The Best Indie Rock Albums of the 2010s

Picture the confusion on Grammy night, February 2011: The Suburbs wins Album of the Year over Gaga and Eminem, and half the internet starts typing 'who is Arcade Fire' into a search bar. Merge's sprawl-and-adolescence song cycle never needed the trophy, but the title track alone — 'The Suburbs,' rolling in on that woozy saloon piano — made the case that indie's biggest band had earned it.

Ezra Koenig called the first three Vampire Weekend albums one long coming-of-age story, and Modern Vampires of the City is the chapter where it all lands. A Billboard 200 No. 1 for XL, a Best Alternative Album Grammy, and in 'Hannah Hunt' a song about crossing the country with someone you're losing — quiet for three minutes, then one drum fill opens the floodgates. Nobody has topped it since.

Adam Granduciel spent two anxious years rebuilding these songs at home in Philadelphia until they stopped sounding like anyone else's, and Secretly Canadian released the result in March 2014. Critics spent the rest of the year agreeing with each other — it topped more year-end lists than anything else that season. The moment in 'Red Eyes' where he lets loose that 'whoo!' is the whole record's pressure valve.

You know the line even if you don't own the record: 'I still owe money to the money to the money I owe.' That's 'Bloodbuzz Ohio,' the swarming center of High Violet, which carried The National to No. 3 on the Billboard 200 for 4AD in 2010. Slow-building baritone gloom about mortgages and dread, played by a band that made adult worry sound nearly glamorous.

Alex Turner wanted a record that sounded like a Dr. Dre beat played by a rock band, and AM — Domino, 2013, album five — is what came back. It went straight to No. 1 in the UK and cracked the US top ten for the first time, Josh Homme lending falsetto from the desert. 'Do I Wanna Know?' stalks in on that riff and never breaks eye contact.

Two guys from Vancouver, eight songs, thirty-five minutes, fireworks recorded at both ends — Celebration Rock delivers exactly what it says on the tin. Polyvinyl released it in 2012 and 'The House That Heaven Built' became the sound of every encore that summer, a whoa-oh chorus built for shouting into somebody's shoulder. Nobody wrung more joy from fewer ingredients all decade.

Bradford Cox asked what we actually remember versus what we invent, then made Halcyon Digest to blur the line. Deerhunter's 4AD peak, produced with Ben H. Allen in 2010, drifts between garage stomp and dream logic — 'Helicopter' is the pivot, harplike guitars circling a drum loop. The closer quietly says goodbye to Jay Reatard, who died that January. Atlanta's strangest band at their most generous.

Annie Clark checked into Seattle's Ace Hotel for a month with no friends and no plans — on purpose — and wrote Strange Mercy out of the loneliness experiment; the recording came later in Dallas with John Congleton. 'Cruel' carries the thesis: a guitar solo like a dentist's drill inside a perfect pop song, plus a video where a suburban family buries her alive. 4AD, 2011; still her sharpest hour.

Dylan Baldi was twenty and bored of his own bedroom pop, so he drove Cloud Nothings to Chicago and had Steve Albini record the loud, mean version of the band — Albini famously played Scrabble through the sessions, which tells you how live the takes were. Carpark released Attack on Memory in January 2012. 'Stay Useless' is the hinge: pure hooks, played like a grudge.

Courtney Barnett talks her way through this debut like a friend narrating errands that keep turning existential — house-hunting, gardening, a swim that becomes a near-drowning. Released in 2015 on her own Milk! Records with Marathon Artists and Mom + Pop, it earned the Melbourne songwriter a Best New Artist Grammy nomination. 'Pedestrian at Best' is the loud one, self-doubt cranked to festival volume.

Mitski wrote the decade's most devastating love song by aiming it at a country: 'Your Best American Girl' sets her Japanese-American upbringing against an all-American boy and lets the chorus detonate the distance between them. Puberty 2 — her fourth album, her first for Dead Oceans, 2016 — treats happiness itself as an unreliable visitor. Half of today's indie descends from this record.

Will Toledo recorded roughly eleven albums into a laptop, often parked in his car, before Matador handed him a real studio and a full band. Teens of Denial, 2016, is what the practice was for — 'Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales' turns a night of bad decisions into a singalong that actually forgives you. The first pressing got recalled over a Cars interpolation; the legend only grew.

Andrew Savage pressed Light Up Gold on his own Dull Tools label in 2012 before What's Your Rupture? gave it a proper push that January after — the last great word-of-mouth record of the record-bin era. Texas transplants playing wiry Brooklyn punk about snacks and dead ends: 'Stoned and Starving' wanders Ridgewood, Queens for five deadpan minutes and says more about being young and broke than most memoirs manage.

Angel Olsen split My Woman straight down the middle: a first half of fizzing jukebox pop, a back half that stretches until two songs pass the seven-minute mark. Jagjaguwar released it in 2016, and 'Shut Up Kiss Me' — the album's first rock single, all leather-jacket bravado over a garage stomp — handled the recruiting. The trick is that both halves are the same broken heart.

Adrianne Lenker sings 'Shark Smile' from the passenger seat of a car crash only one person survives, and somehow the 'and she said woo' hook is the part that breaks you. Capacity, Big Thief's second album for Saddle Creek, arrived in 2017 doing this over and over — folk-rock songs that hide their violence inside gentleness. The band everyone now agrees on, from back when agreeing was optional.

Lindsey Jordan finished high school, signed to Matador, and released Lush at eighteen — a debut with the guitar vocabulary of someone twice her age, which makes sense given the classical training and lessons from Mary Timony. 'Pristine' is the one that spread: a teenager vowing she'll never love anyone else, over chords too pretty to argue with. Bedroom rock found its valedictorian in 2018.

Flagged as the list's post-punk border case, and worth the customs paperwork: IDLES came out of Bristol swinging on Joy as an Act of Resistance, a UK No. 5 for Partisan in 2018. 'Danny Nedelko' is a pro-immigrant anthem named for an actual friend — the Heavy Lungs frontman — and it turns solidarity into a terrace chant. Tenderness, delivered at a bellow.