When Perfume Genius released “Queen” and “Grid” as the leadoff singles for 2014’s Too Bright — which turns 10 today — Mike Hadreas’ metamorphosis into a pop star was well underway. Rock was mired in a general embarrassment about its domination by straight white dudes with guitars during pop’s post-“Blurred Lines” moral reckoning, and the indie world needed something fierce, fun, and challenging. Hadreas, a gay 30-something from Seattle who’d released two albums of painfully fragile piano ballads under a name taken from the grisly and voluptuous 2006 thriller Perfume: Story Of A Murderer, was in the position to give that to the world. Working with Portishead’s Adrian Utley to push his sound into the post-Yeezus zeitgeist of serrated minimalism, Hadreas seemed ready to complete the transition towards a more pop and extroverted mode, which is often the extra push a rising artist needs to vault to the highest echelons of indie acclaim.

Imagine a scenario where you’re just two months out from a presidential election where it feels like the fate of the country, and even the free world as a concept, is on the line. The previous years have been full of tragedy, protest, fear, media distrust and paranoia. Unprecedented societal shifts introduce “new normals” and generations of kids are marked by the conditions they’re born into. The stakes have never been, nor could they be, any higher.

When Richard D. James is mentioned, there’s a good chance the first thing that comes to mind is his Selected Ambient Works series. Comprising two of the most iconic (and meme’d) electronic records ever, it helped draw a throughline between party culture and erudite left-field sounds. The first installment, in 1992, served as James’ full-length debut under the moniker Aphex Twin. Establishing a foundation for intelligent dance music (commonly abbreviated as IDM), it thrust him out of the metaphorical hacker’s den and onto the festival stage. Its 1994 companion was comparably cerebral and synesthetic, asserting that James’ talents as a mad scientist producer were just as remarkable when stripped of pulse.

“We are like the Gallagher brothers, but in the Canadian sense,” Tegan Quin told The Age in 2003. Along with her identical twin sister, Sara, she had just finished promoting their album from the previous year, If It Was You, and in interviews, the pair joked that it sent them into therapy. That record, whose cover literally featured the pair yelling in perpendicular directions, rumbled with a palpable if unfocused angst, its strongest ideas buckling under the unbearable weight of being 19 years old in the public eye. By the end of that tour, perhaps to prevent an Oasis-sized meltdown, the two had moved to opposite sides of the country, Sara in Montreal and Tegan in Vancouver. Once tourmates and roommates, they began to repair their fractured relationship as penpals, sending demo CDs through the Canadian postal service.

School, career, friendships, family, romance, politics, sports: In the fall of 2004, these were trivialities, minor disturbances that kept me from my life’s true purpose at the time. Which was listening to Arcade Fire’s Funeral. This was a rare, yet familiar feeling, one I also experienced with Kid A and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot — albums that somehow outshined their blinding comet trail of purely online advance hype, rendering the print world of circumspect four-star reviews obsolete, incapable of recognizing the canon being assembled in real time.

In June 2013, the professor and programmer Mark Sample debuted the Twitter bot @mobydickatsea. Every two hours, the account would tweet a randomly selected fragment of text from Herman Melville’s 1851 masterpiece, without context and in no predetermined order. Entries could be humorously elliptical (“swallowed down and thrown up by a whale”) or rich with accidental meaning (“the hideous rot of life should make him easier to harvest.”). The decontextualization of Melville inspired a bigger project that Sample unveiled in 2019, called An End Of Tarred Twine, for a line in Moby-Dick about a shipowner saving every scrap of sail material for future use. Like that frugal captain, Sample took every scrap of the novel and created “a procedurally generated hypertext version of Moby-Dick,” one that unfolds differently every time you read it. “Very quickly, you’re lost, reading Moby-Dick one passage at a time, out of order, with no map to guide you,” Sample wrote on his blog in 2020. “Or as Ishmael says about the birthplace of Queequeg, the location ‘is not down in any map; true places never are.'” Sample’s original bot still posts as @mobydickatsea, but in protest of Twitter’s Muskification, he’s moved it to a different platform. The fragmented Moby-Dick now appears exclusively on Mastodon.

“Maybe one day I’ll get away with something naughty,” a 21-year-old former Nickelodeon actor told the New York Times in a 2014 profile. But what, to Ariana Grande, did forgivable naughtiness entail? She may have risen to the public eye thanks to a role on children’s television – in her case, as a supporting player on Nick’s tween sitcom Victorious – but don’t be fooled: She’s no Miley Cyrus. She’s no Britney Spears. She’s a good girl, and she’ll blow your mind.

When Garden State debuted in 2004, it felt like it was a movie made for me — a hopeless romantic millennial teen girl from New Jersey grappling with loneliness who had a fascination with pop culture and a burgeoning interest in music discovery thanks to my dad’s Sirius (not XM quite yet) account. The movie, which follows actor/waiter Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff) as he returns home to New Jersey where he unpacks a lifetime of trauma after his mother dies and decides to go off of his antidepressants, felt like a love letter to my home state (and Braff’s).

The first album from FKA Twigs would be her final release without a proper title. Perhaps the naming scheme — starting with EP1’s eerie minimalism in 2012 and followed by the elegant R&B of 2013’s EP2 — was an attempt to keep some distance between Twigs, born Tahliah Barnett, and her listeners. As a professional back-up dancer, she was already far too aware of the foibles of visibility — she was beginning to get recognized in public for her dancing, but nothing beyond, “Hey, aren’t you that girl from that video?” LP1, released 10 years ago today, is, fittingly, a debut about the dance of perception: the power of delayed gratification, the intimacy of the slow reveal, the ultimate vulnerability of “do[ing] it” (you know what) with the lights on. In the dark, after all, it’s much harder to ask, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?”

The best possible outcome for a piece of art to have, I think, is to inspire its observers to make art themselves. When I first heard “Falling In Love Again” by Joyce Manor, a surge of excitement shot through me and I was gripped by a desire to create something as warm and evocative as that song. I grabbed my laptop and typed away, birthing my own little universe in the form of a short story. It wasn’t good, but I felt an inexplicable, intoxicating sense of connectedness, which only expanded once I heard the rest of the album it was from: Never Hungover Again by Joyce Manor, which turns 10 today.

For a brief and spectacular moment two decades years ago, it seemed like every band could be the Fiery Furnaces. Every band could make music bursting with ideas, suffused with charm, willing to try almost anything to give its listeners a thrill. Blueberry Boat, released 20 years ago this Saturday, was a double album whose signature tracks stretched past seven minutes in multi-part suites — not a rock opera (though it was fun to pretend that it was) so much as a masterful short story collection about the burning, globalized world. Today it stands as a pinnacle of indie’s artistic ambition, and a dense universe still open to exploration and discovery.

“Best rapper alive since the best rapper retired.” I laughed out loud. Did he really say that? On a single? Lil Wayne? It seemed so far-fetched. Jay-Z’s fake retirement had only officially begun a few months earlier, and now this onetime bounce-rap child star was coming for Jay’s crown. I couldn’t believe the sheer moxie. Shows what I knew. Within a couple of years, Lil Wayne was almost indisputably the best rapper alive. When Jay-Z came out of retirement, Wayne was operating at peak power, and Jay looked lost and sauceless in comparison. If anything, Wayne’s boast didn’t go far enough.

Before signing to a major label, working with Frank Ocean, writing scores for A24 movies, and going on network television, there was Tumblr. Alex Giannascoli is, first and foremost, an internet darling — a bedroom pop legend with the likes of Sam Ray, bulldog eyes, Elvis Depressedly, and salvia palth. From 2010 to 2012, RACE, WINNER, RULES, AND TRICK soundtracked the ennui and exasperation that proliferated on Tumblr, his simple yet piercing lyrics and uncanny ear for melody attracting a legion of fans.

Let’s call it right now: “Mr. Brightside” is the white “Back That Azz Up,” the white “Gasolina.” If you play “Mr. Brightside” at a sufficiently loud volume around a crowd of sufficiently drunk white people, bedlam will ensue. The song is a shared experience, a cultural staple. It’s still in the British charts after 20 years, making it the longest-running chart hit in UK history. Over there, it recently replaced “Wonderwall” as the biggest hit that never went to #1. “Mr. Brightside” will never go away. Every day, it’s a little harder to remember a world without that song. That world once existed. If you’re old enough, you might even vaguely recall a moment when “Mr. Brightside” was the flop-sweaty second single from one more fresh-faced band attempting to cash in on the return-of-the-rock hype.

Beyond their deft noise manipulations and how they stumbled into being expert songwriters, Sonic Youth distinguished themselves from their peers by loving Mariah Carey. On “Kim Gordon And The Arthur Doyle Hand Cream” bassist-guitarist Kim Gordon screeches a combination of fan letter and statement of support to the pop singer, then at the nadir of her career after her 2001 film debut Glitter bombed, taking 2002’s Charmbracelet down with it. The atonal boings and peels have as much to do with Carey’s ebullient bounce-to-the-ounce R&B readymades as Lydia Lunch does with Ashanti, but since 1990s “Tunic (Song For Karen)” Gordon had shown a touristic curiosity about female idols on whose shoulders the machista star-making machinery rests: a curiosity that deepened as Sonic Youth got acquainted with the David Geffens of the biz. A pro at chorus writing by 2004 when she felt like it, Gordon wrote one in the argot of conventional pop songs but without noblesse oblige: “Hey, hey little baby, get down/ Before you fall and hurt someone.”

When My Chemical Romance announced their breakup in March 2013, vocalist Gerard Way posted a letter to Twitter, where he said, “it is not a band – it is an idea.” The phrase captured the essence of My Chemical Romance. Their music came complete with plot and characters and world-building. Their videos were like movies, their albums so immersive they provided escape.

Parquet Courts had everything an up-and-coming band could theoretically want. As 2013 yielded to 2014, they had accrued a breathless round of buzz and press acclaim thanks to the re-release of their 2012 album Light Up Gold. Here was a band heralded not just as clever and masterful young torchbearers for all the most tasteful corners of indie and post-punk history, but also the next big thing out of New York. They toured heavily; they quickly built an adoring audience. But by the time Sunbathing Animal arrived, 10 years ago today, Parquet Courts had spent a lot of time telling everyone, “You’ve got it all wrong.”

In 2013, Tigers Jaw announced on Tumblr that three of the five members were leaving. It would only be Brianna Collins and Ben Walsh from then on, while Adam McIlwee, Dennis Mishko, and Pat Brier were exiting. But they already had the studio time booked and they’d been writing together. “We had all these songs and why not do it?” Collins told New Noise. So the quintet recorded one last time together. Some of the lyrics weren’t finished, and it would take the album over a year to finally come out, but nonetheless, Charmer came to life.

In the spring of 2014, Sharon Van Etten told interviewers again and again that the photograph on the cover of Are We There — her fourth studio album, released 10 years ago this Monday — depicted a woman craning her neck out of a moving vehicle to get a better look at a car crash.

My favorite song on A Grand Don’t Come For Free is “Wouldn’t Have It Any Other Way.” Over a skittery percussion loop hinting at drums and bass and a keyboard line that refuses to develop into a phrase, Mike Skinner depicts the experience of kicking it at his girlfriend’s house. The Birmingham native should be meeting his mates at the bar, but he’d rather relax with a spliff and watch EastEnders. His motives aren’t pure: He admits his own TV’s busted. But the way the music stops and starts complements the repetitions in Skinner’s lyrics. He could be convincing himself of a domesticity he doesn’t believe in; the next song, “Get Out Of My House,” records the couple’s first fight. But mostly Skinner’s everyman daze — like Bernard Sumner’s in New Order’s gorgeous 1989 song “Dream Attack” — is affecting. Reluctant by nature to issue statements, incapable of flourishes, he lingers on the banal. That’s what you do when you’re getting high on a Saturday afternoon with your girlfriend.

Sturgill Simpson was disappearing into rabbit holes, obsessed with wikis and subreddits about what he affectionately called “weird shit”: quantum physics, string theory, esoteric cosmology, and anything else that deconstructed reality. He’d spend hours watching Terrence McKenna lectures on YouTube, flip through some Rick Strassman on scribd, then wash it all down with a few .pdfs on multiverse theory. When he wasn’t online, Simpson was touring in support of High Top Mountain, a rollicking outlaw record he’d self-released earlier that year. “I’ve been spendin’ all my nights on the internet,” Simpson sings on one of the album’s standouts. “Looking for a clue but ain’t found one yet.”

Of my 10 tattoos, I would only describe one as truly bad. It’s a smudged collection of lines that (sort of) make up the image of a human figure crying into its hand. It sits on the right side of my ribcage, which, at 19 years old, I learned the hard way is a painful spot to be hit with a needle for an hour. The mediocre rendering resembles the cover of Panda Bear’s 2011 album, Tomboy, less and less with each coming year. It’s not exactly a horrible tattoo — people can usually figure out what they’re looking at if I explain it very directly. But it hardly does justice to an album by an artist I love. Thirteen years ago, this very website proclaimed that Tomboy’s album art would “make a decent tattoo.” Yet here I sit, proving former Stereogum Executive Editor Amrit Singh’s headline wrong.

Loretta Lynn could write. It takes a rare and difficult-to-quantify set of skills to write a great country song. You need to be able to tell a rich, emotionally resonant story — maybe saccharine, maybe not — in as few words as possible. Those words need to make musical sense, and they need to be written for someone who can inhabit those words. Nashville supports an entire industry of people whose job it is to crank out country songs, and the writers often aren’t the ones singing the songs. That industry has existed for nearly a century, and in that time, there haven’t been many writers sharper than Loretta Lynn.

It’s November 2003, and Jay-Z is retiring. That’s the idea, anyway. He’s making a whole spectacle out of it. At Madison Square Garden, Jay is playing an all-star farewell show, opening things up with a Michael Buffer ring introduction as his fake jersey ascends into the real rafters. Halfway through the show, Jay cedes the stage to Beyoncé, his then-girlfriend and now-wife, giving himself time to change into a fresh new suit. A camera crew captures everything so that it can be immortalized as a feature film. While Beyoncé sings “Baby Boy,” her massive Sean Paul-assisted hit, the filmmakers’ attention drifts to backstage hallway, where the camera finds Ghostface Killah.

“Cartoonish” is often used pejoratively. But there’s a reason that cartoons have been the reigning entertainment of choice for children and stoners alike for decades: They’re colorful, they’re accessible, and they’re fun. Todd Terje, whose first (and thus far only) album It’s Album Time turns 10 years old today, seems to understand that better than most. Much like the literally cartoonish album artwork from New Yorker illustrator Bendik Kaltenborn, Terje’s compositions paint with bold strokes and bright colors. Where so much music culture, especially electronic music culture, places value on being cool, Terje dared to make music that’s deeply, defiantly silly.

More than at any point since the mainstream coronation of rock and roll, fans are increasingly sympathetic to selling out, if not outright supportive of musicians taking shelter within whatever remaining revenue streams have not dried up in the streaming era. These are dire economic times, and the purity of forgoing licensing deals was easier to uphold for bands who could still mint a salary hawking rings of polycarbonate and acrylic plastic. Value systems have become so far warped by need that we’ve come to project an aura of ironic protest to bands who succeed in making a living. Yes! Bleed money from the corporate veins! Slay the capitalist beasts from within!

Dylan Baldi must have been taking the piss. Either the Cloud Nothings mastermind was messing with the public, or he was kidding himself about the album he’d just made. “I was feeling pretty good about everything so I just made stuff that made me happy,” Baldi says in the promotional copy for Here And Nowhere Else, released 10 years ago today. “I had nothing to be angry about really so the approach was more positive and less ‘fuck everything.’ I just sat down and played until I found something that I like, because I was finally in a position to do that.”

Mac DeMarco was always an odd fit for Captured Tracks. By the time he’d signed with the buzzy Brooklyn label in 2012, it was an indie hit factory, releasing debut albums from bedroom acts like Beach Fossils and Wild Nothing, American kids obsessed with the sounds of 1980s Britain and the undying melancholy those records conveyed. They were a far cry from their Canadian labelmate DeMarco, whose first release for the label, Rock And Roll Nightclub, sounded like Elvis fronting Ween. His first proper album, 2, which arrived later that year, sounded less like the C86-inspired songs of his labelmates and more like a Dead bootleg that’d been left out in the rain. The bands on Captured Tracks were often called dream pop; DeMarco referred to his own music as “jizz jazz.”

It’s hard to hear it now like I heard it then. In the months and years following its release — 20 years ago this Saturday — Iron & Wine’s Our Endless Numbered Days became so successful and so influential that it’s now almost more of an archetype than an album. It’s one of only ten Sub Pop releases to ever go gold (follow-up The Shepherd’s Dog is another, surely in part due to runoff from this album’s popularity). It also stands as a symbol for a not entirely reputable moment in indie music history. Two decades later, I struggle to get past the Zach Braff of it all, the way Sam Beam and his acolytes became inextricably linked with prestige treacle like Grey’s Anatomy and This Is Us. You know how everyone who bought The Velvet Underground & Nico started a band? Everyone who burned Our Endless Numbered Days to CD-R grew a beard and whisper-sighed at open mic night.

We owe Joanna Newsom an apology. Though it’s hard to recall a time when she wasn’t adored by music critics or guarded by her cultish fanbase, the singer-songwriter was divisive when she broke onto the scene. With The Milk-Eyed Mender, her 2004 debut album, Newsom was on the receiving end of backhanded compliments at best and misogynistic critiques at worst. Robert Christgau declared she was “chronically whimsical” for singing in “a fey little voice.” Some journalists described her singing as “squeaky,” a “lopsided trill” built around “childlike intonation” and teenage “awkwardness.” Others acted like her gender was to blame for ruining a voice that had potential, claiming the album was “overly sweet in spots due to Newsom’s girlish voice.” One publication led their review with “RIYL: Shrill, esoteric female singer/songwriters that play harp and sound like they’re ten years old with a possible, though not certain, mental problem” – but, of course, that didn’t stop that same publication from including it in their best albums of the year list (and using Newsom’s face in the lead graphic!). Even though their reviews praised, if not raved about, The Milk-Eyed Mender, journalists leaned on enough gendered criticism of Newsom to spawn an actual MA dissertation about it.

You can’t talk about Singles without talking about Letterman. Really, at this point, it seems you can’t talk about Future islands at all without talking about Letterman. Ten years later, the performance still factors into so many narratives of the band, the breakthrough moment against which everything since has been compared. On March 3, 2014, Future Islands made their network TV debut, performing their single “Seasons (Waiting On You)” on The Late Show. After that, everything changed.

Sometimes, you see the album cover and just know. When MF DOOM and Madlib came together to release Madvillainy, there was already plenty of lore attached to both artists, but you didn’t necessarily need to know any of that. Instead, you could just walk into a record store and behold the image that first arrived on shelves 20 years ago. (The official anniversary is Saturday.) By itself, that picture was enough to capture imagination. Most of MF DOOM’s records used his masked comic-book persona to cartoonish ends, but that’s not what happens with Madvillainy. Instead, Stones Throw art director Jeff Jank captured DOOM in stark greyscale, his helmet gleaming and even the exposed parts of his face sunk into shadow. Only DOOM’s eyes, lidded and suspicious, shine out of all that metal. It’s the kind of album cover that reels you in even as it keeps you at arm’s length.

I still remember where I was when I first heard the “Woo!” that would change everything for the War On Drugs. In the waning days of 2013, I was spending part of the Christmas season out in Las Vegas. My girlfriend was driving us from the suburban sprawl of apartment complexes and outdoor malls to the Strip, down highways dusted with desert. I put on “Red Eyes,” the new War On Drugs song I couldn’t wait to hear. In some paradoxical way its grainy rush and ghostly atmospherics sounded beautiful against the perverse glitter of the casinos at sunset, but I figured it would also sound beautiful on a sun-dappled LA afternoon, and while barreling through the mountains in the Northwest. I was very far away from the Pennsylvanian home in which I’d first fallen in love with Adam Granduciel’s music, where I’d first heard something kindred in this weirdo Philly rock band. Granduciel was far away too, as if he’d emerged from festering clouds of Slave Ambient and located a whole new road to travel. He almost didn’t make it there.

Before Michigan, there was New Jersey. Sometimes, at the end of his workweek, Sufjan Stevens would take his songs and hop on a bus out of Brooklyn. He was living in New York’s buzziest borough at the dawn of the 2000s — if not the most exciting time for the city’s music scene, then maybe the most publicized. To be sure, Stevens wasn’t making post-punk or electroclash. (Though if you cock your head, his indietronica debut Enjoy Your Rabbit sounds like another Michigan-to-Brooklyn transplant act — Mahogany — folded in on itself). But in the years before Stevens began recording what would become Seven Swans, released 20 years ago this Saturday, acts like Devendra Banhart, Cat Power, and Herman Düne had made good-to-great albums of avant and indie folk in NYC. Nevertheless, there was Stevens, going to South Jersey station by station, forsaking Mecca for the New Jerusalem Recreation Center.

The little guy up there with the glasses wasn’t really singing, and he wasn’t really playing guitar, either. The guitar was there, dangling across his chest, and he sometimes swiped at it, but those moments seemed random and unplanned. The guy’s arms flew everywhere, sometimes towards the guitar but usually not. They jutted out, pointed, clapped, stabbed at the air — a tourettic preacher’s rap hands. The little guy did not seem to be making any of the music. Instead, the music came from the guys behind him — big, mean, surly riffs that made me want to pick up a trash barrel and throw it. (I restrained myself. The Ottobar was right down the block from my house, and I was there three or four nights a week. I was not trying to get banned.) But the little guy was in a wild, impressive rant mode — all worked up, face red and contorted.

They were bigger than the room. That’s what I remember. TV On The Radio came through Baltimore a couple of months after they released their full-length debut Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, and they played at a DIY venue that I’m pretty sure was a converted auto-body shop. (That venue, like so many other Baltimore DIY spots throughout history, did not last long.) TV On The Radio had just added a couple of new members, and they were still learning how to be a band. But they overwhelmed.