The Best Indie Rock Albums of the 2000s

Three family deaths during recording gave the album its title, and Merge released the grief transfigured — Funeral, September 2004, the record that made collective catharsis indie rock's house style. 'Rebellion (Lies)' is the engine room: a pounding piano-and-bass figure that turns insomnia into a parade, and a UK top-20 single from a Montreal art collective. The decade's consensus summit, still earning it.

Reprise rejected it, Wilco streamed it free, and Nonesuch — another Warner label — bought it back, meaning Warner effectively paid twice for the same album. The industry parable would be enough; the songs make it legend. 'Jesus, Etc.' floats strings and pedal steel under Jeff Tweedy at his most tender, static and heartbreak sharing the mix. April 2002; the myth and the music both hold up.

Garage border case, flagged, and the loudest thing here: Elephant was cut to 8-track tape at London's Toe Rag Studios with no computers in the room. 'Seven Nation Army' won the Grammy for Best Rock Song and then outgrew music entirely — a bassline (played on guitar) that now belongs to every stadium on earth. Two people, one octave pedal, permanent cultural residency.

Epic signed the scrappiest band in the Northwest and got a cosmology: The Moon & Antarctica, produced by Brian Deck, the major-label debut that deepened instead of flattened. '3rd Planet' opens it with Isaac Brock musing on the universe's shape over a guitar figure that circles like orbit. The art-rock ceiling of the lo-fi generation, set in the decade's first year.

Fifty states were promised, two were delivered, and the joke produced a masterwork: Illinois, on Stevens's own Asthmatic Kitty, with a Superman cover the label's lawyers made them pull. 'Chicago' is the centerpiece — strings and choir swelling around a travelogue of mistakes forgiven. Orchestral ambition at thrift-store prices; half the decade's chamber-pop descends from it.

Slow-burn as career strategy: Boxer sold modestly on Beggars Banquet in 2007 and then never stopped selling. 'Fake Empire' opens it on a four-against-three piano figure — the polyrhythm hiding inside the decade's most dignified song — while Matt Berninger baritones the anxieties of people with office jobs. Sufjan Stevens guests on 'Racing Like a Pro' and 'Ada'; everyone else just took notes.

Albuquerque's James Mercer wrote pocket-symphonies for Sub Pop, and three years later Natalie Portman handed Zach Braff headphones: 'New Slang,' per Garden State, would change your life. The scene became shorthand for the whole era's earnestness — deserved or not, the song survives the meme, all hushed melody and campfire sway. The blog era's founding whisper.

A Toronto collective with members drifting in from Metric, Stars, and Feist's orbit won the 2003 Juno for Alternative Album with this Arts & Crafts flagship. 'Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl' is the swooning proof — Emily Haines repeating one homesick phrase through a vocoder haze until it becomes a mantra. Indie rock as open-door policy; everyone got in.

Experimental border case, flagged, and the decade's closing argument: Merriweather Post Pavilion — named for the Maryland amphitheater — topped 2009's critics' polls almost by acclamation. Domino released it in January and the year spent eleven months agreeing. 'My Girls' builds from a synth arpeggio into a generational statement about wanting only walls and adobe slats. Psychedelia gone communal.

A Wisconsin hunting cabin, a winter alone, and a breakup produced the decade's best origin myth — and unlike most myths, the tape backs it up. Justin Vernon self-released For Emma in 2007; Jagjaguwar gave it the world in 2008. 'Skinny Love' is the reason the falsetto-and-acoustic template exists: one take of pleading that half of the next decade tried to reproduce.

Phil Ek produced the harmonies that made 2008 sound like a Bruegel painting — fitting, since the cover is one (Netherlandish Proverbs, 1559). Sub Pop released the debut and 'White Winter Hymnal' became its calling card: a round, literally, voices stacking in canon about following a pack. Sixties folk architecture rebuilt with mountain reverb; imitated instantly and never equaled.

Subtraction as a superpower: Kill the Moonlight (Merge, 2002) is Spoon removing everything a song can live without and daring you to miss it. 'The Way We Get By' — piano stabs, handclaps, Britt Daniel's smirk — later strutted through The O.C. like it owned the place. The tightest band of the decade at their tightest; nothing on it wastes a bar.

Columbia University classmates, an XL contract, and a debut produced by their own Rostam Batmanglij — Vampire Weekend arrived in January 2008 pre-armed against every accusation it would face. 'A-Punk' is two minutes seventeen of Afropop guitar and prep-school vim, the fastest song of the year to become inescapable. The internet's first fully internet-made rock stars.

John Leckie co-produced the pivot: Z (ATO/RCA, 2005) is where My Morning Jacket traded silo reverb for art-rock ambition and lost nothing in the move. 'Wordless Chorus' opens it on falsetto soul over a blinking synth pulse — the Kentucky jam band revealing it had been a pop group in hiding. The decade's best proof that reinvention beats repetition.

Named for a tiny Massachusetts island and released on Warp — an electronic label betting on chamber harmony — Veckatimest debuted at No. 8 on the Billboard 200, a sentence nobody would have written about art-choir indie five years earlier. 'Two Weeks' is the piano-chord hook that did it, four voices blooming over it in slow motion. Meticulous without being fussy; the craftsmanship wing's peak.

Carissa's Wierd ended and Ben Bridwell built something bigger from the wreckage: Everything All the Time, Sub Pop, 2006. 'The Funeral' became the band's signature partly through sheer licensing ubiquity — trailers, finales, montages — but the song earns every placement: a hushed verse detonating into the era's most cathartic crescendo. Reverb as landscape painting.

The title is Kerouac, quoted in the first minute: 'Stuck Between Stations' opens the Vagrant release with Sal Paradise's line about boys and girls having such a sad time together, then spends the album proving it over bar-band pianos. Craig Finn talk-sings scene reports from parties everyone barely survived. Classic rock rebuilt by a lit major; the decade's best storytelling record.

Dave Fridmann produced The Woods deliberately in the red — Sub Pop's first Sleater-Kinney album distorts like an amp about to file a complaint. Then 'Modern Girl' strolls in on harmonica and a nursery-simple melody, curdling its sunshine one verse at a time; it became the catalog's unlikely standard. The final album before a nine-year hiatus, and the loudest goodbye of the decade.