Since the 1950s, rock has been one of the most popular genres in music. Artists like Elvis and Little Richard started the movement; The Beatles and The Rolling Stones cemented it as a cultural force; Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix brought it into strange, new directions; Ramones and X-Ray Spex injected the genre with some well-needed energy; Siouxsie & the Banshess and Talking Heads brought it into the '80s; Nirvana and Radiohead dominated the '90s; and the White Stripes and the Strokes brought the genre back to its roots in the '00s. The 2010s are the first decade where rock is absolutely not the genre of choice, almost entirely replaced by rap and pop as the world's dominant musical genre. While the genre certainly has lost relevance, artists are still making beautiful, vital, and fantastic rock music. Here are 26 of the best rock albums of the 2010s. One rule: no metal, that's for another list.
1. Crying - Beyond the Fleeting Gales
Crying's first two EPs were catchy, albeit slight, attempts at fusing the sounds of chiptune with the anthemic songwriting of power pop. Beyond the Fleeting Gales, the group's first full-length LP, proceeds further with that mindset, but significantly beefs up the group's songwriting with progressive song structures and odes to gloriously cheesy '80s AOR.
2. David Bowie - Blackstar
When Blackstar came out, it was already Bowie's best work since 1980's Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps). The album is easily one of Bowie's most experimental, fusing together industrial-tinged soundscapes with cryptic lyrics filled to the brim with biblical allegories and allusions to death. It was fantastic, but a bit too heady and confusing. Then, only two days after the album's release, Bowie passed away, shining a light on the entire record and turning it into one of the most heartbreaking musical swan songs of all time.
3. Mac DeMarco - 2
In the past couple years, DeMarco's influence has overshadowed his actual music. Artists like Clairo and Boy Pablo ape his sound, while thousands of college kids across the globe emulate his thrift store chic style to a t. In the midst of all this, it's easy to forget just how good of a songwriter Mac DeMarco is, and the laid-back, melancholic 2 is his masterpiece.
4. Thee Oh Sees - A Weird Exits
Thee Oh Sees is one of the country's most venerable and long-standing rock groups. While the band has undergone many line-up changes over its twenty years, the consistent guiding force of guitarist/vocalist John Dwyer has kept the band consistently interesting. The band has taken on many styles, but my favorite is the warped, hypnotic style of krautrock they mastered on A Weird Exits, their best record to date.
5. IDLES - Joy as an Act of Resistance.
IDLES' second record more than lives up to its title, offering gleefully throat-shredding punk rock that stands tall in the face of adversity. The group ups the melodicism of their debut album, and also ups the emotion of the lyrics, with frontman Joe Talbot offering brutal and emotional takedowns of homophobia and toxic masculinity.
6. Car Seat Headrest - Nervous Young Man
I could put any number of Car Seat Headrest albums on this list, from the introverted Twin Fantasy all the way to the raucous, full-band Teens of Denial, but I firmly believe that Nervous Young Man is Will Toledo's masterpiece. As good as Twin Fantasy is, the lo-fi production muddles the songwriting more often than not, while Nervous Young Man firmly embraces it to create masterpiece after masterpiece of drifting, riff-heavy indie rock.
7. PJ Harvey - Let England Shake
No artist can adapt with the times better than PJ Harvey. Her first few records saw her embrace the grunge movement, all while giving it her own bluesy twist; she toned down in the late '90s and the 2000s to better match the sounds of albums like OK Computer and Homogenic; and Let England Shake, her first album in the 2010s, had a whimsical, art rock vibe to it that sounds effortlessly fresh. The vocals are incredible, and the songwriting is nimble and incredibly varied.
8. Ty Segall - Melted
The prevailing form of rock in the '10s has been snotty, Adult Swim-endorsed garage rock. Bands like FIDLAR, Wavves, and Bass Drum of Death have been leading this scene, but Ty Segall is one of the few to really do anything interesting with the sound. His sound varies from album to album, ranging from laid-back folk rock all the way to throat-shredding garage punk, and Melted is a good common ground between all of his sounds, bolstered by some of his best songwriting.
9. Mitski - Bury Me at Makeout Creek
Mitski's first two records were student projects, recorded while she was majoring in music at SUNY Purchase. They were heavily composed chamber pop affairs, filled to the brim with great composition but lacking in raw emotion. Bury Me at Makeout Creek was Mitski's first album following her graduation, and it has all the energy and passion her first two records were missing. Her vocals are soaring, her guitar work is brutally raw, and the songs are still immaculately composed.
10. Tony Molina - Dissed and Dismissed
This album is so short and to-the-point I feel totally fine linking to the whole album here. Dissed and Dismissed is twelve-minutes of some of the best power pop ever written. Every single song on this album features an incredibly catchy hook and a blistering guitar solo, and it's only 12-minutes long so it never gets old.
11. St. Vincent - Strange Mercy
Annie Clark, better known as St. Vincent, is one of the best guitarists of all time, without a doubt in my mind. She's incredibly technically proficient, but unlike most other blisteringly technical guitarists, her guitar playing is effortlessly emotional and she's a powerhouse songwriter and vocalist on top of it all. Actor is my favorite album of hers overall, but Strange Mercy is her best of the 2010s, fusing together beautiful pop songwriting with dirgy industrial ballads of passion and anger.
12. Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring for My Halo
Fresh off his run with The War on Drugs, Vile recorded a handful of lo-fi solo albums to middling results. Smoke Ring for My Halo was his first truly great album as a solo artists, with beautiful songwriting and deft guitar work perfectly complimenting his lethargic and chilled-out vocals.
13. Angel Olsen - MY WOMAN
Angel Olsen blew me away with her first EP, the stark and lo-fi Strange Cacti, but her first two full-length efforts underwhelmed me. MY WOMAN, her third studio effort, is her best project to date. It retains the intimacy of Strange Cacti, but places that style of songwriting in a much more expansive and full-bodied sonic field. It incorporates elements of psychedelia, country, electronic, and power pop, all while retaining Olsen's own distinctive artistic voice.
14. The Coneheads - L.P.1. aka "14 Year Old High School PC-Fascist Hype Lords Rip Off Devo for the Sake of Extorting $$$ from Helpless Impressionable Midwestern Internet Peoplepunks L.P."
A more lo-fi Devo for the internet age is a perfect description for the gleeful anarchy presented on the Coneheads' compilation. L.P.1. combines the group's first three EPs, and what the listener will find is a treasure trove of snotty, surreal lyricism; fast-paced songwriting; and some of the catchiest hooks you'll ever hear.
15. Tokyo Shoegazer - Crystalize
Many shoegaze acts have a hard time breaking out of the shadow of My Bloody Valentine, the genre's originator and its most famous act. Tokyo Shoegazer, a group out of...well, Tokyo, manages to carve out their own unique sound in the grand scheme of the genre. The guitars are amped up to eleven, but the songwriting is more deliberate and the influence from post-rock is a beautiful touch.
16. Here Lies Man - Here Lies Man
Afrobeat is a genre created and ruled by the late, great Fela Kuti, so an attempt to fuse the stylings of that genre with genres like acid rock and stoner rock seems dubious at best. Here Lies Man proved me wrong with their debut album, serving up brilliantly hypnotic afrobeat grooves enhanced by deliriously fuzzy guitar work and outlandishly funky bass grooves.
17. Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest
Deerhunter are a remarkably consistent band. While most of their albums aren't anything special, they're reliable enough to deliever a perfectly competent, enjoyable slab of modern psychedelic rock each time around. Halcyon Digest, however, is different. Written in the direct wake of the death of Jay Reatard, a close friend of frontman Bradford Cox, Halycon Digest is one of the loneliest albums ever put to wax, filled with aching vocals and eerie, cold as ice instrumentation.
18. G.L.O.S.S. - Trans Day of Revenge
G.L.O.S.S. are arguably the truest punk band in recent memory. Punk, above all else, is about really fighting for social change, giving a voice to the voiceless, yelling about the truths that people don't want to hear. G.L.O.S.S. accomplish that perfectly, and judging by how much backlash they got in their short run, they stand as one of the most important, necessary punk bands in recent memory. Their second effort, Trans Day of Revenge, is a modern-day punk masterpiece.
19. The Snuggalos - Hocus Opus
The Snuggalos is a project comprising of boyfriend-girlfriend duo Morla McCarthy and Daniel Hicks, and they're making some of the spookiest, most interesting bedroom pop out there. The duo are definitely of the same scene that birthed artists like Yellow Days and Sales, but the duo took their lo-fi bedroom pop aesthetic into an incredibly interesting direction more remiscent of old horror movies than anything else. I love it to death.
20. Touché Amoré - Stage Four
Stage Four is the most raw musical expression of grief this side of Carrie & Lowell. The record was written and recorded in the direct wake of the death of frontman Jeremy Bolm's mother, and Bolm lets all of his conflicted emotions out. He feels anger, sadness, guilt, confusion, and everything else in between, and he screams it all out over some absolutely fantastic emo.
21. Daughters - You Won't Get What You Want
My original version of this list got entirely deleted, which sucks, but with all that extra time to re-write the entire list, I got to listen to this fantastic record, so it's not all bad! Daughters already have three albums under their belt, all of a more metal-esque sound, and they all feel like they're just leading up to this record. Influence is taken from Swans, Killing Joke, and the Jesus Lizard, to name a few, but the end product is entirely original. The guitars sound like buzzsaws, the vocals are dark and brooding, and the percussion is raw and tribal, there's nothing more than I want in a noise rock record.
22. Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool
Cliché as it may be, I'm a huge fan of Radiohead, and I genuinely consider them to be one of the most important bands in my life. A Moon Shaped Pool was the first record of theirs I was fully conscious for the release of, and it's easily one of the group's best record, possibly even their best since Amnesiac. It's more delicate than anything else they've released, but they manage to balance the delicate chamber pop of "Daydreaming" and "Glass Eyes" with frenetic rock numbers like "Ful Stop", and the result is another amazing album from the venerable group.
23. Women - Public Strain
Women were a band that wore their influences on their sleeve, but did so in such an effortlessly likable fashion. Their first effort had much more in common with early dance-punk and post-punk, while Public Strain, their second and final record, has much more in common with the atmospheric stylings of groups like Sonic Youth. The guitar work is brilliant, the atmosphere is cold and desolate, and the songwriting is genius.
24. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - I'm in Your Mind Fuzz
King Gizzard have released more albums in the past eight years than most bands have released in fifty, and I'm in Your Mind Fuzz is the Australian ensemble's best work to date. The whole track plays out as one extended song, which makes the whole thing seem seamless and effortlessly hypnotic, and the band is in absolutely perfect sync, churning out brilliant musical moments one after the other.
25. Khun Narin Electric Phin Band - Electric Phin Band
Molam is a genre of traditional folk music that hails from Thailand and Laos. The genre is usually vocal by nature, but the Khun Narin Electric Phin Band takes the unique melodies prominent of the genre and combines them with brain-rattling psychedelic rock, creating something hypnotic and entirely original. The guitar work on this is incredible, and I tend to love albums that tastefully combine traditional folk sounds with something entirely modern.
26. Parquet Courts - Wide Awake!
I'd never entirely bought the hype for Parquet Courts. Like Women, they wear their influences on their sleeve, but I always thought Parquet Courts did it much more blatantly. This was what I believed all the way up until the release of Wide Awake!, which totally blew my mind. The production from Danger Mouse is slick and really well-fitting, and the group's songwriting is tight, acerbic, and fast-paced. And F*CK TOM BRADY.
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