Best Albums of the Decade: Alternative & Rock
What a funny sub-category the alternative rock one is. Arguably my first love, I’ve had a long and complicated relationship with the bands and albums umbrella’d beneath it. Whether it’s been indie or post-punk, there’s always been something about the guitar which has pulled me back in. The ties between us. however, have never been tested as much as they have in the last 10 years — a period where I strayed all but completely from the traditional setup of the guitar, bass and drum-kit. I think the following list shows a real journey; one that starts the decade with albums from all-time favourites, then wanders into more adventurous, less-trodden territory — but then returns once more to the bands I’ve always loved. Guitar music isn’t dead. It’s just been forced to tear itself apart, assess the pieces then build back something new from the ground up. But in the 2010’s, as it had always been — it was honest to god, raw emotion that saved it.
The National — High Violet (2010)
The National are a strange band for a teenager to fall in love with. By the time their fifth album album came out, their frontman was 40 years old and sounded every minute of it. Their vibe can be best distilled as having a world-weariness to it; a lived-in, weathered wisdom. But somehow to an 18 year old kid it made more sense than anything I’d heard up until that point. Take ‘Sorrow’ for example — the song the band famously played for 6 hours in a row as a piece of performance art —here is a piece of music sung by a man audibly looking back on a full life of hardship. And yet the opening couplet “Sorrow found me when I was young / Sorrow waited, sorrow won” meant just as much for one not two decades old as if it had been written by or for me. Yes; this is a largely po-faced record, but it is its moments of wry humour or flourishes of abandon that make it real, make it powerful and make it endlessly relatable even to a pup just finding his way through the dark forest.
Listen on Spotify: High Violet
Arcade Fire — The Suburbs (2010)
Ask me who the best band of the 2000’s was and I will answer Arcade Fire without hesitation, every time. To me, their 3rd album The Suburbs marks the triumphant end of their run as untouchably flawless (although the follow-up was still great — the less said about Everything Now the better) Yes it’s long, but only 15 mins or so longer than the previous 2 records. I always argue that there is a story to be told here and it’s not one that can be rushed or abridged. It’s one that so many of us the world round know off by heart but is rarely played back to us with such poise and poignancy. It’s the story of coming of age, breaking out, of letting go of who we were as children. But it’s done through a particular lens of nostalgia I’ve never encountered before or since; one that punches you in the gut in the same stroke as rocking you to sleep. For someone who’d just left my own suburb for the big city “All my old friends, they don’t know me now / All my old friends, staring through me now” hit hard.
Listen on Spotify: The Suburbs
These New Puritans — Hidden (2010)
Back in the summer of 2010 I fronted a band that played a small forest stage at Latitude festival. We were called CHAMBRES and yes I thought we were extremely cool. I met Jarvis Cocker who watched our set which I’ll always remember and I often wonder what he made of us. Our primary influence was These New Puritans’ second album which had come out only 6 months earlier. Their inimitable portrayal of mankind’s impending doom completely captured my imagination and has never let go. It secured singer/composer Jack Barnett as a musical genius and was the most ambitious jump from debut to sophomore I’ve ever witnessed. The band obsessed over sounds during its creation, sampling swords, chains and even stuck cream crackers to a watermelon and smashed it with a mallet to replicate the sound of a skull being crushed. The beautiful woodwind and strings throughout added a swell of timeless majesty to every song. I could never live up to it myself, but loved trying.
Listen on Spotify: Hidden
Arctic Monkeys — AM (2013)
At the time of release, a lot was being written about how the Steel City boys had been inspired by the production techniques of R’n’B and Hip Hop records, which was quite a red herring for what AM would end up sounding like. Yes, drummer Matt Helders provided sugary backing vocal refrains, yes, there was a swaggering cool to every song and yes, there was a song called ‘Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High’ But this was unmistakably a rock & roll album. Alex Turner had started becoming the slick-haired stud as far back as ‘My Propeller’ and ‘Don’t Sit Down’ but their 4th album presented a full, unadulterated 40 minutes of late night sleaze and irresistible seduction. Their previous 3 records were huge, but AM was the pinnacle of their efforts purely for quite how effortless it sounded. By 2013, Indie definitely wasn’t that cool anymore, but somehow they captured our hearts all over again — to the point that one of my friends even got the artwork tattooed on her arm (sorry, M!)
Listen on Spotify: AM
Tame Impala — Currents (2015)
It was hard to choose between this, and Tame Impala’s previous record Lonerism for a place on this list. But where the former had huge breakout songs like ‘Elephant’ and ‘Why Won’t They Talk To Me’ – Currents was front to back full of them. From the very first song – a nearly 8 minute mind-bender – it’s clear that you’re not in for a regular experience. Listening through it, I almost get a glimpse of what it must have been like to live first hand through the psychedelic 60’s. And when you realise that Tame Impala is basically all just the work of one man, Kevin Parker, it becomes hard to deny that we have a future classic on our hands. His willingness for wild experimentation while simultaneously crafting the biggest ear worm melodies of recent years is fascinating. The choruses of ‘Eventually’ and ‘The Less I Know The Better’ stick with you for weeks on end. All this is why I credit Tame Impala for singlehandedly bringing rock music back in my life.
Listen on Spotify: Currents
Radiohead — A Moon Shaped Pool (2016)
The career arc of Oxford’s greatest export has been a fascinating one. The album that preceded this one had been met with mixed reception as the band delved once again into an electronic malaise but found little redemption in it. A Moon Shaped Pool was like night and day in comparison. Many said that the tone of the record was inspired by Thom Yorke’s divorce from his partner of 23 years and mother of his two children the previous year. An early highlight ‘Daydreaming’ distilled everything beautiful about Radiohead’s talents, and ended with Yorke’s voice reversed and pitched down like a distorted cello. When played the right way he seems to sing ‘Half of my love / half of my life’ The singer was 47 at the time, marking half of his life married, as well as releasing music with his band. She tragically passed away from cancer at the end of the year. The album is Radiohead at their most heart-wrenching, their most bare, and was their best music in nearly a decade.
Listen on Spotify: A Moon Shaped Pool
David Bowie — Blackstar (2016)
2016 was the year when many of our heroes began passing through to the other side, but none was felt more heavily around the world as the Starman. This, his magnificent swansong was released just 2 days before his death, on his 69th birthday. At the time, no one knew he was ill at all — in fact the NY jazz band he employed to record it with him had no idea. But on 10th January 2016 Bowie died of liver cancer. In hindsight, it was ridiculous that no-one guessed that a song as haunting as ‘Lazarus’ with its accompanying video depicting the singer writhing around in a hospital bed was autobiographical. But it was testament to the man’s mystery throughout his half-century spanning career; that everything he did was so shrouded in mythology that the audience was forever second guessing itself. But besides all that, the most impressive thing about his final album was that he was still treading new ground, still experimenting and was still absolutely unmatched.
Listen on Spotify: Blackstar
Mitski — Puberty 2 (2016)
If Morrissey — instead of growing into an ageing facist cabbage — had instead died aged 31 as the sweet sensitive soul he was at the end of the 80s, he would have been reincarnated as a girl in Japan called Mitski. I can’t pinpoint an artist between the 2 figures who have captured the poeticism of dancing with tears in your eyes so acutely, and that means something. Mitski’s second album is a thrilling smorgasbord of delicate electronic laments, thrashing lo-fi punk and soaring anthemic catharses all squished into just over half an hour. But by the time the final, acoustic song fades out you feel like you’ve lived a whole life. The alternative rock industry has long been dominated by white dudes, so to witness in awe a woman from East-Asian heritage take the year by storm was so exciting and felt long, long overdue. Just listen to album highlight ‘Your Best American Girl’, realise that you’ve been listening to the same narratives for far too long and just enjoy.
Listen on Spotify: Puberty 2
The Veils — Total Depravity (2016)
I’ve been saying (as my father had before me) for a decade now that The Veils are the best band you’ve never heard of. Every album that comes out feels like a blessing as they’ve always felt too visceral, too special to survive long. But no one could have been more surprised than me when news came that their latest with be co-produced by 1 half of Run The Jewels, El-P. For me at that point it was like two treasured by crucially diametrically different corners of my music tastes collide for no reason at all. I had no idea what to expect but the results were absolutely stunning. The Brooklyn hip hop vet brought the gothic Kiwis a pulsing industrial edge which just worked so well. Take ‘King of Chrome’ or ‘Here Come The Dead’ and witness how their meeting world created something like Suicide fronted by Nebraska-era Springsteen. But it wasn’t a complete reinvention; old demo favourite ‘Iodine & Iron’ was pleasingly re-visited and fleshed out into a modern classic blues song.
Listen on Spotify: Total Depravity
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds — Ghosteen (2019)
Cave’s previous album was largely finished when his son Arthur tragically fell to his death from Ovingdean cliffs just outside my hometown of Brighton. It’s thought that the singer ad-libbed a lot of the lyrics as they finished the recording while mourning, so the sadness seeped in. So if that album was a gestational one, in dealing with the immediate shock of bereavement, then Ghosteen was the full flight of Cave’s loss in all its sweet terror and broken beauty. Perhaps it was the arrival of my first child not 3 weeks before the album’s release, but something about it clamped around my heart from first listen. I remember walking through Brighton in a sleep-deprived haze one lunchbreak after returning from paternity leave silently sobbing as the songs played in my headphones. It’s hard to describe. Its inclusion may be tinged with recency bias, but it was my album of 2019 by a country mile. I met Nick Cave at Brighton station this year and was hopelessly starstruck. A true hero.
Listen on Spotify: Ghosteen
Honourable Mentions
It’s tempting to try and draw lessons from retrospectives. From my love of the 10 records above, I would say that alternative/rock music in this decade had to work harder to break through emotionally — to connect on a deeper level than ever before. The fear was more gripping, the sadness all-encompassing. But the good time music went bigger than ever to break through the darkness and give us something transportive. As I said at the start, this kind of music wasn’t my main focus throughout the 2010’s, but I like to think that because of that, the albums I loved I really fell for. I didn’t have to narrow this list down from a longer one, but I was pretty much able to reel them off by memory. It’s a funny bunch, and I realise there are some big-name omissions – namely The War On Drugs who I think are great but aren’t really my bag, and Vampire Weekend who I drifted from. But here are 10 more that did make the cut:
Destroyer — Kaputt (2011)
The most recent addition to this list — I was a late arriver to Destroyer’s gorgeous, laid-back allure. Long before the whole slack sound blew up again, Dan Bejar had been showing that you didn’t have to be musically lazy to sound blissed out. Kaputt added saxophones, trumpets, synthesisers and bells to the rock formula like a lilting dream.
Tall Ships — Everything Touching (2012)
Sincerity was in short supply this decade, but Brighton-based Tall Ships had it in abundance. The album is packed with romance, hope and passion. Even when they’re aware of their existential insignificance as on ‘Books’ it’s done with such grace — “Time is precious / and time will forget us” And ‘Murmurations’ about BN’s dusk phenomenon gets bonus points.
HEALTH — Death Magic (2015)
The LA noise band’s previous album had hinted at a near ear for melody, but ‘Death Magic’ went all out in proving that HEALTH knew how to make you dance as well as cower. I saw them live on the tour for the album and it was exactly like a prom night in hell — the sound was completely overpowering, the figures playing it obscured. But the music was so, so sweet.
Baroness — Purple (2015)
I had no idea who Baroness were before my friend James got me onto them. I know little about metal but I know what I like, and I fell for this album on 1st listen. After a near fatal tour bus crash the band spent a long time recovering and re-emerged, rain-soaked and bruised with an album of gigantic guitar riffs and vocals that howl for being alive.
Xiu Xiu — Plays The Music Of Twin Peaks (2016)
Xiu Xiu had always been an act I’d admired but never really enjoyed – like some kind of gruesome performance art. But then they were commissioned to cover the songs from the cult tv series for an exhibition and the mystical source material; the legendary weirdness of Lynch’s creation bred a twisted darkness in Xiu Xiu’s interpretation that was addictive like a drug.
Perfume Genius — No Shape (2017)
I’d always been a fan of Mike Hadreas but on his 4th album I felt like he made a huge leap forward. His powerful pomp and featherlight fragility came together more magically than ever before. The opener sounds like a field of wildflowers all bursting into bloom at once and on ‘Die 4 You’ he creates a beautiful ballad out of erotic asphyxiation.
Moses Sumney — Aromanticism (2017)
A lazy explanation of Moses Sumney would put him at the meeting point between Prince and Nina Simone, and like Jeff Buckley live. But all of that is redundant once you experience him for yourself – as his music is hits like a crash-landing angel. The album is an intimidating debut and one which lets you know quite how lucky we are to be living in the same timeline.
The Horrors — V (2017)
The Horrors are a band that have gone from strength to strength and have now rightfully secured their place as British treasures. It was hard to choose 1 record from this decade but the 2 before this one felt slightly interchangeable for me, where on V it felt like they took another stratospheric evolution. This time it was into motorik, industrial sounds.
Idles — Joy As An Act Of Resistance (2018)
This one took me completely by surprise. Where I’d enjoyed but not loved their previous album, Joy grabbed me by the collar and wrestled me into submission. Themes as disparate as immigration, toxic masculinity and stillbirth with incredible delicacy for a band that make such an unholy racket. Idles are the band this rotten little island sorely needs.
Angel Olsen — All Mirrors (2019)
Another very recent addition but one that blew my end-of-year list apart as soon as I heard it. Olsen has always been great but it when backed by a full orchestra she is as her most powerful. Coming across like a female fronted Radiohead or an album full of Bond themes, All Mirrors is a work of unutterable power and poise. A future classic in waiting.
