The Best Garage Rock Albums of the 2000s

Three days at Easley-McCain in Memphis, twelve-hour shifts, about five thousand dollars, and an engineer whom Jack White reportedly asked not to make it sound too good. That instruction is the whole record. Michel Gondry built the video for 'Fell In Love With a Girl' out of Lego and the band stopped being a Detroit secret. 'The Union Forever' is stitched together from Citizen Kane dialogue.

A basement studio in the East Village, Gordon Raphael at the desk, three microphones on the drum kit and no appetite for making anything sound expensive. What streaming carries is the international sequence, so 'New York City Cops' is still at track nine — American CDs swapped it out after September 11, though the vinyl shipped that morning and kept it. 'Last Nite' put them at number two in Britain.

Sweden had been sitting on this for eighteen months before anyone outside Örebro noticed. Pelle Gunnerfeldt recorded it, and every song but one is credited to Randy Fitzsimmons, a svengali who may not exist. 'Hate To Say I Told You So' came out as a single in November 2000 and became a hit roughly two years late, which is more or less what the title promises.

Fifteen songs, half an hour, several of them under ninety seconds, and Jimmy Lee Lindsey Jr. playing nearly every instrument himself. Alix Brown turns up on bass for 'I See You Standing There' and that is close to the whole guest list. 'My Shadow' is the one that sticks — pure panic at a Buzzcocks tempo. In The Red released it; Reatard was dead within four years.

Nobody expected the most abrasive trio in New York to write the decade's great heartbroken ballad, and yet 'Maps' dragged the record to gold on both sides of the Atlantic. Dave Sitek co-produced at a Brooklyn room called Headgear; Nick Zinner mixed it in London with Alan Moulder. There is no bass player anywhere on it, which nobody notices until it is pointed out.

The second floor of a dead General Tire plant in Akron, five hundred dollars a month, and a mixing console bought on eBay from a former Loverboy technician that kept failing and stretched the sessions to five months. Fat Possum sent recycled tape from Mississippi. '10 A.M. Automatic' later sold American Express cards, a strange fate for something cut in a condemned factory.

Mick Collins spent the nineties in the Gories, then built a band with two bassists and two drummers and pointed it at the Motown and soul records he grew up on in Detroit. Almost everything here is a cover — Stevie Wonder's 'Livin' For The City', Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson, Barry White — and the sleeve openly apes I Was Made to Love Her. Exactly one original song.

Greg Cartwright came out of the Oblivians, a Memphis trio who played like they wanted the building condemned, and then made this: organ, heartbreak and Sun-era songcraft, engineered by Doug Easley. Howlin' Pelle Almqvist of the Hives told Rolling Stone it was his favourite record of 2002. Spotify misspells track two as 'Staight Shooter'. 'Stormy Weather' is the one that follows you home.

King Khan left Montreal for Germany and assembled a nine-piece soul revue with a horn section, which is not what the garage revival was supposed to sound like. 'Welfare Bread' is the sermon — James Brown showmanship with a fuzz pedal underneath. Note the title: Spotify renders it with a stray space, and dates its cleaner-looking twin 2014. The 2007 original is linked here.

Atlanta's Black Lips cut this in December 2006 and Vice put it out the following September. 'Bad Kids' and 'Veni Vidi Vici' both turned up in (500) Days of Summer two years later, which tells you how fast the underground got absorbed. That second title shares its Julius Caesar tag with the Hives album higher up this list, entirely by coincidence.

John Dwyer had already run this project through three other names and a pile of home-recorded folk-psych sketches before plugging it in. Chris Woodhouse engineered; Brigid Dawson's harmonies against Dwyer's yelp became the signature. 'Enemy Destruct' is where the pivot happens in real time. In The Red put it out in 2009, back when the band still went by Thee Oh Sees.

The Cobras wrote almost nothing and never pretended otherwise — their art was crate-digging and delivery, and Rachel Nagy could sell anything. 'Cry On' is an Irma Thomas song by way of Allen Toussaint; elsewhere they take the Ronettes, Solomon Burke, the Chiffons, Otis Redding. Streaming carries the UK Rough Trade lineage, not the Sympathy original. Nagy died in January 2022.

Ty Segall was in his early twenties and playing in three other bands when he cut most of this himself with Mike McHugh at the Distillery. 'Cents' got him his first video and remains the only one from the record. Watch the edition — a 2025 Drag City reissue sits at the top of search results, while the Goner original from 2009 is the one linked here.

Cincinnati gets almost no credit for the garage revival, which is unfair to a band produced by the Afghan Whigs' bassist. Holly Golightly sings on 'There Is An End', and three years later Jim Jarmusch made it the theme to Broken Flowers. In 2005 the rhythm section went off to join Jack White and Brendan Benson in the Raconteurs and the Greenhornes effectively stopped.

New York band, Detroit record: Jim Diamond produced it, and it sounds like the MC5 rehearsing in a Stax studio. Sammy James Jr. wrote all ten songs, and 'In A Young Man's Mind' became the calling card of a live show people still describe in terms of perspiration. The band took its name from Can's two singers, which nobody saw coming.

Jack White produced this in three days at Ghetto Recorders in March 2001, and two and a half years later pleaded guilty to assaulting the man singing on it. 'It Came from Japan' is the best thing here. Note what streaming omits: the UK CD hid a Sam Cooke cover sung by Marcie Bolen behind the closer, and it is simply gone.