accidentally slip and land on the right note. But the drunken tension building up to that cannot be taught.

What Have They Done for You Lately: The rushed, early-R.E.M. jangle of “My World” comes with a perfectly Buzzcockian refrain (“what I’d give for another day with you / what I’d give for another lay with you”), though “Bop” is a bop.

20. Cold Court

(Photos by Claude J. Easy)

From: Philadelphia, PA

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: Over seven painstaking Ableton frankensteins on their debut EP \ (^_^) /, the best-produced new DIY rockers since you can remember remix themselves into a screeching, Skrillex-style oblivion without breaking the mold of ordinary songwriting, or perhaps that’s the very reason the material leaves so much room for tech-scrambling? Either way, “Nina” is the best early Arctic Monkeys tune in two decades.

What Have They Done for You Lately: “Backslang” is a ten-car pileup of addictive dentist-drill sonics that pounds and swaggers like the Big Pink’s “Velvet” fed through a digital meat grinder.

19. Ratboys

(Photo by Bobby Nicholas III)

From: Chicago, IL

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: After the Beths decided Straight Line Was a Lie, they vacated their seats as the premier normies of choice so these slick and tuneful pros could move in, already poised when 2023’s “The Window” elevated them with, among other things, a pandemic tearjerker about Julia Steiner’s dying grandmother. “What’s it gonna take to open up?” she sings at the outset of Singin’ to an Empty Chair, the best-reviewed rock album of 2026.

What Have They Done for You Lately: I’ve been slow to embrace them (I did say normies) but Steiner is a lovely melodist and her guitarist partner (just like the Beths!) Dave Sagan does have a style of his own, evinced by the bouncy countrified leads on highlights like “Open Up” and “Penny in the Lake.” God I wish they’d bang out more fizzy three-minute rockers like “Anywhere,” though.

18. Downtown Boys

From: Providence, RI

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: Victoria Ruiz is mad as hell — and she should be after her forced resignation as an NYC public defender due to Zionist bullshit — and she channeled it into Public Luxury, Downtown Boys’ first album in nearly a decade, which also happens to be her band’s best ever. From turns dancy (“You’re a Ghost”) to crunchy (“Sirena”), they let in hooks from their signature horns (“The City Begins”) to bright neon synths (“Mi Concha”) without compromising on the leftism you’d expect from bilingual punks who titled their last two albums Cost of Living and Full Communism. Considering the cost of living these days, they might just sell you on full communism.

What Have They Done for You Lately: “Where you thought the city would end, the city begins,” they exclaim on their hungriest rocker, but the gorgeous “Yellow Sun” may be even more vital. Best to split the difference with “Albuterol,” which straddles the best of their many worlds.

17. BIG | Brave

From: Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: Ninth album In Grief or in Hope is what you wish Low sounded like and what you wish doom metal sounded like in one convenient stop, with the added bonus of opener “What May Be the Kindest Way to Leave” being what you wish the last Fever Ray sounded like.

What Have They Done for You Lately: The Antarctic swell-sculpting of “An Uttering of Antipathy” proves definitively that two wrongs make a right.

16. Total Wife

(Photo by Sean Booz)

From: Nashville, TN

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: It’s surprising, and foolhardy, how few bands of the current-wave (and biggest) shoegaze invasion take their cues from Kevin Shields. Maybe they think they’ve got their own juice, ha. This Nashville duo doesn’t fix what isn’t broken, and they ramp up the drill ‘n’ bass Shields was starting to adopt himself on m b v. Turns out you can get pretty far on those alone.

What Have They Done for You Lately: Two-thirds of 2025’s Come Back Down was sonically startling enough to quell the wait for a fourth My Bloody Valentine album (right on schedule in 2035) by a cigarette or three.

15. Robber Robber

(Photo by Jackie Freeman)

From: Burlington VT

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: The youth haven’t been this sonic in some time so it’s good to hear breakcore jousting with Water From Your Eyes-style murmurings and Serena Maneesh-style texturings on Robber Robber’s funhouse sophomore effort Two Wheels Move the Soul.

What Have They Done for You Lately: “The Sound It Made” is as exciting as indie-rock has been in some time, a clamor of blown-out “Crown on the Ground” sirens and Crystal Method breakbeats designed to bash in your skull so candy falls out.

14. Agriculture

(Photo by Steve Gerrard)

From: Los Angeles, CA

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: The Spiritual Sound is the first black metal album to interest me since Deafheaven’s New Bermuda a decade ago, but where Deafheaven took their cues from shoegaze (blackgaze is a term some actually use) and let prettiness fade in and out of the music in waves, Agriculture specialize in on-a-dime surprises like prime System of a Down. One’s called “Dan’s Love Song.”

What Have They Done for You Lately: Bet you a shot of absinthe you can hum along with the chorus of “My Garden” even if barely anyone can shriek the rest.

13. Low Cut Connie

From: Philadelphia, PA

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: Impressive as Adam Weiner’s current motley crew were on their most primetime-ready albums yet, Private Lives and Art Dealers, the ultra-professional air took some of the grease out of the garage. So this year’s protest-fronted Livin in the USA foregrounds tightness over just ten tracks with their most in-your-face production and best recreation of their one-of-a-kind live shows yet. And their best studio job in years ain’t all serious business, as three different party-rock dazzlers called “Get Down,” “Oh Yeah,” and “Everybody” pound away.

What Have They Done for You Lately: If the spectacular glam-stomp “Can’t Be Wrong” sounds like an actual hit, well, you may have caught it at a Phillies game, or perhaps on Kimmel, yakety-sax break and all.

12. Joyce Manor

(Photo by Dan Monick)

From: Torrance, California

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: One of the most beloved emo bands of the 2010s evaded me as beloved emo bands do until 2022’s 17-minute 40 oz. to Fresno finally made remarkably hooky use of their famous brevity. That set them up for this year’s 19-minute I Used to Go to This Bar, which damn well may be the catchiest album released in a year where Charli swerved slightly art-rock and Olivia moped out with the Cure.

What Have They Done for You Lately: How catchy are we talking? “After All You Put Me Through” finds a new use for the Stones-funk riff from Michael Jackson’s “Black or White,” without resorting to CGI Bubbles.

11. The Hives

(Photo by Chris Searles)

From: Fagersta, Västmanland, Sweden

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: The most physically exciting cartoons to score a hit in the 2000s brandished titles like “Hail Hail Spit n’ Drool” and generally sang, played, and operated like they had C4 strapped to their vests, which also explains why they burned up fast despite collabs with Timbaland and the Neptunes that thought beyond their 15 minutes. Instead, they mounted a more-than-respectable comeback in 2023 doing what they’ve always done and clawed their way back to the top in 2025 with the self-explanatory The Hives Forever Forever the Hives.

What Have They Done for You Lately: From start to finish, The Hives Forever Forever the Hives is a shook-up cyanide soda but the garage quintet’s obsession with outsmarting the enemy takes on new resonance when they deploy their might against the fascist threat on an actual protest like “Legalize Living.”

10. The Messthetics

(Photo by Diona Mavis / Impulse! Records via Universal Music)

From: Washington D.C.

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: Fugazi grandfathered the only regional punk scene to garner constant allusions to jazz for its bands’ lopsided structures, unusual chords, and disregard for traditional verses and choruses. Might as well give back, right? So Brendan Canty Joe Lally started a fusion combo even though the former especially still pounds like he’s playing basements, and their two electrifying LPs with sax firebrand James Brandon Lewis aren’t just their best music in years but frequently hookier than, well, Fugazi.

What Have They Done for You Lately: “Clutch” is one of 2026’s most exciting musical moments before it even crunches to a climax, and the most epic performance of Lally and Canty’s careers with just four chords.

9. Worldpeace DMT

(Photo by Thomas Connelly)

From: London, UK

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: With “laptop twee” coming soon to a Discord near you, this arm of it is both arch and generous enough to aim their childlike sopranos at “Big Yellow Taxi,” because they’re more tuneful than Ear and less laptop than Josephine’s Next Million Miles. The duo of Leo Fincham and sometime Femcel Rowan Miles combine freak-folk junk instrumentation with the Magnetic Fields’ adherence to tune. “Artrock” is the one that sounds cheapest, thank god.

What Have They Done for You Lately: Current EP Flowers Powers could be this year’s 1000 gecs if trolling still made sense. It makes even less sense to digitally upgrade Elephant 6 but that’s probably what “Dinosaur Punks” is.

8. Sweet Pill

(Photo by Heriberto Gallegos)

From: Philadelphia, PA

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: Sure, Zayna Youssef can howl like Hayley Williams, but the real reason her band could become this era’s Paramore is because their interlocking guitars actually braid up into something aesthetically appealing unlike so many of their emo peers. Their second full-length Still There’s a Glow is overflowing with melodic generosity if its attractions are a bit too tangled to call hooks, though the goth-grunge “No Control” is as much of a surprise as any other stray pleasures it lobs your way.

What Have They Done for You Lately: The Pride of Philly give “Sunblind” everything they’ve got at the outset of Still There’s a Glow in under three minutes of hypercharged power-pop decorated with the slippery fretwork of studied emo showoffs.

7. Big Thief

(Photo by Troy Gonzales)

From: Brooklyn, NY

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: They were already in an enviable position on this list for Double Infinity alone, an unlikely combo of their grooviest and prettiest album at once that sounded even better live, especially the title tune and the bass-led “No Fear.” But the sudden announcement that they’re about to unveil Horsepower, a triple album featuring Lucinda Williams and Iris DeMent (and, okay, Gillian Welch) as well as unreleased tunes like “Muscle Memory” that were already unexpected highlights of said tour just reestablishes them as the generational juggernauts they are.

What Have They Done for You Lately: In the meantime, all those percussive and inviting layers of Double Infinity are there for the burrowing, with “All Night All Day” the warmest and fuzziest paean to peen since…the Naysayer’s “Pure Beauty?”

6. Feeble Little Horse

(Photo by Tim McMahan)

From: Pittsburgh, PA

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: As sheer sound designers, they’re bold and colorful enough to make the top ten of these annual rankings on the strength of “This Is Real” alone last year. And while I wish they included it on this year’s Bitknot, which would have remained under half an hour even so, Pro-Tooled indie-rock doesn’t come better, tighter, or tidier, a boon when you’re corralling sonics this disparate and digitally dissected. They always provide something to listen to, whether it’s the chopped-up voices at the end of “Doorway” or the pennywhistle that immediately follows on “Poison” or the most refreshing cloud-rap I’ve ever heard on “Upside Down” as a palate cleanser between fuzz-pop and broken toy noises.

What Have They Done for You Lately: Everyone knows pretty ballads are the secret weapon of sound-anarchy outfits, so “Rewind” is the pop jewel Lydia Slocum’s been guarding from normies behind all those crude loops and bursts of unruly distortion.

5. Jeff Evans Porkestra

From: Atlanta, GA

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: Having won me over fast with ragtag Americana tunelets last year about leaving a trail of puppies everywhere he buries his bone (but not if he don’t bring his baby her “Sunday Beer”), Evans’ swillharmonic doubles down and rocks out on the excellent new full-length Telling the Bees, from the Stonesy tale of driving nine hours for a “Hundred Dollar Ham” to the Stampfel-esque travails of Johnny Ding Dong on “Seven Seas.”

What Have They Done for You Lately: The stark, drumless showstopper “Hard Week for Love” leads right into “Big Enough,” a rocker so mean it’s got modulations straight out of “Trampled Underfoot,” and dares to ask “am I playing big enough?” How about now?

4. Angine de Poitrine

(Photo by Jerome Brunet)

From: Sanguenay, Quebec, Canada

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: Because the biggest rock breakthrough of 2026 isn’t just an art-prog duo that smoked Geese on the album charts with not just their new album but their 2024 debut as well, but they’re actually good — listenable, funky, fast, fun. These traits aren’t completely incompatible with prog but they’re rare as a polka-dotted schnoz, and double-threat guitarist-bassist Khn de Poitrine sports that, too. Quite the magic act for viral Québécois sensations who sound like Marc Ribot inhaled a bunch of Pity Stix and forced Tal National and Primus to play dueling microtonal scales to the death.

What Have They Done for You Lately: This year’s Vol. II delivers virtually nothing but what it promises; if you enjoyed 30 seconds of whatever you caught of them on TikTok you’ll enjoy 37 minutes that switches it up only as much as needed to stay groovy, a crucial credo because it’s hardly a core tenet of prog.

3. Sweeping Promises

From: Lawrence, KS

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: Married Boston transplants Lira Mondal and Caufield Schnug didn’t just warm up Bikini Kill’s audience when I caught them in 2024, they set us aflame. But the lo-fi albums I gleaned weren’t afforded the same widescreen impact until now. Third album’s the charm with You Say I Romanticize, which snarls like Essential Logic or We’ve Got a Fuzzbox and We’re Gonna Use It while piling on the harmonies like Holly and the Italians or, why not, Blondie for the perfect smelting of ‘80s postpunk and polished-rock alloy.

What Have They Done for You Lately: Almost anything on the new album packs a spiked punch in both the liquor and brass knuckles senses but the curious title “My Friend’s an Entomologist” barrels down the highway from the opening fuzz bass and jumps like the Speed bus once Mondal’s triple-tracked howl takes the wheel. Easily the catchiest usage of the word “exoskeleton” in the history of music, Mars Volta included.

2. Geese

(Photo by Amanda M. Hatfield)

From: Brooklyn, NY

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: Because like the Clash and Radiohead before them, they’re The Only Band That Matters, and so much more fun than Wilco or the 1975 this time. Not only does the insane description Stones + Radiohead actually defend itself fiercely on a percussion-kooky banger like “Getting Killed,” but what a thing to even be. Cameron Winter, who’s already sold out Carnegie Hall by himself before he can rent a car and just announced a Paul Thomas Anderson-directed document of the experience, expresses his mock-gospel vibrato to awe a generation of stans who fear being cringe more than anything else. He’s got jokes (“Taxes,” “100 Horses”) and he expels pain (“Au Pays Du Cocaine,” “Husbands”) and every single one sounds classic, especially “Cobra,” his biggest Jagger rip of all.

What Have They Done for You Lately: Maybe we will see a more rapturously received rock album in the 2020s than last year’s Getting Killed — Wednesday is due next year and they have a direct line to Weezer’s hookups — but the bar is high for good reason. Even when I was still getting used to them I couldn’t deny the clattering whirlwind force of “Long Island City Here I Come,” thanks to secret weapon Max Bassin swinging at his drumkit like he’s got eight tentacles.

1. Twisted Teens

(Photo courtesy of Ground Control Touring)

From: New Orleans, LA

Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2026: First thought was what a compacy, punchy, catchy little band with relentless energy, and 2014 Parquet Courts came to mind before I even knew they had a second 2026 album in them. But like fellow heavyweights to occupy these upper echelons of their time, they take bigger swings (and in such a short span) than initial impressions imagined. Like Big Thief, they appear to be most empowered at their most ambitious, with a third 2026 album supposedly on the way. They deploy lap steel for twangy hooks like Wednesday if not noise like 2010s Wussy; if anything the one-after-another-after-another energy is closer to Funeral Dress, a pace that Wussy themselves didn’t try to keep up for much longer. Their up-to-date trad suits clever lasciviousness like Low Cut Connie (“I might be your X but I can give you an O / then I might just give you ‘bout three in a row”) as well as observations like “western psychology is colonialism.” So they have the balls of Geese, too. If they somehow manage to pull off three great 2026 albums they could give Karly Hartzman herself a run for her Benadryl.

What Have They Done for You Lately: Choose your own adventure, because Blame the Clown is the undeniable half-hour of power of virtually nothing but hyperactive garage hooks (peaking with “100 Bill Is Gone!” which questions a sex worker’s spending priorities) and Florida Water Blues is equally exquisite for showing what else they can do, including vulnerable.

She mugging but she cannot stop it: Rico Nasty (Photo by Emerald Arguelles)

I’ve admired Rico Nasty’s smack-a-bitch intensity ever since she sampled “Superthug” if not “Smack a Bitch” itself. Her single-minded devotion to lean, mean knuck-if-you-buck on 2019’s Kenny Beats (now Blume) team-up Anger Management was a rarer beast than it appeared, though I really flipped for the same year’s “Sandy,” a Spongebob reference turned drug-posi shoutalong that was anything but laid-back, and perhaps the best lunkheaded summer festival bait of its sort since Danny Brown’s “Smokin’ & Drinkin’.” Ever since, she’s experimented with everything from hyperpop to hardcore without breaking kayfabe.

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She’s never snitched, couldn’t snitch like you: Nia Archives (Photo by Iris Luz)

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Send his mouth way down south and kiss his ass goodbye: Swamp Dogg

YES

Swamp Dogg, Swamp Dogg Contemplates the Afterlife

He can fix that hole in you, by way of pal Jenny Lewis, but if you’re looking for heaven, go home. Nobody helps a liar, especially one whose feet and breath smell, though he did “pay tuition for your big head kids,” but that was a million tears ago because waka waka waka waka waka woo he’s through with you. So let’s just split the money because honey there ain’t nothin’ left to do except throw his brain in a hurricane and the deaf can have both his ears if they don’t mind the size. Never again will music get a singular weirdo like insurgent soul man Jerry Williams, who begins a song “SpongeBob doesn’t mean what he did” before zooming out to sketch a girl’s loving daddy lost in Afghanistan. All metaphysicals notwithstanding, I doubt this 84-year-old has made his final approach.

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Men of the strip? 98°

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Dial M for motherfucker: Bob Bert (photo courtesy of Bar/None)

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Biggest pimp of the year: Jill Scott (Photo by Kennedi Carter)

40. Bill Orcutt, Music in Continuous Motion

I’ve never played Harry Pussy or at least 50 of his other releases, just this and Music for Four Guitars. And if you dug Music for Four Guitars, you’ll dig this. If you’re somehow a fanatic for Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and Sonic Youth who hasn’t heard it, start there. Lovers of deep-tissue body music and repetition that feeds back comfort and chaos equally will feel right at home, especially on the Allmanesque “And Warm to the Touch,” and they might even wonder how many stories there are in the building. Should they sample any of his at least 50 other releases I’d love to know myself.

39. NMIXX, Heavy Serenade [EP]

The title song indeed flirts with metal Ariana, and why not throw in a rap section, but that’s just another day in the lab for the purveyors of 2025 classic “Blue Valentine” and its Dr. Strange-like manipulation of tempos. Even the trip-hop of “IDESERVEIT” gets treated like silly putty shifting five gears (and drum breaks) like Odelay or something. At what point does this simply become prog? “Different Girl” and its fucking Donald Fagen chord change might have the answer. Finale has the biggest surprise of all: “I wanna love you loud / Need a microphone speaker just so I can scream it out.”

38. The New Pornographers, The Former Site of the New Pornographers

Guilty of turning the phrase “powerless-pop” pejoratively, I’m impressed by how fully this album inhabits the notion in a useful way. 2023’s Continue as a Guest was their sleepiest ever, and initially this felt the same, but the New Pornographers’ tenth album is more sleepless, weary, alert for all the wrong reasons. And that was all before their drummer of more than a decade was convicted of felony possession of CSAM. Carl Newman can barely muster up his British affections when he sums up our current empire as “pure sticker shock / at the price on my head / in a pure sticker shock / thought I’d get more for it.” So they “give up on eloquence” and “have one more bonus Mai Tai” “in case I don’t make it back.” Same song shouts out the Thompson Twins. Rolling Stones-to-Fiona-Apple session master Charley Drayton takes over on rather sparse percussion compared to the heavy krautrock of Whiteout Conditions that informed the decade-long depression they’ve been battling now. One of the more hopeful titles here is a postcard from that foxhole: “Wish You Could See Me I’m Killing It.” And the not much snappier “Votive” is presumably the single for saying the quiet part out loud: “I’m just trying to keep the lights on.”

37. Olof Dreijer, Loud Bloom

As the Knife, Olof and Karin Dreijer had no generational peer except Sophie as sound designers who knew songwriting, and Sophie never lived long enough to explicate an interest in radical leftism if any. Karin’s made some great music as Fever Ray that engages both economics and sex, though 2023’s Radical Romantics felt a little sonically staid even though Olof reunited for a chunk. Maybe without the Knife the power balance is off, because sonics are everything on Olof’s solo debut, starting with that signature Knife synth that occupies “Rosa Rugosa” 20 years after perfecting it on Silent Shout. This is the most traditional dance music either utensil has made, though, less dark because what’s the point, and on a track like the Diva Cruz turn “Acuyuye,” the percussive give and synthesis with synthetics recalls the ebullient super-collective Les Amazones d’Afrique. What’s missing is less Fever Ray’s songcraft than the Knife’s exploratory structures, gender-bending framework, socialist urgency, not to mention the fact they didn’t always limit themselves to synths. But Olof throws a party if not a political one, and he used to rely on frontpersons like his sibling or Robyn to do that. Even flirting with conventional dance music his sound design still shakes the habitual.

36. Dry Cleaning, Secret Love

The big surprise, besides the Grammy itself, is how much the Grammy affected them. Or at least MVP guitar stylist Tom Dowse, who let Florence Shaw talk so much on 2022’s Stumpwork it unscrewed the song structures. Here the rhythm section locks into a reliable, unoriginal pulse and Dowse is suddenly all about nonstop hooks. “Joy” or “The Cute Things” could even buttress talkwave godmother Patti Smith. Shaw’s free associations are not her most far-out (a feat for the woman behind phrases such as “blood for breakfast”), but more than ever the most avant thing about them by far, and when they’re grooving like this even she can’t disrupt it. This comfort food won’t win new fans, but it feeds old ones just fine. Not a trace of punk here, though, post- or otherwise. I hope they don’t get any bright ideas about giving Idles a call when Life Without Buildings are back.

35. GENA, The Pleasure Is Yours

You know it’s gonna be funky when the acronym is so stupid, so “God Energy, Naturally Amazing” is Liv.e and Karriem Riggins (drummer for Robert Glasper types but also Paul McCartney) loosening up with downbeat broken loops rather than the ADHD-paced drum’n’bass of Girl in the Half Pearl. “Unspokern” is on Dilla time, “Doobie Doo Wow” is Low End Theory night dub, and, given their pedigrees, there’s simply no way the solo on “This Is So Crazy” isn’t consciously referencing Robert Fripp’s “Wimshurst guitar” on Eno’s classic “St. Elmo’s Fire.” So these stoned neo-soul miniatures are more than sketches if not quite songs, and Liv.e’s too sharp to ever set any vibe adrift on memory bliss. Her “I’m thinking ‘bout giving you the blues right now / I’m thinking ‘bout giving you a bruise right now” proves pain can be pleasure, too.

34. Robber Robber, Two Wheels Move the Soul

“The Sound It Made” primes you for something more dangerous than this turns out to be, but it’s hard to not root for haywire, drum-forward new indies who resist easy description for 30 minutes and prioritize sonic whiplash. Tunewise they’re close enough, but it’s the “hard stop, land flat, good talkback” that will bend your ear. They’re more confident about not knowing what they’re doing than the new Olivia. How about “Avalanche Sound Effect?” Good song, great genre.

33. Al Green, To Love Somebody [EP]

From algreen.bandcamp.com, one of the century’s finest singers (Black) singing four songs by three of its most celebrated artists (white): R.E.M.’s eternal “Everybody Hurts,” two Lou Reed selections, one of them my favorite Velvet Underground tune, and the Bee Gees’ title track, so indelible that Billy Corgan and Robert Smith tried it once. Would love to sic Cameron Winter on that one, or perhaps the Reverend on Cameron Winter. “Husbands” more than “Love Takes Miles.”

32. Buck 65, Do Not Bend

As tempting as it is to not call this 53-year-old white boy the most skilled, reverent, best hip-hop nostalgia act of all-time (sorry Jurassic 5), it’s even more tempting to listen to the fifth B-boy bouillabaisse of Buck’s world-beating 2020s comeback, which (finally) starts with the “Good Times” bassline and the credo “I like drum breaks and the stories they tell.” Next track bends it into an upright while “The Wooga” crescendos to a velcro-like ASMR and the second half has plenty of human beatbox. This might be his best in the way that King of Drums, Super Dope!, Punk Rock B-Boy, and Keep Moving might all be his best, though it’s closer than Punk Rock B-Boy. If only it had more rapping, because “ever lick a nine-volt battery / Can’t see myself working in a blindfold factory” and what sounds like some ICE taunting on “Don’t Forget the Chaos” could make one think they took the previous bricolages for granted. So no need to “hold your breath hostage” and definitely don’t “die for the sake of the art.”

31. Zach Bryan, With Heaven on Top

He’s almost certainly not the first asshole to namedrop Elliott Smith, whose tunes were fussy and undisciplined by comparison. Other than his interminable penchant for 78-minute, 25-song doorstops, this is as straight-ahead as rock gets, leaving no phrase unturned without any of them (or the copious brass and string additions) getting in the way of his steak-and-fries balladry. And it’s no data dump; feel free to nominate any cuts because I’m stumped. He should take his own advice in re: treating one’s baby better, but everyone else could use his two cents in re: crafty corn. “You were smiling like a thief with your cheek-tearing teeth.” “I’ll start a forest fire with my family tree.” “Your soul’s like an old Kentucky coal mine.” And of course, “she likes romance, good sex, music, and ruling the world.” But no, I’m not playing the acoustic version.

30. Angine de Poitrine, Vol. II

These viral virtuosos can’t possibly be prog’s first groove band but they have closed a major loophole for the genre being a duo who relies on loop pedals live. Which means the guitarist is also the bassist. Which means things do have to stay on the grid. Which means no multi-part beat-switch bullshit. Which means a normal drummer could pound out these spidery Eastern-scale workouts that call up everything from Tal National to Taraf de Haïdouks — admittedly a narrow stretch of the alphabet as well as the territory — just more punked up. “Utzp” and “Angor” climax in the proximities of Omar Souleyman’s sazman and Group Doueh, respectively. Analogies can go all night — how about Marc Ribot joins Man Man? Unlikely to top Christopher R. Weingarten’s “Lightning Bolt trapped inside Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” in Pitchfork, though.

29. Megan Moroney, Cloud 9

From “what doesn’t kill you calls you six months later” to “put your pretty head on my shoulder / See if over’s really over,” this whip-smart wrangler of the airtight three-minute song doesn’t always turn a cliché on its side, upside-down, or inside-out. But most of the time her aerodynamic deliverables sound like she did. Sometimes her husky drawl manages to catch each syllable around the hook so deftly that the cliché evolves on its own. But while her third set is about as musically assured as the first two, the first two didn’t make me think about clichés at all. Or make me want to chop the final four tracks.

28. Butthole Surfers, After the Astronaut

Five years after the great Beck jack “Pepper” ruled alt-airwaves apropos of n90sthing, this circus of a band let down everyone who still cared with the major-label compromise Weird Revolution, which shared more than half the tracks here as well as cowrites by Kid Rock and “Sweet Jane.” Thirty years after “Pepper” (and two months after S.G. Goodman covered it), they’ve reunited just to set that record straight with a bricolage of Cornershop trip-hop, White Zombie noise, and Gibby murmuring through a megaphone, evoking sound-rainbow winners from Karl Stephenson to No Age. Call it Bran Van 2026. All that’s missing is, well, “Pepper,” which would have made a poetic closing ceremony like “Good Vibrations” on Brian Wilson Presents Smile.

27. Olivia Rodrigo, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love

For someone really wearing her collegiate influences on her babydoll dress sleeves — album’s first 45 seconds are dead ringers for Rodrigo coverees the Magnetic Fields, Robert Smith gets two shout-outs in addition to one ill-fitting duet — the pastel chamber-synth production and on-the-one rhythms of her second breakup cycle in three records recall her homeschooled homegirl Taylor Swift more than anything else. This doesn’t make her most sodden and on-the-nose record bad; Swift hit a dependable baseline for years if not an irresistible one. So it’s to Ms. Rodrigo’s credit that Swift would never, ever write a song called “Maggots for Brains.” You’ll remember how the singles go (the pseudo-‘90s baby bends not “Lovesong” but “Disarm” and “Everlong” to her will on “The Cure”), but you’ll only sing along with “U + Me = <3” (“I know everybody changes / But I hope that we don’t”), the Chappell ruboff “Expectations” (“I won’t settle for a guy with a fake job”), and “Stupid Song,” OR3’s lone theater-kid classic. It’s a loaded question whether pop stars who double as young women owe us pleasure, but they certainly owe it to themselves. That’s why she’s been listening to CMAT. These days, we’ve got expectations.

26. B0YG1RL & Novagang, Exit 2B

I know better than to spin B0YG1RL’s other two 2026 albums that didn’t get Best New Music, even though it’s tempting. This type of quickstepping chaos screams lightning in a bottle: 24 minutes of woofer-rattling chants (don’t play “Rage & Rave” around annealed glass) and incompetently loud 8-bit synths and hyperdigitized takes on kompa and bouyon and other Caribbean dance musics I know less than nothing about. As trans Haitians double-targeted by the most pathetic presidency ever, the only appropriate stage-setter is dubbed “My People Will Destroy You.” When an English hook occasionally surfaces, it’s “I don’t give a fuck, baby.” The perfect soundtrack for your next Stonewall or fake hillbilly hunt.

25. Kim Gordon, Play Me

I finally came to terms with this being the captain of my favorite band’s solo sound, a disjunct blend of inorganic noise and borrowed hip-hop environments she feels compelled to sound off over but never sing. This music being beats, they’ve occasionally congealed into hooks, possibly even ones she designed, and there’s more of those on the first half of this than her other two Matador LPs combined. Then we arrived at “BYEBYE25!” an update of a two-year-old laundry list of free associations over a cool quasi-rage beat that now plays like Bob Guccione Jr.’s idea of hot-button bullet points: transgender, Hispanic, abortion, “men having sex with men.” Hearing it was a shock, the first thing this woman synonymous with a significant number of people’s idea of “cool” has done that’s inescapably “cringe.” Turns out it’s all words flagged by the radioactive administration putting Project 2025 into action. This is only a relief artistically. So strike the mean things I had to say about how the track included the term “privilege” but not “cultural appropriation.” Everything Trump touches turns to dysentery. Hopefully “Post Empire” proves prophetic, if not a party.

24. Pony, Clearly Cursed

Sam Bielanko and Matty Morand’s third half-hour of power- in twice as many years is the one that finally clicks as -pop: immediate, fizzy, bombastic, crafted, even a little disruptive on raucous highlight “Every Little Crumb.” Namely, hard to resist. Rocks harder than Letters to Cleo and Beebadoobee but not Charly Bliss or Bully. About as much as the live-action Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack.

23. Hemlocke Springs, The Apple Tree Under the Sea

Naomi Udu has toured with Chappell Roan, Doja Cat, and Ashnikko; that triangulates her theater-kid new wave as least as good as any description like “crushes Wednesday the show, not the band.” On her first true full-length, she hopscotches around an audio spectrum that veers from Dresden Dolls-cum-Disney villain songs to word-drunk disco you’ll want to follow with a lyric sheet. From the racial epithets uttered by a 73-year-old to his child bride/slave on “w-w-w-w-w” to “I paid a pretty penny to procure the pirates of Perai” on “head, shoulders, knees and ankles” (who gives a fuck about an oxford comma), no one else in pop is more eager to have her songs unpacked. “Milli Vanilli meets Scritti Politti” somehow isn’t queer enough.

22. Gogol Bordello, We Mean It, Man!

Their voracity for new sounds to subsume is second only to their momentous momentum — these lifers never get the chance to be exhausting when they only rattle off two fistfuls of anthems every 3-5 years. So the synths and circular New Order melodies mesh refreshingly with their natural wedding-band pulse and as always, they mean it, man: Bernard Sumner is Eugene Hütz’s most surprising duet partner yet. Even Hütz feels a little exhausted for once — by reality, who isn’t — figuring “we exist in a mystical realm and nobody knows how it works,” “‘cause in the end we are all only small-time mystics.” And in the latter, one of the most rousing new ones, he won’t even talk you out of suicide. But he knows it’s not the angels who deserve to die.

21. Aesop Rock & Homeboy Sandman, Miami Lice: Season Four [EP]

The Boy Sand and Aes Rock have never strengthened each other’s weaknesses more than on their fourth Lice collab and first in nine years. When Sand’s KRS-One-esque teacherisms veer too close to Paul Ryan (“Stop saying living’s hard / We all get dealt different cards”), Aesop injects necessary whimsy (“I’ll wash out any itsy bitsy spider who was once a gifted climber”). Each gets a solo showcase for the first time, with Aesop’s “Moving Day” a looser-limbed excursion than Sand’s “The 1,” another highlight where he makes being uptight sound dope (“The one who don’t swear like a minister / Who isn’t on Insta, think it’s too sinister”). Aesop the human Wikipedia rattles off boasts like “my keyboard only plays Earth tones” while Sand trash-talks the universe (“It’s nice to have some company / I was ahead of my time, glad you all caught up with me”). He also rhymes “emoji” with “born an OG.” And on the ultimate Rorschach test for their imaginations, what’s in “The Burgers”? Aes suggests “twisted limbs from triple murders” while Sand offers “history meets mystery meat,” and oh yeah, “junk mail from healthcare providers.” They’ve always got more. So bring on Lice Five: Interstellar Overdrive.

20. Girl Scout, Brink

Ordinary Swedish alt-rockers with a confident hit ratio peaking with 2024’s rapid-fire “I Just Needed You to Know” and its better-than-ordinary parent EP Headache finally unveil a debut album that plays more like a sophomore one. Strong but not stronger, ever so slightly more sophisticated in its structures, arrangements, and production, they pile on the reverb masquerading as heft and may not be able to nail it down with songs as good as “Same Kids,” “Uh-Huh,” or “Operator” forever. Local H couldn’t. But then they never tried to cop some of that sweet Alvvays money.

19. Itzy, Motto [EP]

Somehow, K-Pop is massaging the ADHD again after some years where the stuff that floated my way wasn’t much more interesting (re: denser) than Western pop, which imo is its job to be. You know “Glitch” will do the job, and “You and I” is even weirder with its degraded-mp3 Aesop Rock beat. Title song revives the slam of the boy-band boom only busier. After those come five “solo” tracks (you think they had a say?) with no loss of fizz, the best being Yeji’s velcro-Timbaland-salsa-huh “Pocket” but Lia’s arena ballad “Asylum” (immigration not psychosis) arrives just in time to let the ADHD breathe.

18. Black Nile, Indigo Garden

Grammy-nominated bassist and saxophonist who are also brothers claim Los Angeles enough to namedrop Nipsey Hussle in the press release, yet their shading and threading around this winding music they own feels secondary to the varying colors of keys and especially the drums, which explode into quasi-d’n’b or hang back as needed. Aaron Shaw’s blowing comes to the front around “Day Break” before a two-note tease glides into some authoritative, Eastern-mode soloing on centerpiece “City of Silent Angels.” But that doesn’t give the drums a break. Not at all. “Slauson Fog” makes that clear.

17. The Paranoid Style, Known Associates

Invokeés include Sonic Youth, Talk Talk, the Strokes, LCD Soundsystem, Linda Ronstadt and Pavement by way of allusion, Roy Buchanan, Danny Gatton, The Exorcist, Guys and Dolls, Jean-Luc Godard, Marcel Cerdan, Edith Piaf, Marlon Brando played by Chris Elliott, Hector & Achilles, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Rodgers & Hart, Lieber & Stoller, Leopold & Loeb, Cain & Abel for that matter, John Henry, King Midas, and “a U.S. Open of klonopin in hell.” Not all the associations are known and in seven of the first eight songs they function as calls to the titles’ response. It’s to Elizabeth Nelson’s eternal credit that her never-not-clever turns of phrase make great patter between refrains/mantras/what-have-you. And the Clarence-inspired squawks of Mountain Goats saxman Matt Douglas for providing a musical throughline on her most oblique offering since Underworld U.S.A. almost a decade ago. Major exception: “There’s people who should know better being led around like cattle.”

16. The Cucumbers, As You Heard Me: Songs From the Novella “Hello George”

“My Boyfriend” was the claim to fame of a short career for the Jersey couple of Deena Shoshkes and Jon Fried that transitioned into an occasional outlet after the ‘80s and returned with surprising potency after COVID, even though Shoshkes never stopped writing tunes. They gathered up a handful of gems for 2023’s Old Shoes, which found their son Jamie Fried on drums. And this year’s As You Heard Me: Songs From “Hello George” is even better. “Hello George” is a short story that the elder Fried, now a novelist, was inspired to pen based on Shoskes’ demos, about a character he named Daisy Steinberg, a thinly veiled analogue for his wife and bandmate. As You Heard Me has the same charming-ditties feel of the Cucumbers’ best ‘80s work with a little more roots in its DIY, which is probably why Steinberg is writing country hits in the story.

15. ILLIT, Mamihlapinatapai [EP]

NewJeans’ scabs/understudies are unquestionably victims of the same oppressive K-Pop-industrial complex that will unleash scores of tell-all docuseries in hopefully less than a decade. But they’re also not biting their predecessors anymore than NewJeans were biting PinkPantheress or Ariana Grande. This 13-minute tour de force starts NewJeans and quickly turns “Gnarly,” hyperpop, Carly Rae Jepsen, and “Dear Prudence” in that order, respectively. All of them impress, especially the latter. Maybe Hybe could replace the Beatles while they’re cleaning house.

14. Roc Marciano, 656

The man who invented sleep-rap; I prefer him self-produced and this is his most homemade-sounding record yet, full of twice-baked soul and rhyming “Spanish fly” with “Canada Dry” and postmodern Illmatic-isms like “not even death can make me acquiesce” and Del the Funky Homosapieisms like “haberdashery.” The lane of threatening-yet-playful has been wide open for 30 years now since Reasonable Doubt but that doesn’t mean the likes of “rappers looking like maggot dinner on Fear Factor” or “they gon’ have to ask for skin grafting, I been nasty” have surfaced before. In fact — pinched nasal wisp aside — this batch of sample chop-suey and half-narrative might be your best bet to reassess imperial Ghostface’s stream of consciousness. To wit: “I beg your pardon / Neiman Marcus darling / Floor seats at the Garden like Olive Garden / Your garbage made Tracey Morgan vomit.”

13. The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis, Deface the Currency

Their aesthetic isn’t a mess to me. Fugazi’s rhythmic backbone plays straight and blunt rock with Anthony Pirog on guitar while Lewis wails on sax in these parameters that are rare enough to equal a sound. Their eponymous 2024 debut had hooky moments even compared to Fugazi, and this one establishes real footholds, hitting harder and aiming higher. It all leads up to “Clutch,” one of 2026’s most exciting musical moments before it even crunches to a climax, and the most epic performance of Joe Lally and Brendan Canty’s careers with just four chords.

12. Effie, pullup to busan 4 morE hypEr summEr it’s gonna bE a fucking moviE [EP]

Other than the epileptic capitalization, this 11-minute sachet of Pop Rocks scans even less like “hyperpop” to me than, you know, pop. Though if the genre (finally) keeps up with the brisk pace of Ninajirachi’s Art Angels variation and Effie’s trap-flavored derivative, it could well be the new Hi-NRG. Yung Lean is (thankfully) to her what Kodak Black is to Cardi B, a signifier for her Pitchfork decimals and little impact on her vastly superior tunes. And her most K-Pop move goes out to NewJeans: “LET’S FIND A GOOD MANAGER.”

11. Tierra Whack, Whack’s Museum

The opening lines are “they said I should rap more / What more could I ask for” and I’m so glad we’re on the same page. At 30, she sticks with it like Fun Dip, stands out like hard nips, and puts her prints on you like she’s got purple on. She pushed the envelope so her reputation is stamped, and she gets deeper than ants. She’s so sick she really thinks you should mask up. Playing both sides? Isoceles. All the shit you talk? She’s surprised you don’t eat ass. Beats evoke the detuned boom-bap psych of Griselda and Mach-Hommy with a bit of Chance’s watery Chi-Town gospel; rapping calls to mind both the rock-solid Rapsody and the forever scatterbrained Lil Wayne as well as the triple-time Das EFX. And she makes clear that in the wake of Doechii’s runaway success she wants her money and flowers.

10. Joyce Manor, I Used to Go to This Bar

An emo-identified band I didn’t get at all in the 2010s other than respecting their impressive concision; friendly but hookless albums still felt normal-length, that’s rough. But once they started crafting their sub-20-minute LPs for four years at a time with 2022’s 40 Oz. to Fresno and now this inauspiciously titled delight with even faster tempos, they were hookless no more. “After All You Put Me Through” has even spent time in the weight room with Michael Jackson’s “Black or White,” and a harmonica breaks open the joy fighting to be released from “Well, Don’t It Seem Like You’ve Been Here Before.” But we have to talk about those awful titles, an area where they need to work on impressive concision. They’ll only ever truly escape emo when they figure out lyrics. Brevity is the soul of the what?

9. Robyn, Sexistential

To temper my own first-listen enthusiasm, let’s ascertain this is not Body Talk. This is the under-half-hour pop album it feels like she can make in her sleep, even though she hasn’t done so in the last 15 years. Consistently tuneful and pleasure-button-y more than Great Songwriting like “Call Your Girlfriend.” The hyperpop-juiced production — bending bass synth on “Blow My Mind,” scrambled guitar solo on “Really Real,” various laser-tag vwoops and vwurps — you’ve been waiting for, the somewhat stingy quotient of quotables mostly limited to the title banger not. And the horny single-mom conceit has been hers for the taking. Still might be one of the year’s best — or a slight, necessary “Dopamine” hit, sex can be hard to tell. Best coup: rewriting 2002’s sexistential “Blow My Mind” about her son and his “scrumptious little face.”

8. Lord Jah-Monte Ogbon, As of Now

Sonically, Charlotte’s finest (since, gulp, DaBaby) bears all the marks that made me fall in love with Billy Woods and Ghostface Killah. That is, fully realized sample-scapes of many musical tones, led by the one constant: Ogbon’s original-enough jabber, which sounds more like the voice actor in a headlining rapper’s series of skits, or a neighbor prone to arguing with the pigs. His rapid-fire comic rasp is a feast of forebears from the young Chance of Acid Rap to Wiki to Devin the Dude, and following word by word can be work but also a treat: “My bitch just got a BBL, the label paid for it / N****s broke but want a feature, better save for it,” “little sister beat your ass like Hovi and Solange.” The wide assortment of excellent beats vary from the best Navy Blue since Song of Sage to Noname bossa nova to the skittering synth oddity “I’m Getting Too Famous,” which Danny Brown would’ve been all over. His idea of realism is “in my spot we take Cashapp and EBT,” his idea of a pickup line is “Cardi B lookalike contest, come try out.” Well, now Jah-Monte’s the headlining rapper and he hires actors (well, actresses) for skits of his own. Not getting too famous, but it’s a relief he’s concerned.

7. Emperor X, Unified Field

Chad Matheny’s prettiest album is his least subtle. He’d never put something as fat-baiting as flawed masterstroke “Renee Nicole Nicole Renee” on a real album but “Praise Jesus! Hail Reagan!” sums up the spittle he’s wiping off his chin after spending considerable time in wartime Ukraine up close, as does “fuck your reticence to fight / that’s fucking impolite.” After the metaphysical and ecological disturbances of The Lakes of Zones B and C failed to catch on and left him “Feeling Nothing,” not to mention “Pissing With the Flashlight On,” here the doomsayer mode won’t make that mistake twice. “My wife and I bought a Cybertruck / That’s a lie ‘cause we’re not rich enough / So instead we paid our power bills / And the lawyer for our living will” is as abstract as he’s willing to get, even going as far as explaining his own Marianne Faithfull reference and “citing three recent examples” on possibly the best moment of an Emperor X record ever. The unfussy acoustic palette’s ‘cause no time to program machines and they’ll just grow sentient and turn on us anyway. Cue the massed choir from “hold my hand as we vaporize.”

6. Boards of Canada, Inferno

After my disappointed review, I never stopped playing it, until it became my most-listened-to 2026 album by far, at least thrice as much as any others. At very least, I’m still proactively figuring it out. But Backrooms licensed it for a reason: the brothers Sandison’s biggest hit is a harshly lit, deceptively dull labyrinth of unsettling corridors and nothing as nightmarish around the corner as whatever your anxieties conjured up. Does that make it, um…comfort music? Let’s never find out.

5. Carsie Blanton & The Burning Hell, Everything Is Great

Many are put off by the presupposition of novelty; not me. But my initial feeling was to worry about how the Sesame Street/Avenue Q muppets in the videos/voices in the mix would affect replayability. So far, so good. Instructional children’s music about how “nobody wants to talk about what you should do if your government is starting World War III” or how “my bank is a system that borrows money from me, interest free, to invest in an oil company” strikes a novel tone for both mocking Chuck Schumer and getting the right (or left) laughs. Children’s music is also extraordinarily catchy, which is important for putting across a jaw-dropping stanza like “private equity / is buying my dad’s nursing home / cutting the wages of the woman on staff / who’s wiping my father’s ass / she’s from El Salvador / where we backed a coup and a civil war / to keep them from doing land reform / and who do you think all that was for?” Then there’s the rhetoric, which correctly talks guillotines and “turning the one into the zero percent” unlike most folk (or, ha, punk) that gestures at revolution — this is where we’re at, kids. Having been arrested on a flotilla to aid Gaza herself, she’s understandably tired of waiting for us to get off social media and join in. And the male-sung closing ballad from the POV of a “weary arms dealer” (“I sold drones and anti-drone guns / it was buy one, get one free / I sold warheads to assorted warlords / sold more to their enemies”) shows Blanton isn’t the only star of the show even if she’s the biggest. Democracy!

4. Twisted Teens, Blame the Clown

Believe it or not, throaty baritone twang-garage doesn’t always share, say, Parquet Courts’ sense of propulsion. Definitely doesn’t always have the songs. This Beefheart-voiced duo has both, without sounding too twisted or at all teenaged. Blaming the clown is a necessity, of course, though I don’t hear much of that either unless “Hurricane” is a FEMA indictment. What I hear are those blown-out string bends, and the strums interwoven with accordion drone on “White Hot Coal.” Most-universal-in-show: “100 Bill Is Gone!”

3. Jill Scott, To Whom This May Concern

I admit I was afraid AI authored “Beautiful People” (“Our love is the art of war / Conquering all algorithms”) because organic overreach is so quaint. So indulge in the quaint: a 53-year-old who spent the last decade acting leads this hour of things she’s gathered up to say since then with “Be Great” of course and no known awareness of girlboss memes. So bless her for persevering for the intelligent freaks of Norf Philly when “I could give you my all but is it ever enough.” Bless her for “Pay U on Tuesday” undoubtedly being the least fashionable (R&)B song that will see release in 2026. Bless her for addressing that on the very next track: “I wasn’t the aesthetic / I guess, I guess I get it.” I do wish she had more to add in re: pimps or the tabla from “What Happened to That Boy.” But no one has come along in a decade to match her organic overreach for sex.

2. Feeble Little Horse, Bitknot

Lydia Slocum has her lyrical charms even if she’s “too shy for New York,” but her band’s all about the sonics in a way few still are, save for Water From Your Eyes, should they count as a band. So even though their best album’s 25 minutes leave room to tack on last year’s dynamic rollercoaster “This Is Real,” it’s got the pennywhistle-acting recorder on “Poison,” the Girls Against Boys hypno-screech on “DMT,” the g-funk-cum-”Jackals, False Grails” synth on “Dior,” better-than-the-real-thing Bladee imitation on “Upside Down,” weirdo waltz “Paris,” fiberglass fuzzbombs aplenty, and two of their prettiest-ever songs in “Rewind” and “Cradle.” And if such a thing can be said, it’s all so neat and lined up it brings Deerhunter’s Monomania to mind minus the spacier coda. Right, Monomania wasn’t so neat either. And sometimes all the lyrical charm you need is a credo: “This is our club because we’re us and no one else is.”

1. Kehlani, Kehlani

From Cloud 19 to SweetSexySavage to While We Wait to It Was Good Until It Wasn’t, the era’s most dependable R&B recordmaker has been neither much of an innovator nor that big of a star. Didn’t expect “Folded” to change that, but who expected “Folded” in the first place? Now it sits comfortably near the front of their best album ever, an event by association with no guest newer than their most successful partner-in-song Cardi B: Usher, Clipse, Missy, Weezy, Brandy, still-spicy jester Big Sean, and don’t miss the T-Pain/Lil Jon snapper that’ll really make you miss 2007. All of them sound lovely, and all of them juice a reliable melodist and increasingly ambitious singer with just enough personality and hip-hop soul to push this wondrous album above merely what a great block of “urban” radio may have sounded like circa 2011. And then Kehlani Ashley Parrish tops them with “Unlearn” all by themself.

If you wannabe their lover: Itzy (Photo by JYP Entertainment)

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In Dakota, sippin’ on Coca-Cola: Trim (Photo by Ethan Holland)

63. Bruce Springsteen, “Streets of Minneapolis”

Our most conscious white male billionaire, for whatever that’s worth (upwards of $400 for clear view seats, apparently).

62. Yorushika, “Bubble”

You’ve heard of hyperpop, so here comes hyper-bossa nova, the only soundtrack that could possibly score that insane video.

61. Mandy, Indiana, “Sevastopol”

Yeezus take the squeal.

60. Xaviersobased feat. Skrillex & Dylan Brady, “Party at My Place”

Make him do this all the time. Let you figure out which him.

59. Dari Bay, “We’re Gonna Be Okay”

The blocky bedroom power-pop basics, broken up by processed guitar-vroom solos that could part the seas.

58. Gouge Away, “Figurine”

Another dense, discordant wad of grunge worth unpacking — less for the “Belgian man gave me a chocolate bar / When we compared whose nose was crookeder” than the way its burnt Pixies chord-chunks just barely fray the edge of melody as Christina Michelle brands herself on the electric fence or whatever.

57. Tove Lo, “I’m Your Girl Right”

“Love me hard, it’s not my first time,” although you’ll mishear it first as “lonely heart.” You did not mishear “we fuck all night on Ritalin.”

56. Deftones, “Briana”

Is last week’s leak of Eros — their last recordings with bassist Chi Cheng before a car crash put him in a coma for the rest of his life — real? Sure sounds like Chino singing under that distortion, though the material is suspiciously linear and melodic for a famously obfuscated band; the guitar doesn’t sound downtuned enough to be Stef. Taken at face value, their poppiest album, capped with this cheesy power ballad that extra throws a wrench into their mysteriousness. Big if true.

55. Latto feat. GloRilla, “GOMF”

There are two rules of recycling beats verbatim. One, it has to be something people actually haven’t heard in a while (Latto’s own breakthrough “Big Energy” is one of the very worst offenders) and, two, you have to be a better rapper than the original (not the tallest hurdle with Soulja Boy’s “Yahhh!”).

54. Parts & Labor, “Haunted Limbs”

They’re back and anthemic as ever, with Dan Friel’s hacked 8-bit hooks and why not, both of their drummers Into the Spider Verse’d into the same reunion lineup simultaneously. And the band name takes on new resonance: “We could build that house / We could build that song / But the work is long / That work is long.” Perhaps a sparking young Dem socialist’s campaign would like to give it a spin?

53. BTS, “Normal”

It means more by feel — seven hotties over royal synth fanfare living lives we couldn’t dream up ourselves talking ‘bout “we call this shit normal” — than the actual lyrics’ mental health talk in a blender.

52. Vince Staples, “Blackberry Marmalade”

Kicking off perhaps the least bombastic rap-rock album ever made, a rapper who virtually never preens keeps up with a menacing compressed riff but not the “B.O.B.” beat to get a lot off his load-bearing mind, including missing his nana. Get Kim Gordon on the remix.

51. Kevin Morby, “Bible Belt”

Pretty album that you can shave down to a pretty single, or even further to a pretty lalala-la-la hook.

50. Geese, “Apollo”

I’m going to the moon. I’m going to the moon. I’m going to the moon. Goddamn. I’m going to the moon. 1-2-3-4. You went down. You went down. You went down. You went down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down. 1-2-3. I’m goin’, I’m goin’, I’m goin’, I’m goin’, I’m goin’, I’m goin’, I’m goin’, I’m goin’, I’m goin’, I’m goin’, I’m goin’, I’m goin’, I’m goin’, I’m goin’, I’m goin’, I’m going to the moon. I’m going to the moon. I’m going to the moon. I’m going to the moon. I’m going to the moon. I’m going to the moon. I’m going to the moon. I’m going to the moon. I’m going to the moon. I’m going to the moon. I’m going to the moon. I’m going going to the moon. I’m going going to the moon. I’m going to the moon I’m going to the moon, moon, moon. I’m going to the moon, going to the moon, moon, moon. I’m going to the moon. I’m going to the moon. I’m going to the moon. I’m going to the moon. I’m going to the moon. I’m going to the moon. I’m going to the moon. I’m going to the moon, moon, moon, going, going, going. Going to the moon, going to the moon. I’M GOING TO THE MOON AND YOU’RE BUYING THE TICKET MOTHERFUCKER!!!!!!

49. Mitski, “That White Cat”

But I guess according to cats, now it’s her best tune since “Why Didn’t You Stop Me?”

48. Lucinda Williams, “Freedom Speaks”

“Don’t take me for granted,” asserts Americana legend trying her hand at Mavis Staples-style funk for the first time at 73.

47. Corook, “Scooby”

Running down no fewer than seven disparities of class and race privilege in the first minute alone, Corinne Savage is probably the most politically incisive pop fluke to ever hit via YouTube. So of course the chorus fumbles the analysis a bit: “now I’m learning a TikTok dance” isn’t equivocal as satire and comparing themselves to Scooby-Doo isn’t enough of a tonal 180 for any “If I Were a Fish” fans still tuning in. Of course they conclude by being too hard on themselves “fuck, I am the enemy” but no one said solving the entire world was easy. Making their hooks resolve is enough.

46. Skrillex feat. Naisha & Beam, “Diwali”

The simplest track on a surprise album teeming with Brazilian funk lets Odisha-born Naisha make Kleenex/LiLiPut noises until “he sucking on my titties then he put it in my kidney” before erupting in a fit of self-induced giggles. And if “I’m freaky like I’m Nicki” is an up-to-the-minute Obsession reference, that’s what surprise releases are for. If only Skrillex could always be so childish.

45. Car Seat Headrest, “Optimistic Son”

Most famous furry anyone can think of. Had to reprimand his own fans’ Reddit more than once. Can’t leave his previous recordings be. Follows up his most trying rock opera with an unnecessary remake of his best. Upshot: this unexpected and incongruent new addition paced like Insomniac-era Green Day that’s his most concise tune ever as a bonus, and yes it’s a tune.

44. Yaya Bey, “As the Ocean”

You can croon me anything over that circuit-bent Leapday Night modular synth thing, really.

43. Bladee, “Dolor”

The evocative Sulfur Surfer is more redolent of this glummo’s cold visions than Pitchfork’s favorite rap album of 2024. But I didn’t expect him to actually name a track “Dolor,” in which a Scandinavian emo rapper’s late-blooming wordplay identifies “pain” as a privilege and it’s pretty-gothy enough to survive.

42. David Byrne, “Drivers License”

The best Olivia Rodrigo song of 2026, it brings me no pleasure to report. Second- and third-best? Her CMAT and Magnetic Fields covers.

41. Wishy, “Lovesick”

The shoegaze band most eager to sell out to songfulness wallops their base with this jangle-blowout first single, the missing link between Drop Nineteens and Liquid Mike or maybe even the Go-Go’s. Heard in passing: “you cut your teeth on the currency of youth.”

40. Harry Styles, “Season 2 Weight Loss”

As someone who prefers James Murphy at his most tasteless (c.f. “Drunk Girls”), I’d sooner Styles fall in love with a vulgarian like Aphex Twin, whose “minipops 67 (source field mix)” drums show up here reimagined by the Smile’s grand backbone Tom Skinner.

39. Wiki, “Park”

If only more “entrenched in thought” rappers loved hypnagogic beats and sleeping on park benches.

38. Hilary Duff, “Weather for Tennis”

Few pop contenders write as tersely or consistently as Taylor Swift, but many are more melodically eager and willing when it comes to targeting the pleasure center. Taylor’s influence here is in the rigorous line editing, the insistence that every chord and syllable land with meaning: “I’m a seasoned apologist / For the people who I love / I’m an amateur psychologist / Key to everyone’s handcuffs.” Duff is 38 af, concerned with the supply of new first times in a real-life marriage that sounds a-okay on hooks co-conceived with husband and early Carly Rae Jepsen collaborator Matthew Koma. The music is almost fascinatingly trapped in the high register, with jangly, tweeting textures pitched up an octave higher than seems natural; Swift is Miami bass or Tuvan throat singing by comparison.

37. Lana Del Rey, “White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter”

Did you know Father’s Day landed on Lana’s birthday this year? (extreme late-night talk-show host voice, tugs collar)

36. Slayyyter, “Crank”

Poised to fill a Brat-shaped void while the real Charli preps her polarizing follow-up, Catherine Garner is a B- lister who tells it like it is in a more openly fatalistic way than her obvious antecedent, Ke$ha, and “Crank” is her most novel, akin to a horror-trailer slow cover of “Tik Tok” (the song, not the standard by which monocultural pop success is now measured).

35. Pouty, “My Own Beauty”

Forgot About Me was a blast-from-the-past pleasure but this body-image reclamation banger has more emotional heft than the entire album. Special treat: that bridge riff nodding to Deftones’ “Be Quiet and Drive.”

34. Massive Attack feat. Tom Waits, “Boots on the Ground”

“Where do you think all your cartilage went?” asks the AWOL iconoclast whose last sign of life was my very first review for SPIN, and it’s also a shock to hear him growl the words “big titties” on his second “foxhole journal,” as I put it 15 years ago. A hell of a comeback (not necessarily for Waits, who qualitatively never left) and a hell of a “Hell Broke Luce” sequel. Title is all that they found left of the guy.

33. Tinashe, “Too Easy”

“Nasty” completed a Rihanna-style pop ascension that now subsumes R&B into this vwumping electrobanger that under two minutes cycles brattily through “Fergalicious,” “Milkshake,” and for those who remember, Death Team’s “Fucking Bitches in the Hood.” If you’re mad, then go to therapy.

32. Modest Mouse feat. Janet Weiss, “Look How Far…”

“Look how far we haven’t come / Oh my god, we’re so fucking dumb” applies to take-your-pick, but mine is that they didn’t ask the best drummer in rock to bang on the entire album.

31. Cameron Winter, “Warning”

Strictly for the haters: nothing but Goofus Wainwright channeling Laurie Anderson over sequoia-sawing cello, plus it’s for a good cause.

30. Ludacris, “Pull Over”

What’s really ludicrous is how deftly he plugs back into his ribald, every-line-a-mic-drop (“girl that’s a monster truck from the waist down”) confidence from 23 years ago when I can’t even remember the last album he made. What’s more, he made plenty of irritating hits back then (“Number One Spot,” “Money Maker”) that this suavely clears.

29. Katseye, “Pinky Up”

It feels like pop’s more nihilistic than it ever was; sure there’s been plenty of “live fast die young” so “I wanna get high right before we’re in the ground” is one thing but “I’d kill ‘em for you if it got that deep” feels like new ground for a prefab girl group. Ditto the Socrates quote.

28. Fire-Toolz feat. Jennifer Holm, “And Where Is the Heart? I’ve Searched My Entire Home”

Always a pleasure when the acquired-taste mastermind gets murdered on their own shit by a monster melodist, i.e. “Stillness Is the Move.” That is, if the mastermind was piping in gutturals and metal crunch.

27. Weezer feat. Wednesday, “We Might as Well Be Strangers”

As with most Wednesday and occasionally Weezer, this kicked in as a real big song with an even bigger chorus after a few ingrainments, even if it only came into existence because they’re neighbors alphabetically. But “Go Away” did wonders for both Weezer and Best Coast and only took 12 years for the world to notice so perhaps The Orange Album can be all duets in 2030.

26. Nia Archives, “Boys in Blue”

The gist of the Dismemberment Plan’s traditional show-closing “if you’re such a victim then go call the cops / You certainly looked good when you were on top” bop probably lands better recalibrated by a woman of color. Coincidentally, both artists have proven themselves uniquely adept at juggling drum ‘n’ bass and bratty alt-rock at the same time.

25. Widowspeak, “Soft Cover”

Married couple serves up sly, Luna-cum-Chris Isaak verse bursting into rainbow sherbet chorus; whatever happened to the Raveonettes anyway?

24. BossMan Dlow, “Motion Party”

Doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that 2026 rap’s handful of Hot 100 hits aim for results on the club floor, especially if your ass big like the sun.

23. Greg Mendez, “Looking Out Your Window”

Forget Alex G, this is Philly’s real Elliott Smith heir (meaning cherrypick the upbeat ones).

22. Charli XCX, “SS26”

Wish she just called the album Rock Music because these singles are matching Brat’s inversion of its own title into vulnerable territory by inverting the power chord usage with loads of negative space. The quiet metronomic drum machines on this one transfigure a spring/summer pop-punk readymade into something one-of-a-kind. Peep that dinky-synth anticlimax!

21. DaBaby feat. GloRilla, Yung Miami & YKNiece, “Pop That Thang (Remix)”

His on-the-beat baritone has gotten more slovenly since his ex-communication and it’s downright somnambulant on the original. But three of the sauciest MVPs I could want to hear on this beat perk him up enough to neither help nor harm the thing, which is more than I can say for Drake’s Zuckerberg-grade seduction on the otherwise foolproof “Cheetah Print.”

20. Robber Robber, “The Sound It Made”

This motorcycle accident of breakbeats and noise hooks primes you for something more dangerous than the full-length turns out to be, but it’s hard to not root for haywire, drum-forward new indies who resist easy description and prioritize sonic whiplash.

19. PJ Harvey, “Voyager”

Peej 11: In Space awaits us, but what a maiden launch: softly quacking modular synths, Jonny Greenwood-style ascending orchestra coda. As far as legendary art-pop middlebrows go, even Björker than the real thing.

18. Cold Court, “Backslang”

Best-produced new DIY rockers since you can remember remix themselves into a screeching, Skrillex-style oblivion without breaking the mold of ordinary songwriting, or perhaps that’s the very reason the material leaves so much room for tech-scrambling?

17. Aespa, “Bite”

Standard girl-group taunts over one of those god-given zero-gravity beats millennials used to live for in the Timbaland era, gosh, a quarter-century ago. More where that came from in K-Pop if you know where to look, which we do not.

16. Grace Ives, “My Mans”

Middle-class pop struggler à la Lola Young emerges from “drinking, lying, and hiding” to pair with Ariel Rechtshaid on her best-received album but pens the crown jewel without him, a forceful argument for Lana Del Rey to aim for the head with power ballads.

15. They Might Be Giants, “Wu-Tang”

The human song generators have slowed considerably because 40 years after their debut album how could they not, but during the first Trump term they still gifted us with the spectacularly anti-brownshirt “The Communists Have the Music,” which hits even harder in the wake of Freedom 250 falling apart. Second term gets us this joyous paean to their finest New York brethren the Wu-Tang Clan, “a transformative force and a guiding light through inner conflict and personal struggle” per the press release and now also the Knicks.

13./14. Kacey Musgraves, “Middle of Nowhere” or “Dry Spell”

The pretty one or the witty one? Choose your own best Kacey song, yes, ever.

12. Eddy Current Suppression Ring, “Bop”

Reemerging for just the second time in 16 years for the only acceptable reason: discovering a stumblebum new riff they wanted to show us.

11. Dan Ex Machina, “Açaí”

Full disclosure: me, atypically solo acoustic. Conceptualized, written, recorded on my phone, edited, and released in six inspired hours, so there’s a couple high notes in the choruses that could be Melodyned half an inch if I had the restraint. Fuck ICE, long live Neil Young.

10. Low Cut Connie, “Can’t Be Wrong”

Full disclosure: pals and hometown heroes, whose most irresistible tune in years for sure knew the bride when she used to rock and roll and earns that rarest of honors: entering Phillies game rotation between “Seven Nation Army” and “Not Like Us.”

9. Lime Garden, “Always Talking About You”

Coming off like Lola Young fronting Wet Leg doesn’t do Chloe Howard’s hilarious confessions justice (and do I hear Standard Fare in her quaver?): “I wanna be an asshole and I still wanna win,” “I want everyone to say that’s that bitch,” “and I want to make all the businessmen hard.” But she can’t do any of that if she’s always talking about you, stupid!!

8. Gracie Abrams, “Hit the Wall”

There perhaps won’t be a sound more pleasing in 2026 than that flickering synth pulse, so it’s a relief she nails to it the melodramatic gravitas that both Midnights and Boygenius were too cool to let loose. Plus, that is how you write a fucking bridge.

7. Maris, “Body Is on Fire”

What she lacks in Chappell’s personality and smarts she torches with a flamethrower in massive choruses. This isn’t just her hugest yet, it’s anyone’s this year, a smash waiting to happen inside a mirrorball rigged with proven explosives like Linndrum and the San Junipero synth from Tegan and Sara’s indelible “Closer.” Call her the new Ava Max if you’d like, but Max didn’t learn the trade this quickly.

6. Charli XCX, “Rock Music”

I’m really banging my head; Charli’s annoying, “Von Dutch”-maligning stans think there’s something deeper to their queen than spectacular sound effects. Luckily queen is here to course-correct, troll, ro/o/o/o/o/o/o/o/o/o/o/o/o/o/o/o/o/o/o/o/o/o/ock out as the case may be.

5. Trim, “Coconut Water”

“I’m tryna hop on your face and spark it up like a motor” — the most addictively catchy rap song of the year is usually the horniest one, right?

4. Steve Lacy, “The Feeling”

Does anyone else go for it like this? The Internet guitar virtuoso turned “Bad Habit” Hot 100 topper applies his ‘80s Stevie chest voice to a gradually towering “am I your baby?” ballad bolder and hungrier than anything Miguel’s done in a decade, much less Frank Ocean.

3. Ari Lennox, “Soft Girl Era”

This cone of cotton-candy perfection is all rat-a-tat melodizing like Beyoncé’s “Countdown” or Normani’s “Motivation” only it’s the dub version: spare minimalism that’s all cowbell, pumped bassline, and julienned harmonic layering, enough tricks to massage your ear into its soft girl era.

2. Emperor X, “Renee Nicole Nicole Renee”

Here Chad Matheny reveals a secret vice for the problematic in his quest to go for the jugular, usually opting for brainier stuff than calling ICE volunteers “middle-aged sacks of asthmatic ham,” to pick the best of the four(!) fat-shaming instances. Because the song is impeccably constructed, offending lines and all, the first-take worst-take ethos kind of wins out even still; so full of blinding rage (no pun on the legally blind Matheny, though turnabout would technically be fair play) that just mowing down everything in its path is convincing. But the showstoppers are empathy all the way down: “they see themselves as victims who can’t explain why they’re so happy when someone dies,” “so scared of the Muslims, so scared of the gays that they’re body slamming grandma,” “Minnesota law prohibits shooting unarmed moms in the face.”

1. Jill Scott, “Don’t Play”

You haven’t ever heard a sexpot squeeze her meat like this before, with a wipe-me-down, fan-me-now vocal performance to match: “Give me Afrobeats / Please me hard / So hard like a K-Dot lyric, then sweet / Like my grandma’s yams / With the marshmallows on top / Pineapples and candied pecans.”

Dirty boots in the attic

If you don’t obsess over rock bands, lists, or silly parlor games, you will not have fun reading this 15,000-word tome. Everyone else, strap in. If you’re familiar with this site’s annual power rankings of the 50 Best Rock Bands Right Now, you’re acquainted with a smaller-scale version of the criteria for this be-all end-all of the same concept. Most of these determinations were made by figuring out what band best represented a given year, usually because they released one or more great albums, sometimes their best, sometimes their most innovative, sometimes their most culturally important or artistically distinct. Some combination of those. Occasionally, the judgment was weighted towards the band’s live reputation. With very few exceptions, the selections were weighted and biased towards traditional guitar bands, or outfits that best mimicked the loud and blunt function of same. Being able to feel the band’s music in your gut was a helpful tiebreaker for these particular parameters.

Some years are just historically more crowded than others; don’t assume the best band of 2019 is as terrific or important as the fifth-best band of 1970. Likewise, there are plenty of gaping omissions like Yo La Tengo, Ramones, Gang of Four, ZZ Top, Funkadelic, the Stooges, Old 97’s, Pretenders, New Pornographers, Pylon, Bad Brains, Minutemen, Big Star, Big Thief, The Chills, Minor Threat, Wire, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Living Colour, Pavement, Derek and the Dominos, Sugar, the Go-Betweens, Alice in Chains, and countless others who simply had the bad fortune to peak during years when there was always something else better or more pertinent or more rock-oriented.

Yo La Tengo’s endlessly beautiful Summer Sun is unquestionably my favorite and most listened-to album of any genre from 2003, and they’re my favorite still-active legacy band still making some of their greatest music. Unfortunately, that album’s reputation is marginal even among their stans, and a gigantic relatively recent contribution to an increasingly sparse riff-rock canon from that same year could not be ignored. YLT’s subtlety and eclecticism ultimately wasn’t a good enough fit for this list compared to those who won out, and while the band’s longevity should be celebrated and considered by any serious music fan, it also made them difficult to tie to a particular year when they inarguably obliterated everything else. (You can only imagine 1977 was a bitch.)

I imagine the biggest controversies will have to do with certain inclusions/exclusions of solo artists with famous backing bands: it will look very arbitrary that James Brown, Prince, and Bruce Springsteen were snubbed. The former two were just vastly more major solo than as members or even leaders of the Famous Flames and the Revolution respectively, rock was merely one of Prince’s many skill sets, and the E Street Band had the bad luck to matter most during a couple of the most crowded years for rock icons. Condolences as well to PJ Harvey when that was the name of a trio, the Band, and the Patti Smith Group. It was a bitch to deal with any of those amorphous solo/band cases. Most of them ended up shafted. I apologize. Cuts had to be made, excruciating choices had to be decided, and “best band” had to be interpreted in the truest way possible. The exceptions feel like they make more sense to me than the other available options, maybe you’ll disagree.

I’m really, really sorry about the Ramones. Punk ended up being perhaps the most well-represented strain of rock on the list overall. With months of deliberating, the final 60 bands feel comprehensive and right, including two different acts with a song called “Stairway to Heaven.” I think the list gets a lot done and covers a lot of ground considering (oh, right, you should know) there are no repeats. So the band chosen for 1996 was no longer eligible for 2005. Yes, that rule made this list possible at all even though it turned certain eras into musical chairs. Cheating is the point. Have fun, fellow miserable bastards.

1965: The Beatles (Help!, Rubber Soul, uh, a lot of stuff)

Easy one, right? The baseline, the control variable, patient zero for the idea of rock bands at all and that there could be mania for them. But 1965 is where the list begins because it’s also where the Beatles became rock’s renaissance men, the year when bringing “Help!” “Ticket to Ride,” and Paul’s most-covered-tune-in-history “Yesterday” into existence was virtually an appetizer for Rubber Soul, the shaggy-haired fulcrum for the rest of their career. Sure, it varied their frightening mastery of verses and choruses with Ray Charles piano interjections of “Drive My Car,” George Martin’s famously sped-up not-a-harpsichord solo on “In My Life,” and the horny (“she asked me to stay and she told me to sit anywhere / but I looked around and I noticed there wasn’t a chair”), sitar-driven “Norwegian Wood” to match the trippy album title in its drippy font. But from the mournful “Nowhere Man” to the power-pop “Wait” they also never made a sturdier record. And while it would still be rock and roll without John’s poisonous “Run for Your Life,” the fact he nicked his most problematic lines ever from Elvis himself begins a throughline, for better or worse, of the genre summoning toxic forces from Mick Jagger’s whip fetish to Jewish-born Joey Ramone reclaiming Nazi symbolism.

1966: The Rolling Stones (The Rolling Stones, Now!, Out of Our Heads, Aftermath)

Now we’re really talking. Elvis’ pelvis scandalized ‘em and the Beatles were showered in panties, but it was really the ascent of Mick Jagger dancing with Mr. D that began to paint the whole thing black. Here’s where the blues burnt to smoldering tar with leather and Satanism. I mean, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” makes crystal that the blues being referenced are Mick Jagger’s balls, no matter how much he denied singing “I can’t get no girly action” by way of explanation. Maybe that was cute, but Aftermath, one of the greatest albums ever made, is absolutely not. Compared to “Run for Your Life,” “Stupid Girl” and “Under My Thumb” are horror films. The greatest rock and roll band in the world (important distinction) wanted soul so badly just to sell it, to shroud the marimba and sitar in darkness, to juxtapose the Aretha-ready “Think” with 11 minutes of oily basement droning on “Goin’ Home.” And yes, the American version smokes the UK original like BBQ (which would pair well with “Dontcha Bother Me” or “High and Dry.”)

1967: The Who (The Who Sell Out)

The Summer of Love was the year of the concept album, and briefly before Pete Townshend committed himself completely to Meher Baba-inspired rock operas, he was a reliable antidote to the costumed grandeur that the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was indulging in or Their Satanic Majesties thought they were subverting. Instead, these dynamite purveyors of “maximum R&B” paid their respects to pirate radio. That kept the format terse (what a rush when “Tattoo” accelerates into “Our Love Was”) and the lyrics class-clown (what does Mary Anne do to a man with those shaky hands?). The Who Sell Out isn’t where most would agree the band peaked or fully harnessed their life-affirming power, but it is unblemished genius that wasn’t yet full of itself. It had something to get off its chest about the commodification of the arts. And on “Armenia City in the Sky” and “I Can See for Miles,” it ripped.

1968: The Jimi Hendrix Experience (Are You Experienced? Axis: Bold as Love, Electric Ladyland)

One of the more difficult parameters to determine with this list will read psychotically arbitrary no matter how it’s rationalized: who gets to be a band? Timing shortchanges both the E Street Band and Prince’s Revolution, because 1984 is just ungodly unfair, as well as personal preference; the DIY Dirty Mind and proto-bedroom R&B (other kind) Sign “☮” the Times blew mine, not Purple Rain, which did have a shot at the cultural-impact goods. Ultimately decided that Springsteen’s most pertinent “band” years were no match for punk and that as awesome as Wendy and Lisa were for Prince’s mythos, they don’t quite wrestle the solo tag away from him. He’d be number one on all kinds of lists and he is a supernova of a bandleader but he can just never be viewed as inside one the way that, say, Neil Young disappears into the thump of Crazy Horse. Young’s solo identity is more defined and amorphous, too. Prince is a greater rock and roller than almost anyone on here, but he also never made rock a full time job.

One-of-one James Marshall Hendrix may be, but he was the high-voltage battery of a power trio. His closing Woodstock set might be the most iconic rock performance of all time, and his posthumous solo start was fantastic, but he only died a year after the Experience disbanded. Rock was his full-time job, and his virtuosic explorations were so reminiscent of Coltrane and Miles that even his greatest shredding has that ensemble density. That’s nowhere more apparent than on Electric Ladyland, a six-string Sistine Chapel fresco that predated Bitches Brew, There’s a Riot Goin’ On, Sign “☮” the Times, any deep Funkadelic or Sonny Sharrock. Hendrix burrowed deep into his artistic soul with every flight of electric fancy, but his most torrid playing always sounded in conversation with others. He could space out. He could also nail three-minute pop hits — “Crosstown Traffic” and “All Along the Watchtower” still interrupted his most rippling impressionism on “Moon, Turn the Tides....Gently Gently Away” to prove that, long after he advanced from “Foxey Lady” or “Purple Haze” into psychedelic theater of the mind. My cherrypicking bullshit doesn’t have much to stand on, but Prince could put down any one of his instruments and morph into Michael Jackson or Madonna as the case may be, and the Hendrix “experience” at the peak of his world-leveling power and influence is firmly a “band” one to me.

1969: The Velvet Underground (White Light/White Heat, The Velvet Underground, VU)

Rock’s “best” is so relative; a pop star like Hendrix embodied it most wholly at his wildest, snaking and sprawling like Coltrane. Lou Reed, rock’s biggest provocateur up to that point, made outstanding white noise with John Cale’s atonal assistance on “Sister Ray” and Nico’s flat, doomed affect on “All Tomorrow’s Parties,” but was most soulful at his most pleasurable, a major focus as Cale exited. Though it wouldn’t see release for 15 years on 1985’s revelatory VU, a viola-and-celesta arrangement like “Stephanie Says” wasn’t just uncommon for the Velvets, but any rock. The Velvet Underground that did get heard in 1969 wielded their share of rave-ups (“What Goes On,” “Beginning to See the Light”) and the grand stereo collision “The Murder Mystery,” but they foregrounded beauty and intimacy as a matter of principle. “Pale Blue Eyes” and “Jesus” and “Candy Says” and the Moe Tucker classic “After Hours” were balms in darkness, no longer attempting to realize Reed’s electroshock trauma but to show their very small cult a therapeutic side. A meditation like “I’m Set Free” sparked U2’s spiritual belief and R.E.M.’s pastoral jangle as future rock standbys in unison. An “alternative” to the status quo was born — and it wasn’t just out to offend. That’s what Reed going solo was for.

1970: Creedence Clearwater Revival (Green River, Willy and the Poor Boys, Cosmo’s Factory, Pendulum)

Already riding in rarefied air following 1969’s doubly astonishing Green River and Willy and the Poor Boys, Cosmo’s Factory sees CCR taking the lead as the greatest American rock band and then hiding the ball. It’s where John Fogerty’s dutiful troops refine their signature groove into something world-historic: think of the proto-punk-infused psych-rock energy in opening raveup “Ramble Tamble,” a six-minute song taken at a hectic pace, all about up about going on down the road. “Traveling Band” is basically a rewrite of “Good Golly Miss Molly” about playing in a traveling band. Show up at the airport. Luggage is not delivered, which is an absolute nightmare for a low bottom-control addict like Fogerty. Go to the hotel, it’s taking forever to check-in. Why? Don’t know. Great tune. But — if you read the words — this is the single least-thrilling song ever recorded about a major band on tour. It’s all tedious minutiae behind the outfit’s steamrolling excellence. “Run Through the Jungle” does it one better, commingling the Velvets’ menace and Booker T.’s grooves into a series of half-liturgical prophecies and promises with heatstroke, refracted through the upstairs/downstairs injustices of the Vietnam war, which tended to pit poor Americans against poor Vietnamese. By the time we get to “Who’ll Stop the Rain” — one of the single saddest and most beautiful songs ever written in the English language — Fogerty knows it can’t be him. Tough thing for a control freak to concede. Pendulum arrived later that winter at their insane pace of two LPs a year, distinguishing itself by being merely amazing rather than world-historic, though the slippery, Little Feat-like “Pagan Baby” and the proto-Replacements hooks of “Hey Tonight” might beg for a recount. Flying ‘cross the land, tryin’ to get a hand, no one could keep up or touch Creedence in 1970. — guest blurb by Elizabeth Nelson of the Paranoid Style

1971: Led Zeppelin (III, IV)

Zeppelin’s impact? How about rock’s biggest event since the Beatles? By the end of 1971, that was no longer a debate, culminating a hot streak from “Dazed and Confused” through “Whole Lotta Love” through “Immigrant Song” (and, for true rifficianados, “Out on the Tiles”) with their least complicated yet most ambitious and therefore most volcanically popular album, even if it never overtook Sly and the Family Stone’s smudgy masterpiece There’s a Riot Goin’ On at number one. All the more impressive since their bullshit hadn’t actually been invented yet: Tolkien-evoking mystery painting and runes on the album cover with no text, eight minutes of “Stairway to Heaven” half chiming ballad, half thundering repose. Only ten records ever made have sold more than Zeppelin’s untitled fourth, which hit even harder than Beethoven’s fifth, and only eight of them contain rock (and that’s counting “Beat It” and Shania Twain’s arena-country). But since two of those are the Eagles, we’d better account for quality. Zeppelin never strayed far from their roots, as Willie Dixon could tell you, but “Rock and Roll” never slammed so hard without John Bonham in the driver’s seat; his kit on their ultimate epic “When the Levee Breaks” sounds like Godzilla beating limousines against the foundations of a skyscraper in common time. He does throw in an extra beat or two on “Black Dog” and “Misty Mountain Hop” just to keep beating the shit out of you, but who among us? The folksy “Going to California” and the Sandy Denny duet “Battle of Evermore” forgo his services altogether lest he break them like Lennie Small’s rabbits. Robert Plant obviously wailed like an electric boner, Jimmy Page made his axe crunch like a wrecking ball. When John Paul Jones is your least-distinguished member, you’re in Satanically talented company, which explains the metric tons of heavy metal that Led Zeppelin dropped on blues, pop, and folk. Rock never sounded bigger, maybe still hasn’t. Ditto better.

1972: The Allman Brothers Band (At Fillmore East, Eat a Peach)

You know the Allmans are miraculous when the poster boys for simplicity as a rock virtue have two drummers and routinely jam upward of 20 minutes; “Mountain Jam” took a ludicrous Donovan song for a three-axe luxury cruise over 33 and got away with it. For po-faced traditionalists they did almost nothing typical. Multiracial southern rockers who classed up the joint with jazzy excursions and some of the best, stretchiest white blues, they made instrumentals so heavenly they could storm the charts (“Jessica”), made tasteful the very idea of what-in-jamnation excess, and even bested themselves when they regrouped in the ‘90s with master gunslingers Warren Haynes and Butch Trucks nephew Derek. Had they focused on the studio down the line, they might have bested their early albums, too. But even their youthful peak from 1971’s graceful At Fillmore East through 1973’s Dickey Betts-led pay dirt Brothers and Sisters is half push-record onstage. And right in the middle was Eat a Peach, improvising hippie hooks from the ground up on “Les Bres in A Minor,” trainside balladry on “Melissa,” country-pop paradise on “Blue Sky,” and the beauty of fragility on just two acoustics for “Little Martha.” Plus Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson kicking ass.

1973: Steely Dan (Can’t Buy a Thrill, Countdown to Ecstasy)

The smooth(-brained?) Aja’s for dudes who have their own office complete with a bourbon drawer in the desk, and I prefer when rock’s most smartass band is singing about those types rather than playing to them. Also prefer when they’re holding court on their instruments like the shredabilly “Bodhisattva.” The undervalued Countdown to Ecstasy is Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s greatest record because it’s caught in an impressive unstable balance: Can’t Buy a Thrill singer David Palmer gone, jazz fixation heating up but not yet overwhelming (the gorgeous “Razor Boy”), rocking out briefly a priority (“Show Biz Kids” and “My Old School” border on glam). It was rough to have to choose between one of the sloppiest-produced monsters in the rock discography (Iggy and the Stooges’ way-in-the-red, speaker-melting Raw Power, and that’s the good remix) and the poster boys for brain-damage-as-studio-perfection for 1973. But Ecstasy isn’t compulsively beholden to hopeless standards yet, merely mortal dexterity like the dreamy-jumpy riff that vamps throughout “King of the World.” Concluded that the Stooges begat countless imitators but there’s only ever been one band psychotic enough to be Steely Dan, the band named after a dildo who nearly had a top-ten hit called “Peg.”

1974: New York Dolls (New York Dolls, In Too Much Too Soon)

It’s a great pitch: The Stones, but trashier. Smear lipstick on ‘em with torn fishnets and rouge. Dress them like streetwalking cheetahs with [checks notes] a heart full of napalm. Shake them up in a dumpster. With a rock and roll nurse shooting them up, what could go wrong? The least they could do is try to fuck Frankenstein (scooping Rocky Horror’s first production by months), and you best believe they’re in love L-U-V. Somehow they got even better when they hired Shangri-Las vet Shadow Morton to help them scuzz up the Coasters and Gamble & Huff, or in one of rock’s funnest-ever moments, doo-wop goofs The Jay Hawks. If that’s David Johansen acting like a king, well, let him remind you for six unstoppable minutes he’s a “Human Being.” So what do you call the act? The aristocrats.

1975: Neil Young and Crazy Horse (On the Beach, Tonight’s the Night, Zuma)

The most prolific and nonstop ‘70s rocker, dirt-farm folkie slash “grunge godfather” Neil Young owned the decade, and made his most emotionally wrenching work in the middle of it. He’s on this list because he’s in the fucking band, even if they’re not always credited on the cover; that’s Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina crackling behind him for On the Beach’s indelible opener “Walk On.” And they’re all over Tonight’s the Night, recorded first and released second, paying tribute to late Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and Econoline-cherishing roadie Bruce Berry. A live and dirty “Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown” featuring Whitten on backup is the centerpiece of Tonight’s the Night, and classics like the incredible “Roll Another Number (For the Road)” mourned the fallen without forgetting to celebrate. Whitten overdosed the night after Young fired him for heroin finally rendering his bandmate unable to play, and you can feel the guilt in his gut. These were songs about losing your friends to the road, where the band was playing their own members off. And then Crazy Horse emerged in full with Whitten replacement Frank Sanpedro for Zuma, which, fuck: “Don’t Cry No Tears,” “Lookin’ for a Love,” “Barstool Blues” and the Homeric “Cortez the Killer,” almost anyone’s platonic ideal guitar epic if you prize soul in your soloing. Neil Young accomplished plenty by his lonesome, but not these.

1976: Aerosmith (Toys in the Attic, Rocks)

MTV-era Aerosmith wired the criteria for this list as much as anybody and they’re still the perfect elementary school kid’s idea of rock and roll. Most of the lean, mean Pump (“I hear that you’re so tight your lovin’ squeaks”) and peaks of the too-long Get a Grip (“it’s like getting head from a guillotine”), including the craftiest power ballads ever made (they invented the thing with “Dream On” after all — and murdered it with “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”) are as good as filthy excess gets. “Cryin’” is, under oath, one of the greatest songs ever, impressive considering it’s a clown car for as many chord changes as can be stuffed in. Even a few attempted Nine Lives hits and “Jaded” go the fuck off. But even music snobs who can’t stomach any of that (and they are legion) get on their knees for 1976’s Rocks, which power-tooled the Dolls, Stones, and Zeppelin into the best case scenario for what would eventually rot into Mötley Crüe. That is, just a bunch of motherfucking riffz (“Lick and a Promise,” “Sick as a Dog”) shoved into your skull with at least one lyric (“Combination”) weighing the pros and cons of Steven Tyler and Joe Perry’s infamous cocaine and heroin diet (“walking on Gucci, wearing Yves St. Laurent / Barely stay on ‘cause I’m so damn gaunt”). They found their filthy groove on the previous Toys in the Attic with “Sweet Emotion” and “Walk This Way” cementing hard-rock stardom that subsidized hard living while linking their own raunch to blues tradition on Bull Moose Jackson’s “Big Ten Inch Record.” But Rocks showed the world how exemplary horny-idiot hard rock could be, and social relevance moves (giving rap a layup to rock audiences if also Kid Rock, “Janie’s Got a Gun,” “Livin’ on the Edge”) get a lot worse than the ones they attempted later. With these guys you either accept that a banger can go “I met a blind man who taught me how to see” or you don’t.

1977: Television (Marquee Moon)

The year punk broke. The Sex Pistols. Ramones. Voidoids. The Clash and Wire at their rawest before the ideas flooded their heads. And so forth. But what inclusion would be more punk than the only CBGB’s band that could be described as elegant? Marquee Moon goes against all notions of what punk was, so forget first-take/best-take, much less three power chords. Television woodshedded its eight songs for years and rejected demos tracked by kindred spirit Brian Eno back in 1974 for being too sterile. Deity of dexterity Tom Verlaine extrapolated his intricately folded compositions from Stan Getz and electric Miles; the especially celebrated title tune exceeded ten minutes and borrows its mood from “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.” Only the venues they booked and Verlaine’s clipped, off-key yelp identified them as any species of counterrebellion, though his lyrics tended philosophical and the emotional palette is demure. It’s no slight to the oft-imitated Pistols or Ramones that virtually no one else has ever sounded like this band, which broke up after 1978’s prettier Adventure, followed by a string of underrhapodized 1980s Verlaine solo albums with plenty of excellent guitar and no obvious precedents. But they were still wild and cocky enough to give the unwound-string treatment to “Satisfaction” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” live. Many, many virtuosos pretend and legitimate have positioned themselves above and outside of rock in the following decades. Television always cultivated their fluent, one-of-a-kind sound from right inside it. But electric Miles would know exactly what to do with “Venus” and “Marquee Moon,” too. Maybe even “See No Evil.”

1978: Blondie (Parallel Lines)

Considering Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s crackling gospel axe invented the stuff, it’s galling how long it took for rock’s unnecessarily macho audience to let women properly reign. Cass, Janis, Tina, Suzi, Patti, Ann, and Stevie all couldn’t be denied, but punk lit some paradoxical fire under pop, with tough broads Debbie, Chrissie, and Joan as well as the party-hearty Go-Go’s ushering the expediency of new wave into existence on the charts after long-haired Deep Purple manspreading largely dominated the ‘70s. Blondie may have even been the first big-timers to refract rock back into pop itself rather than vice versa. Leading with their sneering CBGB’s pedigree on early classic “Rip Her to Shreds,” they pulled disco and rap with them onto the Hot 100 right beside “One Way or Another”’s power chords. Debbie Harry’s Noo Yawk affect was the glue on undisputed 1978 champ Parallel Lines, grappling the Nerves’ immortal “Hanging on the Telephone” like a cigarette possessed through the ultimate “Just Go Away” with plenty of detours for clubs (“Heart of Glass”) and soda shops (“Sunday Girl”) in between. Attitude wasn’t the whole story, and Harry’s babe appeal wasn’t besides the point, but the versatile attack of ironclad songs from all points of then-recent history is what really turns new blood into made legends.

1979: Buzzcocks (Singles Going Steady)

Sullivan-era Beatles, played at the wrong RPM, even lyrically kinda if you nix “Orgasm Addict.” But “Love You More?” “I Don’t Mind?” My favorite idea of punk has always been pop songs performed too fast, and the tightly wound John Maher smashed the skins like he was on the verge of hospitalization. Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle ran with the stammering frustration of early Who to capture a lovesick new wave the Buzzcocks simply banged out too fast to wait for an album to cohere. That’s where punk’s most useful default best-of comes in. Singles Going Steady collected their high-anxiety highwire act single by whiny single, where maturation waiting in the wings not only helps the earlier cynical stuff like “Orgasm Addict” go down easier but allows it to be their best. Behold, “What Do I Get?” the most good-hearted incel anthem ever bawled, and its epic counterpart “Why Can’t I Touch It?” which is thankfully not about orgasm addicts. Something’s gone wrong again; the nice guys finished first. No pun.

1980: The Clash (The Clash [U.S.], London Calling)

The Clash have a shot at the greatest rock band of all time, especially if you plot it out on paper. Starting punk and rough, they were impossible to not shout along with from the first martial hits of “Janie Jones” or “White Riot” or “Career Opportunities.” Their politics only kept branching out (“Safe European Home”) as the songs took on complexity, before going stylistically nuclear on London Calling, which starts with an apocalypse and ends with a party. In between, they explore everything from Elvis like the cover art (“Brand New Cadillac”) to expert reggae (“The Guns of Brixton”) to an emotional take on the new wave that was creeping in with all its dubious plasticinity (“Lost in the Supermarket”). Punks interested in the future were almost as strange punks looking back at history and Joe Strummer (the Lennon) and Mick Jones (the McCartney) did both. For all this stretching their legs, their refrains still rang out like soccer chants (“Death or Glory,” “Rudie Can’t Fail”). No band was better equipped to usher in a new decade as they dabbled in dub, disco, and funk while gigging with everyone from Joe Ely to the Stones. “The Magnificent Seven” and “This Is Radio Clash” even reached out to newborn rap before “Rock the Casbah” and “Should I Stay or Should I Go” (and even the synth-smeared “This Is England”) made for the logical endpoint of pop success. And by then they were still conscientious, still leading off with the public service announcement that murder isn’t a crime if it’s committed by a cop. But the Clash’s career was shaped like a mountain peak with London Calling at the very top, just brash young men who thought they could do anything — including chronicle their own tribulations in “Complete Control” and triumphs in “Clash City Rockers” — and made it so. They roared into existence and took their unsustainability all the way to the bank.

1981: X (Los Angeles, Wild Gift)

For those tuned into L.A. as a burgeoning early ‘80s punk scene, X may have well been their Fleetwood Mac. Married bohemians John Doe and Exene Cervenka harmonized on every chorus, sometimes almost every word of their stuttering, upside-down rockabilly tunes, usually with a title slapped on from Cervenka’s many moleskines of poetry: “The World’s a Mess, It’s in My Kiss,” “Sex and Dying in High Society,” and most punkishly, “Your Phone’s Off the Hook, But You’re Not.” That is, they exploited any hairline crack in their union for the art, giving punk an edge that previous cardholders had nowhere near the sophistication for. The prematurely destructing Sex Pistols certainly were in no shape to eulogize Sid and Nancy. The closest thing to exploration of conjugal hardships in the genre might have been Joey Ramone singing “The KKK Took My Baby Away” after Johnny stole his girlfriend. So Billy Zoom armed the couple with duct-taped Chuck Berry moves as they played the inchoate drifters on record, honing their craft more personally between 1980’s audacious Los Angeles (whose title track took liberties with a racial slur they’ve finally excised) and 1981’s tighter, more interpersonal Wild Gift: “every other week I need a new address,” went the song with the refrain of “we’re desperate, get used to it.” With Doe writing one about the Germs’ Lorna Doom and Cervenka ditto about the Blasters’ Phil Alvin, X ran towards, not away from, their jealous tendencies and tensions as Zoom swung for the fences on bangers like “Beyond and Back.” John and Exene lasted four more years and got two more good albums out of it before the mighty and unexpected Alphabetland in 2020 turned out to be their wildest gift of all.

1982: Talking Heads (The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads)

Tough one to place. Talking Heads’ great 1970s albums were only just beginning to scratch the surface of what they could do, especially funkwise. Their 1980 fulcrum Remain in Light is rightly lauded but one-dimensional by design (several tracks never change chords from their central loop) and the second half gets drab. Their biggest chart moment Speaking in Tongues gets eclipsed by Stop Making Sense, the most wonderful concert film ever created, which unfortunately lands in the most overcrowded possible year for MVPs without contributing new music, though they’re admittedly a special case. So let’s split the difference between studio and cultural peaks: The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads beats Stop Making Sense as live music, and sums up how vital and groovy they had become. It presents a catalogue visionary enough to encompass “Life During Wartime,” “Take Me to the River,” “Psycho Killer,” “Heaven,” of course “Once in a Lifetime,” and many other prizes unlike any artist who’d ever previously existed. They already had their dream team of Bernie Worrell, Nona Hendryx, Adrian Belew, and more backing up songs that never sounded more alive. So look at it this way: the potency of this tour convinced them to self-finance Stop Making Sense.

1983: R.E.M. (Chronic Town, Murmur)

Has an Only Band That Matters ever been so unassuming? R.E.M. lived many different lives; fucking hilarious that the very moment he finally spat out the marbles, Michael Stipe had all that to namedrop in rapid succession on “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” He got real about Reagan and Bush — and Andy Kaufman. They palled around with Courtney Love and Thom Yorke and went glam and folk and Patti Smith. They signed to Warner Brothers because “Bugs Bunny.” Peter Buck swung a mandolin around his neck and lifted the world with “Losing My Religion,” sat on a whoopee cushion and out came the wah solo to “Stand,” which isn’t even one of the top three most inane things on the song (3. slap bass 2. “your head is there to move you around” 1. ok fine wah solo). Like any great band, R.E.M. contains multitudes, and they evolved from Cans of Piss (only their second-most-offensive early moniker) to “Shiny Happy People.” But early R.E.M. is worshipped in godly measure for a reason. One is Bill Berry, who had the bright idea to affix panicked Vibrators drumming to Buck’s arpeggiated Byrds chime. But Stipe’s ethereal goods, mumbled as somberly as someone can intone “up to par and Katie bars the kitchen signs but not me in” gave philosophy majors their moment while Yorke was still dropping deuce in digitized diapers. “Catapult” scanned exultant, “Perfect Circle” lilting, and “Radio Free Europe” rousing, all without meaning anything obvious; grow up with Murmur and for years something he didn’t actually sing will live in your head. No one else in rock history has ever uncovered so many moods in the slipstream of ambiguity, and most never will. Those guitars, that rhythm section, even those highly singable melodies, none of that is cryptic. Recite an R.E.M. song to a loved one, conveying mystery to each other, I guess that’s rock and roll now, too. Because some of the tensest post-punk chords you’ve ever heard shift are undergirding the phrase “boxcars are pulling out of town.”

1984/1985: The Replacements (Let It Be, Tim) / Hüsker Dü (Zen Arcade, New Day Rising, Flip Your Wig)

The Twin Cities ruled the 80s start to finish even if you sidestep the decade’s twin greatest rock bands — pour one out for the Purple One who comes out on top of pop’s greatest-ever year by rocking harder than Springsteen, outfunking Talking Heads, and outslutting Madonna. The ‘Mats and the Hüskers had an us-against-the-world attitude against the scene, the world, and each other (see “Somethin to Dü”). Both viewed punk as a new means to lofty ambition albeit with very different work ethics. Bob Mould and Grant Hart’s personal onesupmanship scanned as gay before either came out, and Zen Arcade, their attempt at a hardcore White Album, was radder than it had any right to be, concealing Hart’s largest anthems (“Standing by the Sea,” “Turn on the News”) behind Mould’s volcanic dissonance (“The Biggest Lie” and “What’s Going On” back to back) and still having enough left over for…their two most tuneful records in 1985. Suddenly Hart’s melodic respites were getting downright Billy Joel on “Books About UFOs” and even Mould unearthed a tuneful side (“I Apologize,” “Celebrated Summer”) that paved the way for his top-shelf Sugar. A power trio just didn’t prove big enough for the both of them; it’s remarkable that their egos imploded before the Replacements’ livers.

Paul Westerberg was always too self-deprecating to be a hardcore bro; naming your debut Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash will do that, and getting bored with the bracing “We’re Coming Out” so fast you resort to a lounge-piano shuffle interlude is peak ADHD. Getting bored was a sport for Minneapolis’ finest, though, swapping genders with a shrug on “Androgynous” or covering Kiss or tormenting 12-year-old Tommy with tonsillectomy nightmares (or their stewardess or SNL’s censors as the case may be). The glory of the mess (“Seen Your Video,” “Answering Machine”) gave way to the pitfalls of passion (“Left of the Dial,” “Here Comes a Regular”) as Let It Be was buffed into Tim, and it still didn’t get a proper mix until 2023. The legend, the myth, the losers.

1986: Slayer (Reign in Blood)

The moment Slayer cemented themselves as history’s greatest metal band is when the banshee-like lead guitar squeals in for takeoff on “Angel of Death” and quickly reveals itself to actually be Tom Araya’s venom-spitting groan. At 29 minutes, Reign in Blood is essentially an extra-nasty hardcore record à la Bad Brains without one of those momentum-killing reggae jams that’s five times as long as the best tracks. It’s so breakneck they forced themselves to slow down on the unworthy follow-up South of Heaven. Tempo-changing riff-gnashers like “Piece by Piece” and “Altar of Sacrifice” march on your skull without resorting to Metallia’s muddled prog interludes and “Jesus Saves” makes a convincing case (as the Church of Satan does on a regular basis) that devil-worshippers can sniff out corrupt Christians better than legislators do. If only they were able to do it twice, without Rick Rubin’s holy reducing, and occasionally (1990’s “War Ensemble”) they have. But they really made thrash an institution so knifelike newcomers such as VHÖL, Vektor, Power Trip and Pest Control can keep tearing off the scab. Virtually every metal band over 180 bpm owes them something.

1987: New Order (Brotherhood, Substance)

Olivia Rodrigo prefers them to Joy Division, so that settles that. Not that the band behind Power, Corruption & Lies was proffering “Shiny Happy People” — “The Perfect Kiss” turns out to be death. But Bernard Sumner cracks up at the beginning of “Every Little Counts,” because the closer one gets to reaching melodic nirvana the sillier it feels, and every little counts. New Order wowed critics by seamlessly maneuvering between the totally programmed synthpop of “Blue Monday” and guitar-driven college-rock like “Broken Promise,” usually operating between the two. On 1986’s Brotherhood, they gave both versions of themselves one side apiece, and unsurprisingly it peaks where they join in the middle: the euphoric “Way of Life,” the worldwide smash “Bizarre Love Triangle,” the delicacies of “All Day Long” rearranging “Sunday Morning”’s celesta for discos, which somehow shakes out to Wagner’s prelude to Das Rheingold. The following year’s Substance is unanimously considered one of the essential ‘80s sum-ups, where you can feel the brightness being turned up at light speed from the transitional “Ceremony” to the fully elated “Temptation” and circular mood-funk workouts like “Confusion” or slo-mo disco on the order of “Thieves Like Us.” From the groundbreaking Kraftwerk to boredom-fetishizing Pet Shop Boys, history is dotted with plenty of crucial synthpop combos. This is the one that always kept one foot in the rock world. And their sacrilege, victorious take on “Love Will Tear Us Apart” beats the original.

1988: Sonic Youth (Sister, Daydream Nation)

Favorite bands are personal, and evangelizing the impenetrable thickets of A Thousand Leaves, NYC Ghosts and Flowers, and Experimental Jet Set, Trash, and No Star to the uninitiated is futile, even though two of those I understood well before I was an upper classman. I’ll never understand how Sonic Youth isn’t a love one, love ‘em all proposition to most people. But bands don’t normally make flawless albums for a quarter-century straight without hiatus, a confusing prospect to music geeks trapped in the strictures of annual hype cycles. Let’s choose to celebrate the brief window in which no one could argue about them, when they followed up the massively musical leap forward Sister with the rollicking opus Daydream Nation, meeting its own moment with classic-rock style jams (even a ZZ Top goof at the end) that for once aimed at larger meaning, even if it’s tackling adolescent ennui with Thurston Moore’s “Teen Age Riot” or Hollywood snake talk with Kim Gordon’s “Kissability” or the vividest rabbit-hole excursion ever described with appropriately wide-eyed delivery by Lee Ranaldo on “Eric’s Trip.” They stayed no less epochal as their ambitions got stranger and smaller, but Sonic Youth didn’t always relegate themselves to the sidelines of hip and sly. They were just born that way. And for all detractors’ talk about disaffected cool, piloting one’s major-label gambit to ask “are you gonna liberate us girls from white male corporate oppression?” and declare “I believe Anita Hill” was thinking pretty fucking big, too.

1989: Mekons (Rock ‘n’ Roll, Original Sin)

Alt-country’s nonplussed inventors certainly have a take on the genre they named their most irreverent album after: “Destroy your safe and happy lives before it is too late / The battles we fought were long and hard / Just not to be consumed by rock and roll.” But they still cop to being born inside its belly, and on the next track, they celebrate the futility of resisting (“day by day I plunged deeper into a world of cheap sensation”). Such is the curse of the Mekons, forever critical, anticapitalist, rousing motherfuckers who can’t stop turning a miserable lyric into a defiant call to arms even as they allowed bleakness to take over for last year’s Horror. Their live shows remain unimpeachable, and while they refined themselves exquisitely on 1990’s twangy Curse of the Mekons and brimstone gospel of 2002’s OOOH!, they slammed the door on Reagan and Thatcher’s 80s with the most gleefully punishing halleujahs of their career: “Empire of the Senseless,” “Heaven and Back,” “Blow Your Tuneless Trumpet.” Even the production fought dirty.

1990: Pixies (Doolittle, Bossanova)

The first alt-rockers who didn’t start out punk invented the ‘90s by achieving Charles Thompson IV’s dream synthesis of Hüsker Dü with Peter, Paul and Mary. Joey Santiago’s lopsided, stairstep riffs left plenty of negative space for Kim Deal’s bass and David Lovering’s sparse boom to carry verses before detonating on choruses where Thompson, who took the quizzical name Black Francis, would either guffaw like an Arkham inmate or lay on you the loveliest tune or both, sometimes with Deal coating his sour with sweet. It’s this Jekyll-and-Hyde routine, all over highlights from big-break Doolittle such as “Monkey Gone to Heaven” and “Debaser” that gave Kurt Cobain and hundreds of low-ink xeroxes their only lesson in song dynamics. But their greatest testament was the fascinating, overproduced Bossanova, a triumph of internal logic that married “Telstar”-indebted sci-fi (“Velouria,” “The Happening”) and surf themes (“Ana,” the Surftones cover opener “Cecilia Ann”) with their perfected store of tantrums (“Rock Music”) and pop nuggets (“Dig for Fire”). Even with Deal sidelined and no peak quite as singularly astounding as “Here Comes Your Man” or “Letter to Memphis,” it jells even better than their more obvious successes. No one said rock was fair, which is probably why Thompson tried to fire their most (only?) charming member (woman) before putting the whole group out to pasture via fax.

1991: My Bloody Valentine (Glider, Tremolo, Loveless)

With respect to showoff Tom Morello, studio-weaponizing Trent Reznor, and taking-matters-into-his-own-axeless-hands Skrillex, Kevin Shields will go down as rock guitar’s greatest sound designer. From the barrage of Jesus and Mary Chain-style noise on 1988’s audacious Isn’t Anything he’s always been a master songwriter who never felt that normal earthly confines suited his compositions. So where Hendrix played his brains out like he was trying to launch himself into orbit, Shields chained pedals frantically for alchemical reaction and eureka, there was “Glider,” a clanging construction site being sucked into a black hole you can’t turn off (highly recommend the ten-minute version released in 2012) and “Swallow,” a gorgeous simulation of some hybrid Chinese flute/uilleann pipe that hopefully made Jon Hassell proud (his estranged collaborator Brian Eno said “Soon” “set a new standard for pop”). But those were mere breadcrumbs on the trail to Loveless, the towering creature that bankrupted Creation Records and took so long between sessions to conceive that the band forgot what tuning songs were in. Almost nothing comes back from those depths of spelunking indulgence, so hearing mutated elephants roar back from the opening strains of “Only Shallow” must have been akin to Odysseus returning home. The verses of “To Here Knows When” resembled distant vacuum cleaners, and well, you know the metaphors. Yes, shoegaze began here just like Godsmack began with Alice in Chains. A spinoff of the instantly sui generis barely stood a chance.

1992: Nirvana (Nevermind, Incesticide)

I wasn’t there, but I can believe the world felt the Beatles in their bones, that “Twist and Shout” or “Please Please Me” hit with primal force like nothing else that existed save for, like, James Brown. That the mastery over melody and exploration of themes and sounds had a physical component true guitar addicts would seek out further in the Who or the Experience or Blue Cheer or the Stooges or Black Sabbath, definitely Led Zeppelin in the heft of their whomp. But a lot of those guys jammed or made operettas or made a big show of rebelling against the disciplines of the two-or-three-minute pop song. Having only been conscious of current music since MC Hammer and Dookie, I’m fairly hard to convince that there’s any band that bricked the world in the chest like Nirvana with such headbanging impact controlled under such tuneful precision, and that’s just the formal stuff. Even before Kurt Cobain’s shocking suicide, it was clear he cared in a way megastars did not, unless they were diplomatic crowdpleasers like Bono or Springsteen. This was a guy who wore dresses onstage and castigated “Mr. Moustache” and the homophobic jocks of his troubled youth well past becoming a millionaire overnight. In fact, Nevermind’s famous baby swimming towards a dollar album art spoke volumes about his trepidation to succeed at all. That hesitation didn’t exist in his art, which was so immediate and urgent it had middle-schoolers in plaid and tattered jeans contemplating phrases like “a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido” like it was the Rosetta Stone for their own hormones sending cryptic messages to their changing brains. “Sliver” alone turned the mundane memory of missing your parents as a child into trauma even ice cream couldn’t fix. “Lithium” dealt with a more complex investigation of sanity, and both were set to melodies the 1992 Reading Festival could sing back en masse. There’s nothing new to say about Nirvana, and they’re still an apotheosis of rock and roll so raw they just bled out with no chance to heal. Thousands of bands in their wake have turned up more emotionally open than ever before. Almost none of them exhibit Nirvana’s mastery over melody or the disciplines of the two-or-three-minute pop song. Almost none of them howl from their stomach like Cobain. Zero can do both.

1993: Archers of Loaf (Icky Mettle)

I dig Pavement, I really do, especially Slanted and Enchanted and the cult-was-right fave Wowee Zowee, which took decades to fall into its jagged place. But the others have a few too many moments that warrant the slacker tag, swaying tempos and mock-aimless melodies like “Stop Breathin’” that have considerable charm and also need to get out of the way so Archers of Loaf can demolish the Cat’s Cradle. Eric Bachmann’s hairball-in-throat affect and Eric Johnson’s Big Country-derived upper-neck melodies careening into noise convoys that threaten to get wreckt were unlikely hotspots for indie anthems to bloom. But they did, from “Wrong” to “Web in Front” to “Toast” to (why wasn’t this a radio hit?) “Plumb Line” with plenty of earwax and backwash (and “Backwash”) in between, exemplified perfectly in their finest combo of “You and Me” slo-mo screeching into “Might” jawbreaker jangling. Sometimes they sound like bubblegum Fugazi and sometimes noisy cranks on excellent debut Icky Mettle, which kicked off a winning streak of startling quality assurance from the all-bangers Greatest of All Time EP to the hoarser cacophony of Vee Vee to Eno and Tom Waits influences creeping in on All the Nations Airports. The laptoppy title hymn of onetime swan song White Trash Heroes even scooped Kid A’s click-and-bloop by a couple years. But the finest noisemakers in ‘90s indie never topped their triumphant zit-crusted debut even if they actually had it in them to grow the fuck up.

1994: Hole (Live Through This)

Courtney Love’s every bit the dish you’ve heard. She can write ‘em (“they get what they want and they never want it again”) and annotate ‘em (“this song is about a jerk, I hexed him and now he’s losing his hair”) and then co-write her biggest hit with the subject of said song. And while the Kim Gordon-produced Pretty on the Inside had its moments in its Sonic Youth skinsuit, Love’s inoterstellar leap forward Live Through This comprises 12 cautionary tales of nearly uniform excellence and brutality in tandem. (That’s about three per each famous nemesis she’s got — two women who come to mind are on this list, the men aren’t.) Kurt Cobain’s self-inflicted fatal gunshot wound left Love a widow and their daughter fatherless four days before the album’s release (the eerie title is actually from Gone With the Wind) and she still had to weather accusations of marticide, before losing her bassist Kristen Pfaff to heroin just two months later. And yet even before that chain of terrible events, the tunes cataloged tragedies unknown to cismen (“pee girl gets the belt” is a one-line nightmare story, “Plump” catalogs the body horror of pregnancy) while “Credit in the Straight World” is a bashed-out Young Marble Giants cover preempting the charges that Cobain ghostwrote her songs (the verses of “Gutless” are the only thing on the entire record that even resembles him a little). Love obliterates her larynx like the embattled survivor she was even before she experienced the full extent of her pain, and she’s a laugh riot in the very moments you empathize with her most. As so many kickers blurbing this masterpiece have joked already, Miss World wanted to be the girl with the most cake, she faked it so real she was beyond fake, and so forth, but her cries of “I want my baby / who took my baby?” should have never had to be as heartbreaking as they are. “I’m all I want to be,” she declared next time out, paradoxically along with “I need to be under your skin.” Neither was ever in doubt.

1995: Green Day (Dookie, Insomniac)

Unless you count Blondie (which is fair, if wrong), it took Green Day to finally break punk mainstream in the U.S. nearly 20 years too late, though they did improve on Buzzcocks’ and Descendents’ pop-punk prototype to deliver hits only slightly tricker than “I Wanna Be Sedated,” with more than a hint of Beatles in their tuneful abandon and Mike Dirnt’s bass some of the most audible and liveliest to invade any era of radio — the swingin’ “Longview” you know but check how he crabwalks all over “Stuck With Me.” In the summer smash Dookie and its sicker, crunchier counterpart Insomniac the trio warp-sped Nevermind and In Utero in miniature, both flawless spitballs of in-your-face power chords and disaffected sarcasm that paint the Bay Area as apocalyptic apathy zones of meth and masturbation to a ceaseless assortment of happy, hyperactive hooks. Believe you me, “86,” “Brat,” and “Walking Contradiction” are just as contagiously catchy as “Basket Case,” “Welcome to Paradise” or “When I Come Around” if a little less iconic and a smidge mercenary about clinging to their runaway success. Ironically, the maturity they hit on all too quickly afterwards turned out to also be a phase and they permanently lost their wit with the rhetorically necessary and painfully earnest American Idiot. But you can listen to Dookie and Insomniac on repeat, even when you’re not ten. Great to sing or play along to, especially when you don’t know how.

1996: Sleater-Kinney (Call the Doctor)

There maybe isn’t a better band on this list; there certainly isn’t one with more teeth. They could’ve showed up in 1997, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2005 (very fucking close), or 2015, and with regret it must be pointed out that powerhouse skin pounder Janet Weiss wouldn’t join the trio until the following year. But even before that pivotal event, before they had the backing force of Kill Rock Stars, Sleater-Kinney were already the most ferocious act in the universe, riot grrrl (and Robert Plant) transmuting itself into something darker, more primal and tangled, courtesy of Corin Tucker’s impossible vibrato, lunging for space with Carrie Brownstein’s wirier taunting on Call the Doctor, one of the most unsettling, vibrant records ever made by two supposedly smitten people (albeit “this is love and you can’t make it”). When that bubble burst following SPIN outing the two singer-guitarists even to their families, they made the even more emotionally consuming Dig Me Out, home to megafans’ tears-in-beers special “One More Hour.” But their first masterpiece in 1996 was all lions and tigers, its most famous manifesto the stardom paean “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone,” simultaneously mocking and bring-it-on. If you’re no rock ‘n’ roll fun, you’re no match for Sleater-Kinney. Your words are sticky stupid running down their legs.

1997: Radiohead (OK Computer)

A moment of silence for Yo La Tengo, Primal Scream, Old 97’s, Modest Mouse, that dog., and probably more. There’s a staggering number of cultural threads running through 1997 in music, from Hanson to Chumbawamba to big beat to ska to swing revival to shiny-suit rap to Missy Elliott to Sugar Ray to Spice Girls. Not since the dawn of MTV were so many inexplicable novelties of different flavor all fighting for the same brains to get lodged in like shrapnel (Cake!), and so many new strains of alternative and indie and electronic (Stereolab!) that even Bush resorted to a remix album to try and get ahead of the confusion. That confluence is where the very clear winner comes in. Not only is OK Computer the second time ‘90s rock changed the course of music completely (unless you want to argue this didn’t happen until Kid A, which really couldn’t have existed independently of it), but there wasn’t a 12-year-old at the time who could resist “Paranoid Android” or its avant-Beavis video that MTV actually kept all six minutes of in rotation. It was alt-rock’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” on its Dark Side of the Moon, a dystopic freakorama meltdown brought on by, like, free AOL discs and Windows 95. There’s simply never been a band who understood the artistic pros and capitalistic cons of the tech renaissance better. With a fascist president posting AI fanfic videos, it’s really hard to deny Thom Yorke and co. maybe even lowballed the shit they portended. The automaton who intones “Fitter Happier” and the huckster who sneers “Electioneering” sound positively quaint as the thing approaches 30. “Karma police arrest this girl / her Hitler hairdo is making me feel ill” is more up to speed, though any irony has vaporized. The panic, the vomit. We are standing on the edge.

1998: Bikini Kill (The Singles)

Long a part of shaping the 1990s (she first wrote “Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit” on Cobain’s wall and in Le Tigre played matchmaker to dancebeats and punk by decade’s end), Kathleen Hanna didn’t hurry to write coherent songs. Her claque shouted her diciest rhetoric back to her anyway, who needed choruses? Still, “Suck My Left One” and “Double Dare Ya” and “Lil Red” more than made do as mere forces of nature. After her friends in Green Day got punk on MTV, she made like the Go-Go’s on 1996’s notably jangly Reject All American, and then Bikini Kill collected their one-offs and split up. Except that last will and testament turned out to be punk’s most important singles comp since Buzzcocks’ Singles Going Steady, and the quintessential Hanna manifesto at under 18 minutes. Joan Jett oversees three anthem-shaped classics at the beginning, most notably the definitive “Rebel Girl” recording out of three tries, then things get ruff again for electrocutions like “Rah! Rah! Replica.” And the classic-rock Reject reject falsely titled “Anti-Pleasure Dissertation” is roundly dispatched by the powered-up “I Like Fucking,” climaxed by a credo anyone should want flash-tattooed: “I believe in the radical possibilities of pleasure, babe.”

1999: The Dismemberment Plan (Emergency & I)

The utopian ideal for an all-white dude rock band. Following a debut single in which a referee gets kneed in the balls, the Dismemberment Plan get decreasingly snotty, eventually letting some vulnerability into their jittery, Minutemen-like postpunk, along with some funk, samplers, synths, and next thing you know they earn a rep as emo’s Talking Heads with the “Once in a Lifetime” parallel “The Ice of Boston,” sans wife, house, and large automobile. They follow it up with Emergency & I, an Interscope-bankrolled masterstroke that makes jaw-dropping indie-rock from dabbling in drum ‘n’ bass and Timbaland-esque hip-hop innovations, but only using sounds they can replicate onstage. The lyrics confront mortality and heartbreak while remaining uproariously funny, and they balance all these spinning plates atop crazy time signatures. The major dumps them after all and lets them out of their contract easy so they take it on the road and become one of the best live acts in existence, letting fans swarm the stage during that “Boston” song. Their combustible energy, vested interest in Black pop rhythms, and never-sappy shows of humanity earn them the kind of hype money can’t buy. Then they drift towards dad-rock, split up amicably, start families, and reform well-received reunions and festival spots. Letting the days go by, water flowing underground.

2000: At the Drive-In (Relationship of Command)

Right, 2000 is the year of Kid A, and my own preferred boogie-dystopia, XTRMNTR by Primal Scream, wondrous ear-brain sync-ups anyone should experience in oversized headphones. It’s also the year of personal favorites by comfort bands: All Hands on the Bad One is Sleater-Kinney at their most sugary, NYC Ghosts and Flowers is Sonic Youth at their most beatnik. The real contender here was Rated R by Queens of the Stone Age, a wacked-out patchwork of Massive Attack’s collectivism applied to detour-heavy stoner rock with plenty of funny grooves and inside jokes. But Cedric Bixler-Zavala’s impassioned outbursts simply edge out Josh Homme’s coyness; this is one of those records you’ve heard tell of where the band wound themselves so tight they exploded. Famously sadistic Korn whisperer Ross Robinson probably didn’t help, though he did capture At the Drive-In at whirlwind ferocity. No emo has ever thrashed like this, kicked like a rodeo bull entangled in strange guitar countermelodies. In fact, nothing else has ever really sounded like Relationship of Command, least of all their wimpy previous records or the Mars Volta’s exhausting prog to follow. Ravers like “Pattern Against User,” “Rolodex Propaganda” (featuring a gleefully wtf-am-I-doing-here Iggy Pop) and the dizzying intro “Arcarsenal” brim with stunning internal logic and junk-science exhortations from Bixler-Zavala. “One Armed Scissor” made more sense than conceivable as a moderate hit just before the implosion, and the recitation-and-response “Invalid Litter Dept.” you’ve just never heard anything like. It’s about female maquiladora workers gone missing and murdered. A vision of emo with intersectional feminist class politics, as well as the riffs and tunes to pull off their gut-instinct pretensions.

2001: System of a Down (Toxicity)

System of a Down might not be the most singular metal band of all-time but they’re certainly the one that’s most marketable. How Rick Rubin or any exec heard three multiplatinum number-one albums in these outspoken Armenian tricksters is known only to them, but at the same time it was obvious they had something special and unrepeatable on their hands if you caught Matt Pinfield hawking 1998’s jazzbo-mock-slam “Sugar” in between mookier rap-metal morons on 120 Minutes. Still, a hit single called “Chop Suey!” and a follow-up with a prominent refrain about eating seeds were not on anyone’s bingo card, and it’s even more of a feat that they ascended so high literally the week of 9/11 before Bush’s America descended into shameful jingoism including radio monopoly Clear Channel blacklisting any tunes that could be perceived as anti-American. The quartet’s politics are now so muddled (one open Trumpie, two Charlie Kirk sympathizers) that it’s flagrantly obvious why they haven’t been able to agree on any new material in 20 years beyond a couple of new singles condemning “Genocidal Humanoidz” in Armenia. But 2001 smash Toxicity was right on when it wasn’t smacking groupies; “Prison Song” made it history’s first and only number-one album to declare “all research and successful drug policy shows that treatment should be increased / And law enforcement decreased while abolishing mandatory minimum sentences.” Of course, Serj Tankian’s jestermaxxing ululations never kept anything that straightforward, even betwixt melodic highlights like “Science” and the regrettably Charlie Manson-inspired “ATWA.” But the improbable sweet-and-sour blend of pogoing grindcore and lushly harmonized choruses made the marketing plan a little more understandable.

2002: The Hives (Veni Vidi Vicious)

In rock and roll, uniforms are a costume because authority is mocked. So from Angus Young’s schoolboy digs to Devo’s hazmat-style coveralls to the Ramones’ leather to the Donnas’ similar naming convention, we eat up the schtick because imposing order on the noise is always a fun joke. Three-chord Swedish cartoons the Hives especially love to embody this contradiction, playing intentionally like robots while wild-eyed Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist swaggers and screeches and hams it up in the splitting image of the young Mick Jagger stunting like the young Iggy Pop. And it fucking slays when they’ve got the juice, which like Aerosmith sometimes takes them two decades off; The Hives Forever Forever the Hives last year makes a convincing case that age is nothing but a number. But when they stormed MTV in their prime with the indelible “Hate to Say I Told You So,” they were the most shameless and preening of the “garage-rock” bands that included the laissez-faire Strokes and damn-near talentless Vines, with whom the Hives had the misfortune to emerge in unison. With caffienated shakeups like “Outsmarted,” Veni Vidi Vicious was a bomb in a Red Bull can that took two years to be cracked open, and 2004’s Tyrannosaurus Hives nearly topped its frenzied energy despite more garbled sentiments. But if you start them up, they’ll never stop.

2003: The White Stripes (Elephant)

Sometimes personal preference doesn’t matter. The albums housing “Fell in Love With a Girl,” “Blue Orchid,” and “Conquest” all have stranger and chewier goodies for this guitar nerd to fixate on — even bought my first real pedal indulgence, an EHX POG2, to get that electric-toothbrush tone from “Blue Orchid.” But I worship The Riff as only a psycho who devotes weeks to a compendium like this could, and “Seven Nation Army” was the last of The Riffs that the outside world will agree on, cheer their teams to, and drunkenly chant da- - -da-da-da-DA-DA spilling out of the stadiums, for an unforeseeable long time. While Elephant is sequenced bizarrely (tracks 5-7 are three tender ballads in a row?) and less fresh-faced than the $5,000 rush of White Blood Cells, it captures Jack and Meg White’s big moment with several jolts as strong as anything they’ve done: Meg’s other single-kick showcase “The Hardest Button to Button,” the surf-garage tsunami “Hypnotize,” and the squealing seven-minute “House Rent Blues” elucidation “Ball and Biscuit.” And the silly-goose closer with Holly Golightly.

2004: Rilo Kiley (More Adventurous)

Have you ever met someone who didn’t like Jenny Lewis? If that’s even possible, I don’t want to know. From her knowing chirp as early as 1999’s please-buy-me-one Initial Friend EP to the proud hussy who sings (and does the swim to) 2007’s “Smoke Detector,” there is no era of Rilo Kiley that doesn’t excel. That includes her duetting with Too $hort on the “Dejalo” remix. Day-ones hold their noses for the two Blake Sennett lead vocals on 2002’s majestic The Execution of All Things but not the simulated Gloria Estefan and Dusty Springfield for some reason that made Under the Blacklight such an ahead-of-itself precursor to indie’s R&B fixation. Even the 2013 odds-and-sods Rkives fucking rules. But let’s go with More Adventurous, from the very middle of their reign, with Jenny’s sharpest writing (“Does He Love You?” “A Man/Then Me/Then Jim”), suavest singing (“I Never”), and Sennett’s lavishest ornamentation (you know the horns but check out his third-verse pyrotechnics on the Bush-burning “It’s a Hit” or his solo on “I Never”). Rilo’s reunion stint last year shows they’re more beloved than ever, and they were never quite unsung but it’s time we get it on the record that there wasn’t a more accomplished band working in 2004, or a more magnetic frontwoman extant during their entire heyday.

2005: Gogol Bordello (Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike)

Could it be as simple as the best live band you’ll ever see? I didn’t exist to compare Gogol Bordello to Zeppelin or Prince’s Revolution or, I don’t know, Bad Brains in 1982. But I’d make my bets. Those who consider Eugene Hütz and his merry band of accordion- and violin-wielding globetrotters an irritating novelty have the right to ignore their actually fire studio catalogue (including this year’s New Order-influenced- and -featuring We Mean It, Man!) except for the Steve Albini-recorded Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike, a cinderblock-hard, alternate-universe London Calling for Balkan dissidents. But no one has the right to deny Gogol’s profoundly physical stage show, at peak form in 2005 when the sloganeering Hütz performed daredevil feats atop a marching-band drum atop a very living circle pit. Ageless fiddler Sergey Ryabtsev gets all the best riffs in his Slayer shirt and various women have held the position of clanging circus-sized hand-cymbals together over the decades. Whatever spectacle or Rolling Thunder Revue you’re imagining, it’s still more intense and ridiculous. And it’s that studio catalogue that fuels its engine, starting with Gypsy Punks.

2006: The Hold Steady (Separation Sunday, Boys and Girls in America)

Even with his old motley crew Lifter Puller, Craig Finn was building a world before he learned to carry a tune. So when he and Tad Kubler dreamed up the Hold Steady, they kept the awesomely detailed narratives and impossibly unreliable characters (Nightclub Dwight! The eyepatch guy!) and gave them a sound, too: basically what disgraced Sun Kil Mooner Mark Kozelek would disparage future Finn producer Adam Granduciel as “beer-commercial lead guitar shit.” They threw any ‘70s at the wall that stuck, from Zeppelin to E Street in one song (“Stevie Nix”) to Franz Nicolay imitating Rick Wakeman’s swirling keyboard on Yes’ “Roundabout” (“Chips Ahoy!”). On 2005’s tidal Separation Sunday Finn prized his full-album narrative about Charlemagne and born-again fuckup Holly Lujah above tune, though “Your Little Hoodrat Friend” sported his first real chorus. He never took those for granted again with the constant shoutalongs of the following year’s Boys and Girls in America, which removed the quotation marks around their hymnals once and for all. Despite opening with their finest title ever, the Hold Steady were effectively no longer stuck between stations.

2007: Arcade Fire (Neon Bible)

If you don’t want to deal with Arcade Fire, just substitute mouthy grandstanders Against Me! who made the album of their lives with 2007’s New Wave, a steroidal hookfest with good jabs at love (“Borne on the FM Waves of the Heart”) and the limitations of protest music (“White People for Peace”) with a mythmaking closer (“The Ocean”) that turned out be Laura Jane Grace’s retroactive coming-out party for her trans identity. But this is a very punk-heavy list and many bands who made grandiose-ensemble indie never hit with the embarrassment of riches that prime Arcade Fire tapped into. Except, impressive as the landscape-shifting Pitchfork kingmaker Funeral was, that impact was so much more gorgeous and urgent on 2007’s Neon Bible, simply one of the best albums ever made. These pious pilgrims didn’t waste a second, with a hoedown like “Keep the Car Running” or the subversive church march “Intervention” coming off like an E Street Band performing in an attic lit by one candle or tailing a torch-waving mob. It functioned as both a furious and soothing response to Bush’s devastation of Iraq, with uneasy balms like “Ocean of Noise” and “Windowsill” cresting like black waves indeed, over and over, an ever-burning constellation of melodies to guide those in need. Of course, no one needs Win Butler now. But great rock and roll often boils down to memory, anyway, and you can’t put your arms around one of those. The lions and the lambs ain’t sleeping yet.

2008: Be Your Own Pet (Get Awkward)

You’d be hard-pressed to find any band ever who was more fun than these hyperbored Nashville brats who unleashed their wildfire debut on the release date 6/6/06 full of Jemina Pearl shrieking post-Iggy provocations like “my brain is on fire / so piss right in my ear” and the even goofier “want to get a cat / my boyfriends wants a dog / we got into a fight / I drowned him in the bog.” The follow-up was somehow not just more tunefully refined (it happens) but also more threatening (huh): “today’s my birthday and now that I’m 20 / I don’t want to have responsibilities / I don’t want to be part of society,” “wanna kill myself on a telephone cord,” “I know you’re lying that you take it in the rear,” and personal spiritual map “crash a six-year-old’s birthday party / smash the cake in her face and make her grab her mommy / you gotta stand your fucking ground.” The hypocrites at their Eminem-selling label took exception to some of these and botched the American release, so if you scour Discogs for imports, never ever buy the one without “Becky,” who dies after class at the knife-wielding hands of a former BFF singing the tale from cell block two “but I don’t regret what I’ve done / ‘cause in the end it was fun.” Then they didn’t resurface ‘til 2023 with Pearl a Mommy. But no explosive live band has ever made more of their misspent youth — did I mention both original LPs each include a song about zombies?

2009: Paramore (Brand New Eyes)

Paramore aren’t always the great band rumored, but the highs (“That’s What You Get,” the David Byrne-covered “Hard Times”) are almost too high, and Hayley Williams is such a winner as the only true arena-level star of her generation who doesn’t suck in the slightest, that stans are willing to shrug through the rest of After Laughter or half of 2013’s Paramore. Their best and hardest-rocking album is most known for a ballad (“The Only Exception”) and it dropped in the year indie finally took over the world. So consider this entry a big-time rejection of an Animal Collective/Grizzly Bear/Phoenix new world order that didn’t end up lasting too long before Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes or whomever rendered “indie” permanently meaningless (we still got some decent xx and Dirty Projectors). Fuck all that sophistication because Brand New Eyes is just wall-to-wall bitter Williams bangers: “Ignorance,” “Feeling Sorry,” “Where the Lines Overlap,” the vicious “Playing God” (“if you point a finger I might have to bend it back or break it, break it off”), and the sagacious “Looking Up” (“God knows the world doesn’t need another band”). Quite a feat for emo Christians.

2010: Sleigh Bells (Treats)

The toolbox is a history of loud. “Knuck If You Buck” 808s, cheerleader chants, goes-to-11 riffs dumber than “Break Stuff,” and a fox out front in varsity lettering and leopard print finna beat you comatose with a baseball bat if you sample-snitch her Funkadelic steal. Nothing else has ever been like them unless you played Psychocandy and 2NE1’s “I Am the Best,” one in each earbud, at the same damn time. Against conventional wisdom, they made more than one great record as Alexis Krauss’ role grew in complexity — Bitter Rivals has the fiercest-tipped nails ever to grace a chalkboard. But the blunt-force simplicity of their true moment cannot be denied: “got my A machines on the table / got my B machines in the drawer.” Or if you prefer, ah-ah-ah-ah ah-ah-ah-ah (ahh-ahh-ah).

2011: Wussy (Strawberry, Funeral Dress II)

If you’ve ever read this site you know RIOTRIOT stands firmly that Funeral Dress is the One. But Wussy had so much further to go, and grow, from Great Album to Great Band, plotting out new dynamics that new drummer Joe Klug stepped in to finally pound into the firmament with 2011’s Strawberry, especially on the oft-played “Pulverized” and “Pizza King,” as well as the rarely-performed “Chicken,” on which Lisa Walker stretches her voice into PJ Harvey razor wire. Heavy rockers got heftier and slow ones like “Grand Champion Steer” took up more space, priming them for 2014’s epic career summit “Teenage Wasteland” to come. As for master songsmiths Chuck Cleaver and Lisa Walker, who may as well be Neil Young and Lucinda Williams fronting R.E.M. (with their strongest melodist Mark Messerly usually on bass à la Mike Mills), they re-recorded Funeral Dress entirely with campfire instruments just because fuck it.

2012: Japandroids (Celebration Rock)

If you’re going to make a fetish of rocking out and the attendant lifestyle, you might as well be elemental: one guitarist, one drummer, both shouting anthems so puerile they make Paul Westerberg look sophisticated, and lots of beer to lock up that analogy. Brian King and David Prowse scored a couple before and since (“Wet Hair” and “North East South West” are faves), but few outfits were destined for a lone gigantic monolith of a wish-fulfillment album like Japandroids. They nailed Celebration Rock on the second try, a power-rock anachronism that starts with literal fireworks and piles on liberal whoa-ohs as it strains to turn garage scuzz into amphitheater glory and sticks the landing with the final three tracks their two greatest hits and a denouement by design. Of course they couldn’t sustain it; few attemptors in the annals of history have truly come this close to convincingly having given it every single thing they got.

2013: Vampire Weekend (Modern Vampires of the City)

Unless you count Talking Heads, who never had a number-one album, these guard-changing indie Trojan horses are possibly the band to make the most hay ever from flaunting their privileged educations. First they gave Afropop guitar its biggest Western commercial moment since Paul Simon, then they dabbled in Auto-Tune and reggaeton, Lil Jon quotes and Rancid covers, all from a seeming academic distance. Then they managed to achieve something even higher after two improbably catchy, reference-clogged full-lengths: Modern Vampires of the City, a magnum opus that really put Rostam Batmanglij’s ace arranging to the test, from the John Philip Sousa coda of “Unbelievers” to the delicate machinations of “Hannah Hunt” to the live vocal pitch-shifting on “Diane Young” and “Ya Hey.” The latter is among the deepest and most celestial conversations with god in pop since Brian Wilson invented the pocket symphony. The former is simply a riot. Both titles are very silly puns. Among their peers to conquer the triumvirate of brows high, middle, and low, neither R.E.M. nor U2 ever mapped out their territory like such a well-plotted novel stuffed with footnotes. They’re still pretty great even after Batmanglij’s exit. But they’ve got their own sense of time.

2014: Parquet Courts/Parkay Quarts (Tally All the Things You Broke, Sunbathing Animal, Content Nausea)

Even more than Vampire Weekend, this band has studied. Their motorik Feelies/Pavement/Minutemen garage-punk is steeped in several past generations’ idea of primitive cool while Austin Brown and Andrew Savage allowed their busy brains to be eggheads all over it, kicking off the 2010s’ most impressive rock run with the stoned and starving Light Up Gold and ratcheting up dynamics on opposite ends of the tempo spectrum for its big-time successor Sunbathing Animal, or as Savage puts it, “how can I want something more than a new hell in which to fry / when I see in mostly black and white?” So “Black and White,” “Ducking and Dodging,” and “Sunbathing Animal” instantly became their fastest garage freakouts while “Instant Disassembly” remains hard to beat as their loveliest tearjerker, alongside “She’s Rolling” which is simply at the speed of snail. But unlike any other band I know unless you count Sonic Youth’s improvisation-oriented SYR series, the plot thickened with Parkay Quarts, a parallel alternate-timeline version of themselves that’s cruder and maybe even catchier on their two concurrent mini LPs Tally All the Things You Broke and Content Nausea: “The More It Works,” “Pretty Machines,” “You’ve Got Me Wonderin’ Now,” “Uncast Shadow of a Southern Myth,” and a note-for-note Nancy Sinatra cover would all be perilous for a best-of to skip. Or any fan of their correctly-spelled selves. It was all so good and kept ‘em coming for such a time that it made us question which was the “real” band, which was probably the idea.

2015: The Paranoid Style (Rock and Roll Just Can’t Recall)

Elizabeth Nelson and Timothy Bracy do for our nation’s capital what the Hold Steady do for the Twin Cities: cram in lots of words about shady, compelling figures brimming with rock-collector in-jokes over wailing bar-rock from yesteryear. Only in Nelson’s case, these characters are real, and the Washington connection is more synecdochal when they reach back to encompass the Molly Maguires secret society and Trotsky. For balance, the good guys in Paranoid Style songs include Doug Yule, Barney Bubbles, and They Might Be Giants. In short: the artists win, and everyone else gets an icepick in their back (“it’s understandable,” Nelson sings). If this particular flavor of lyrical world-building sounds dense, luckily so is the squall of the guitars. The Paranoid Style have made a lot of great records over the last decade incorporating an unparalleled sense of history. But for intensity, nothing matches this 2015 EP, which imagines Bob Seger at a deposition, and has since been reissued with irresistible bonus titles like “Slush Fund City” and “Last Days of the Monoculture.” With dB Will Rigby on drums (Peter Holsapple now commands lead guitar), these five songs blast off with “National Sunday Law” (“betcha someone told you you’re a tad unreasonable / around about the time you had your rivals shot”) and sustain twitchy This Year’s Model energy all the way through 1968’s “Master Jack,” a #18 Hot 100 hit by South Africans Four Jacks and a Jill that criticized apartheid.

2016: The Goon Sax (Up to Anything)

Maybe they’d be banished to the usual twee-Velvets realm of can’t sing-can’t play if Louis Forster wasn’t the son of the Go-Betweens’ Robert and surely grew up witnessing a lot of valuable songwriting lessons firsthand. Respectively, “Target” and “Telephone” change in key and tempo, fancy. But the more pessimistic James Harrison and on-the-go learner Riley Jones are his equals; where would Forster’s “Up to Anything” (“I want people to wonder about me”) be without Harrison’s “Sometimes Accidentally” (“I don’t care about much but I definitely sometimes care about you”) to complement it as a statement of anti-purpose? No band, twee or otherwise, has ever fully rendered their awkward stage so successfully, with “Home Haircuts” and “Sweaty Hands” vivid concerns a few years before Pen15 hit the air. All three LPs they made before surrendering to adulthood are as remarkable as they are tuneful, but the first, like Jonathan Richman before them, for once made naïveté something that smart people can fetishize.

2017: Sheer Mag (Compilation, Need to Feel Your Love)

The only thing Sheer Mag have in common with the punks they came up with besides a fervent leftist-DIY ethos is how fully realized their fusion of Thin Lizzy ‘70s grandeur and crude lo-fi was from the ground running. And of course they became less crude; latest batch Playing Favorites was kaleidoscopic (and hooky) enough for roller-derby funk among other things. But they seized their true national moment with three better-and-better EPs from 2014-2016 compiled the next year to reward us with the Sweet moves of “Button Up” and glam-swagger classic “Nobody’s Baby” (the punk “Dancing on My Own”) on one disc, as well as an entire bonus album that promised “Expect the Bayonet” for the disenfranchised and “Pure Desire” for the disco.

2018: Superchunk (What a Time to Be Alive)

Unless you count the second act of Fleetwood Mac retooled with Buckingham Nicks at the forefront, Superchunk lays claim to simply the greatest comeback in rock history. Outlier firecrackers like “Slack Motherfucker” and “For Tension” (and “Watery Hands” and “Hyper Enough” and and) hinted that their ‘90s run had more than just popping stage energy and tiny-label smarts. But putting out Kill the Moonlight, 69 Love Songs, Neon Bible, etc. sure focused Mac McCaughan’s songwriting for 2010’s roaring reunion Majesty Shredding, which dwarfed any full-lengths they’d ever done, and 2013’s even catchier I Hate Music, which proved it wasn’t a fluke. But in a less crowded year they remembered their Reagan Youth and torpedoed a dispiriting marketplace with a hardcore-tinged anti-Trump pipebomb as songful as the others with a sharper, angrier purpose, from the blitzing “Cloud of Hate” to the ruling class’ “Bad Choices” (“gonna cause suffering”) to a bulwark against “Erasure” that roped in Waxahatchee and Stephin Merritt. Adjusted for contemporary norms, they’re now our R.E.M. if you shuck all mystique whatsoever. We ain’t got time for that now.

2019: Control Top (Covert Contracts)

It would be an understatement to say Philly’s local music scene exploded in the 2010s, first with the reverberating drawl of folkie Kurt Vile and the booming sonics of his ex-bandmates in the War on Drugs, suddenly followed by guitar gods (Screaming Females, Sheer Mag), emo royalty (Modern Baseball, Hop Along), and punks (Mannequin Pussy, Soul Glo) all dominating headlines in a way the city had not since the dawn of alt-rock itself. As Control Top, the neatly named trio of Al (he), Ali (she), and Alex (they) met their very brief moment as the city’s best-ever punk band with the caustic Covert Contracts and have yet to follow it up. But their balance of the danceable “Chain Reaction,” the chorus-washed White Lung new wave of “Straight Jackets,” and shrieking meltdowns like the self-explanatory “Office Rage” (“service with a smile? Eat shit!”) sustains an aura both familiar and dangerous throughout. And speaking of meeting the moment, “Betrayed” (“by the cronies on the left and the right,” and I could’ve sworn it was “betrayed by the police and the left and the right”) still sums up the agonizing helplessness of post-Trump electoral attitudes better than any song to emerge in the last (gulp) decade.

2020: Chubby and the Gang (Speed Kills)

Turns out hardcore’s 2020s magic didn’t extend to a similar resurgence for street-punk or oi; that spark was limited almost entirely to the projects of ace songman Charlie Manning Walker, who launched Chubby and the Gang with pure-rush intentions, got a little grandiose and eventually wound down as a solo project while presumably continuing to supply anthemic riff hooks to the Chisel (and you’ll want both Retaliation and What a Fucking Nightmare blasting from your car stereo with Cal Graham reviving Rancid in real time). Chubby’s debut Speed Kills is the most breakneck and unprecedented of any of these, with the Gang echoing every single lyric, but it’s also the filler-free experience never afforded bands like the Casualties and the Exploited who interpreted working-class to mean no time for play. The elegy for victims of the Grenfell Tower fire clinches that it’s more soulful, too.

2021: Dry Cleaning (New Long Leg)

Spoken word has a long history in rock, from Dylan to “The Gift” to Laurie Anderson to King Missile to prime Hold Steady, so Florence Shaw is part of a lineage, most closely analogous to the angular free associations of the newly viral Life Without Buildings, though Shaw is far more mumblecore, in her esoteric stream of consciousness and in her muted, far less expressive affect. As Dry Cleaning’s name indicates, she makes a real thing out of criscrossing the mundane with the surreal: “The last thing I looked at in this hand-mirror was a human arsеhole / Well, Helen’s situation has really put all that in the shade now.” Where the rock comes in is Tom Dowse, a guitarist so bent and original he leans on the uglier innovations of Gang of Four’s Andy Gill while also circling all the way around back to inadvertent hooks. Only John Parrish, the architect behind the close-miked moan of PJ Harvey’s not-of-this-earth To Bring You My Love, could have corralled these reluctant sonic bedfellows into a coherent work as gripping and mystagogical as 2012’s New Long Leg after two EPs that didn’t leave much left to deliver on their promise anyway.

2022: Alvvays (Blue Rev)

There are so, so, so many bands not on the list who have great tunes for days and just not a ton of a sound. Tokyo Police Club, the Beths, the Bottle Rockets, the fucking Pretenders, I see you all and extend sincere condolences. After the almost laughably archetypal situation of 2017’s great Antisocialites receiving the most upper-moderate praise, this sterling song band spent five years crossing the rubicon into the forbidden, mythical territory of the sound-band, a maneuver far rarer to pull off than people realize. On 2022’s massively received Blue Rev they swam with the shoegaze sharks without compromising the best, most melodically cornucopic songs of their career. They were simply fed up with being told they had great tunes for days and not a ton of a sound. So from the dizzying “Pharmacist” to the Smiths-signaling “After the Earthquake” to the cathedral-worthy “Many Mirrors,” this is where a normal frontperson like Molly Rankin submerges in a speaker-swallowing production gamble and comes out deafened by “Lottery Noises” on the other side. So few have dared this territory with the songwriting to survive intact. Almost no one who has, including My Bloody Valentine, have ever cared about wording like Rankin does on snap-shut morsels like “he’s a very online guy and he likes to hit reply.”

2023: Wednesday (Rat Saw God)

Karly Hartzman’s aspiration to be her generation’s local-color raconteur laureate doesn’t have many precedents beyond Craig Finn or Patterson Hood within the world of actual bands, and her penchant for comedically absurd details really comes from Gary Stewart’s honky-tonks, Loudon Wainwright III’s joke-folk, and The Slim Shady LP’s tall tales. Having split with no-slouch-himself MJ Lenderman and still brought the paint-peeling Vee Vee caterwaul from the guitar department on 2025 masterpiece Bleeds, they were just as strong together on prime-time breakthrough Rat Saw God, and more dangerous for their tenuous grasp on the full potential of seismic forces like Hartzman’s In Utero-conjuring, stomach-emptying bellow in the final act of “Bull Believer.” Neither Hood nor Finn ever had one of those, and I’m pretty sure Wainwright didn’t either.

2024: Gouge Away (Deep Sage)

The story of 2020s rock mostly reanimates two strands of genre long thought to be stagnant: slow-and-steady shoegaze from onetime worstsellers like Duster and hardcore from the most orthodox of audiences. Now Duster’s been awarded gold-certified plaques and Turnstile skipped right past alternative-category Grammys to win for Best Rock Album. While your local shoegaze faves are usually only as good as the most recent upgrades to their pedalboard, hardcore bands are tweaking all possible permutations of their rage; Turnstile even tried one without the rage at all. There’s also Soul Glo splicing in the “It Takes Two” loop and more contemporary trap, the always tuneful Militarie Gun prompting Bob Mould to reunite Sugar, and the impressively influence-proof Knocked Loose, shrieking metalcore like they have no idea they’re even famous. As is wont to happen, Gouge Away aren’t the most original of their ilk, they’ve merely the most enduring album of its era on 2024 sophomore rager Deep Sage. Christina Michelle’s acid-burn bellows earn comparisons to Steve Albini-produced roilers like Nirvana on glass-quicksand traps like “The Sharpening” while an entire Midwestern record store of influences from Pixies to Unwound show up in the more melodic numbers like “Maybe Blue.” And you bet the closing “Dallas” folds in shoegaze. They’re not the archetype for 2020s rock only because sounding like this all the time would make 2020s rock so much better.

2025: Geese (Getting Killed, Cameron Winter’s Heavy Metal)

“Nobody knows where they’re going except me,” boasts Cameron Winter and the answer turned out to be Carnegie Hall so you know he damn well practiced. The only band who could serve as an epilogue to this list is all too happy to be an irony-laden postscript as they finally found their calling on last year’s instant polarizing classic Getting Killed. They’re not old enough to rent a car and probably can’t drive one, so of course they conceive themselves as the ultimate post-everything be-all end-all of zoomer/alpha meme-driven discourse as they assimilate Jagger, Dylan, some say Newman and mean Joel, Beck, Yorke, and on the godlike “Long Island City Here I Come,” Boadrum 77 as conducted by Dr. John. Winter’s improvisatory-sounding humor doesn’t negate the coy but underlying politics (“fuck ICE, free Palestine, go Geese”) of a band who stands firmly behind their trans guitarist, Emily Green. That is, their sincerity propels their passion and Max Bassin’s drums make this whole wobbling Jenga proposition move and shake. And the quotables — not just “there’s a bomb in my car” and “if you want me to pay my taxes” but also “I was kneeling on the turnpike with an angel down my throat,” how’s that for trans-coded — get them on TikTok.

They don’t give a fuck, baby: B0YG1RL sans Novagirl

YES

Tierra Whack, Whack’s Museum

The opening lines are “they said I should rap more / What more could I ask for” and I’m so glad we’re on the same page. At 30, she sticks with it like Fun Dip, stands out like hard nips, and puts her prints on you like she’s got purple on. She pushed the envelope so her reputation is stamped, and she gets deeper than ants. She’s so sick she really thinks you should mask up. Playing both sides? Isoceles. All the shit you talk? She’s surprised you don’t eat ass. Beats evoke the detuned boom-bap psych of Griselda and Mach-Hommy with a bit of Chance’s watery Chi-Town gospel; rapping calls to mind both the rock-solid Rapsody and the forever scatterbrained Lil Wayne as well as the triple-time Das EFX. And she makes clear that in the wake of Doechii’s runaway success she wants her money and flowers.

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They’re not singing anymore (psych): the Mekons of 2025, Jon Langford second from left

The Mekons are an institution. Not only have they outlived most other bands from punk’s very birth circa 1976 to help create “alt-country” and enjoy decades of cult legend in the Americana sphere, but they’ve survived long enough to invite their original vocalists back in 2018 to revive “The Mekons 77.” If that’s not a collective who practices what longtime ringmaster Jon Langford terms an “open door policy,” then what is? Whomever’s along for the ride and willing to fight the good fight gets a seat at the table, which is how you get two different versions of last year’s timely Horror, recalibrated again this week as a dub deconstruction called Horrorble. Titles like “War Economy,” “Private Defense Contractor,” and “Sad and Sad and Sad” sum up the gist, though the material holds up (improves, actually) in rousing group settings onstage, with an audience present to directly feel it all back to them. It’s the broken-democracy equivalent of rubbing two freezing bodies together for warmth. As early as 1985 when I was born they were boasting “fear and whiskey kept me going.”

But I’d start with 2002’s pitchforks-and-torches OOOH! (Out of Our Heads) from the Dubya Bush era or 1991’s twang-forward Curse of the Mekons or 1989’s self-explanatory The Mekons Rock ‘n’ Roll if navigating their vast catalog for the first time. The aforementioned Fear and Whiskey still holds its own on Rolling Stone’s just-published 100 Greatest Punk Albums list. It’s also worth mentioning Langford’s extended universe of projects solo and with the Three Johns, Waco Brothers, Men of Gwent, Pine Valley Cosmonauts, et al. because between them, no one person has had their work A-listed by legendary music critic Robert Christgau more times at 25 instances, not even Neil Young (23), Willie Nelson, or Bob Dylan (tied with 18 apiece). And yet the favorite of his fellow legendary music critic Greil Marcus (2000’s Journey to the End of the Night) isn’t even among those 25.

RIOTRIOT woke up Langford via phone (“I’m sorry, I didn’t set an alarm”) to pepper him with questions about all of the above, Mekons trivia, and other heavy subjects you shouldn’t batter someone with at 10am central even if they’re as quick-witted and knowledgeable as the singer remains at 68.

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The alternative polka: Angine de Poitrine (Photo by Brad Merrett via Future)

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She keeps on running, planning, running, planning: CMAT

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Two, three, four, one: Imperial Teen (Photo by Jonathan Grassi)

Everyone can imagine a different timeline where their personal faves were what dominated alternative radio circa 1996 or so, but it’s genuinely shocking to listen to a band like, say, that dog. with full awareness that minimal 120 Minutes-style airplay never broke them out of cult fandom. Imperial Teen is one of the catchiest bands of the period, one of the most compact and easy sells from the post-Cobain boom, with an almost minimalist, mercenary focus on hooks, and if that reads like Spoon on paper, well Spoon’s famous track record would be given a run for its money by Imperial Teen’s first four albums as well. They’re not Fountains of Wayne; cleverness weaves in and out but never conceptually. The attitude was sass and San Francisco. Few other alt-rock bands at the time were lobbing glitterbombs at radio from a distinctly queer lyrical POV.

Try “Copafeelia” (“Carbonated blonde / Couture drunken hands will kill your pimp /And make you whore de jour / You're worth more dead than alive”), except you can’t. The pitfalls of the major-label complex have rendered Seasick and its excellent follow-up What Is Not to Love unavailable on streaming services despite representing the band’s peak visibility. There’s not a subpar tune on either but most would know the band at all from “Yoo Hoo,” featuring a sinister lead-guitar groove from bassist Jone Stebbins that millennials will recognize from the trailer for Rose McGowan’s Heathers redux Jawbreaker, though Seasick’s “You’re One” made the rounds, too. You’ll have to hit the used CD bins for those. The band went indie on Merge for every increasingly infrequent album after that, including their finest, 2002’s On, where they finally surrendered completely to their ba-ba go-go pop instincts. You’d never know from just listening that their most well-known member is Faith No More keyboardist Roddy Bottum, who recently released a memoir called The Royal We.

Singer/bassist (though they all swap instruments and vocals) Jone Stebbins spoke to RIOTRIOT via phone for the 30th anniversary of Seasick to discuss how quickly Imperial Teen (and their debut album) came together and also some good news for their fans in 2026.

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They’ll let your body decide: Kehlani

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UGquet, is that anything? Bun B and Parquet Courts (Photo by Sama’an Ashrawi)

The 2010s weren’t necessarily a bad time to be a rock band. But it was the first decade of popular music since rock and roll was born where rock was unquestionably no longer the state of the art. Kendrick, Beyoncé, Tyler, Drake, Kanye once upon a time, and Frank drove the decade’s acclaimed heavy hitters with a dominance among critics polls that Black music previously hadn’t, especially R&B and a long-denied level of respect only then being afforded to Black women who weren’t taken seriously like fucking Fleet Foxes. The biggest “rock” stories of the decade were unquestionably the artists engaging the world outside of guitar/bass/drums, and outside of white men for that matter: Tame Impala reinventing psychedelic retro as Coachella EDM, Mitski trading Weezer’s emo chug for middlebrow artsong, and most gracefully, Vampire Weekend traversing encyclopedic knowledge of any and everything from baroque classical to Auto-Tuned reggaeton mostly thanks to gay, non-white genius arranger Rostam Batmanglij.

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Cut it loose: The Cucumbers (Photo by John Niedzwecki)