It’s hard to believe that the Smiths were only together for five years. In addition to four studio albums, they have a handful of compilations, a live LP, and a session with John Peel. The Manchester outcasts are known as one of the most influential groups, yet their specific sound has rarely been replicated; ’90s groups like the Sundays, the La’s, and Belle And Sebastian definitely came close, along with early 2000s act Voxtrot, but otherwise resemblances are quite vague. They’re also credited with inspiring the Britpop movement. Blur formed after watching the Smiths on The South Bank Show in 1987; Oasis, the Stone Roses, and Suede reportedly drew heavily from the Smiths as well, though similarities are hard to detect. What genre are the Smiths? Depends on who you ask. Jangle pop. British alternative. Mope rock.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of Pearl Jam’s third album, Vitalogy — aka the most significant release in the grunge survivors’ long discography. And that’s not just because it remains the only Pearl Jam album where you’ll find an accordion lullaby about insects butting up against psychedelic mantras and freeform sound collages. While it was initially received as an anti-pop reaction to the hypestorm engulfing the band’s blockbuster 1991 debut Ten and its equally earthshaking 1993 follow-up Vs., in hindsight, Vitalogy was less a Kid A-style gateway into some new avant-garde phase than a stress-relieving exorcism of all tensions weighing on the band from within and without: the death of Kurt Cobain, the mounting legal battle against Ticketmaster, the imminent dismissal of drummer of Dave Abbruzesse for being too much of a bro.

The shock hasn’t worn off yet. New Jersey rock legends Screaming Females called it quits earlier this week, ending a brilliant 18-year run. The trio of guitarist/vocalist Marissa Paternoster, bassist “King” Mike Abbate, and drummer Jarrett Dougherty started playing together in the New Brunswick DIY scene that orbited Rutgers University in the mid-2000s. They shared basement stages with bands like the Ergs, Hunchback, and Full Of Fancy, and they always kept a foot in that world, even as they became critical darlings and fixtures of the indie-rock touring circuit. Their eclectic annual Garden Party festival in Jersey City became a way of recreating those genre-agnostic bills from New Brunswick’s punk houses, just on a much larger scale. (The Garden Party will outlive the band who started it; a 2024 version headlined by Team Dresch will take place in February.)

In the early months of 2014, a viral video transformed an obscure act into indie icons seemingly overnight — and no, I’m not talking about Future Islands on Letterman. In April of that year, on Record Store Day, Sleaford Mods played an in-store — make that an out-store — on the sidewalk at London’s Rough Trade West, and for many of us outside the Isles, a widely circulated clip of them performing “Fizzy” was our first glimpse of the Nottingham duo in action. Or, rather, in inaction: If not for the visible microphone stands, you’d think frontman Jason Williamson was in the middle of a pub argument that spilled out onto the street rather than a concert. And with his gear out of the frame, it was hard to tell if his producer/partner Andrew Fearn was actually part of the band or just a curious bystander.

It’s become a risible cliche to state that a recently-passed artist “taught me that it’s OK to be weird.” But what if it’s still true, not just from the perspective of an individual’s experience, but in the context of an entire culture? The reconnections people have been making with De La Soul in the last month — spurred by the near-concurrent announcement of their catalogue’s escape from sample-rights purgatory onto streaming platforms and the death of their MC Dave “Trugoy The Dove” Jolicouer at age 54 — have been more than just nostalgia trips for oldheads. They’ve actually given some perspective to where De La really stood on the precipice of hip-hop’s revered late ’80s-early ’90s Golden Era: as the geeky weirdo class clowns who skeptics struggled to take seriously until the sheer force of their creativity became impossible to deny.

Forty years ago today, on February 22, 1983, the Flaming Lips performed their very first show at Oklahoma City’s Blue Note Lounge. But if you could take a time machine back to that moment, chances are, you wouldn’t recognize the band onstage. None of the qualities we now associate with this band — the kaleidoscopic pop anthems bursting with positive vibes, childlike wonder, and a shit ton of confetti — can be detected in early setlist standards like “Bag Full Of Thoughts,” which sounds like a group of stoned misfits trying to figure out how to play Echo And The Bunnymen’s “Do It Clean” and coming up with a sludgy goth-garage jam of their own. Even the group’s most instantly identifiable characteristic — Wayne Coyne’s fragile, folksy voice — was nowhere to be heard; lead vocals back then were handled by his brother Mark, whose voice teeters on the edge between humorously dazed and genuinely disturbed.

Everyone always talks about the death of rock ‘n’ roll, but in retrospect, the Cramps were the only artists doing anything to resurrect it. Filth. Sleaze. Shock. Flesh. Fetish. These were the quartet’s tactics. Frontman Lux Interior writhed around on stage, searching for a new kind of kick and screaming about eyeballs in martinis, a lubed-up serpent mutant hissing and howling at fans — his leather pants miraculously gone. Meanwhile, guitarist Poison Ivy would keep the pace with her sinuous blues riffs clad in pin-up or dominatrix wear. She was the lion tamer to Interior’s ferocious beast.

Last month, the Swedish pop-metal outfit Ghost had their first-ever Billboard Hot 100 hit with “Mary On A Cross,” a previously obscure B-side from a 2019 7-inch. As you might have guessed, both TikTok and Stranger Things were involved. Unlike Kate Bush and Metallica, whose respective chart ascents this year were powered by needle drops, Ghost rose on the back of a fan-made clip featuring scenes from the Netflix series. Virality did its thing, and soon “Mary On A Cross” was all over TikTok, soundtracking videos that had nothing to do with either Stranger Things or Ghost. (“Mary On A Cross” isn’t on the list below; it isn’t very good.)

In their first decade of existence, Melbourne ensemble King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have already produced enough music to last several lifetimes. And it seems like any obstacle that gets thrown their way — lineup changes, a global pandemic, Crohn’s disease — only strengthens their resolve to be the most prolific rock band on the planet. Let’s put it this way: In April, King Gizzard released a mammoth 16-track, 80-minute double album, and that already feels like an afterthought compared to an October that brings three new records released within three weeks of one another. At this point, King Gizzard have essentially become the musical equivalent of a Hello Fresh box showing up on your doorstep every Friday.

In the days of mixtapes and CD burning, Paul McCartney was one of those acts like the Fall and Wu-Tang Clan whose immense catalog concealed overlooked corners and underused trails the former Beatle himself had no interest in mentioning. Standalone singles with B-sides, album tracks composed with first wife Linda or Wings members, collaborations with Michael Jackson, Elvis Costello and a member of 10cc —McCartney’s career reveals an untrammeled curiosity about the wonder of human voices sharing a mic; about comic books and sci-fi escapism that his fan base would’ve recognized and appreciated; and, in a break from the promiscuity and grossness of his peers’ backstage practices, about energetic married sex.

It’s shaping up to be the summer of Kate Bush. After Stranger Things used 1985’s “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)” in the first part of its new season, the song became an instant viral hit, storming up the charts and even reaching #1 on Spotify’s global chart earlier this week. (In the US, the song is #8 on the Billboard Hot 100; it’s her first-ever top 10 hit here.) Bush — who is apparently a fan of the series — released a rare statement in response via her website: “It’s all really exciting! Thanks very much to everyone who has supported the song. I wait with bated breath for the rest of the series in July.”

Simon Cowell pulled One Direction together in 2010 after Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson and Liam Payne had each auditioned as solo artists on The X Factor UK. Better together, at least at the time, the five-piece came in third place in the singing competition. But at this point, mentioning their stint on the show feels as necessary as tracing Justin Bieber’s success back to his time on YouTube or Ariana Grande’s on Nickelodeon. While important stepping stones and key parts of their stories, the feats pale in comparison to literally everything that came after.

People will take you for granted until you’re gone, a truth hip-hop is intimately familiar with. If an artist is “lucky,” they will live long enough to have their contributions simply forgotten, as with innovators undersung in their middle age like the late DMX and Shock G. Too common is the scenario where an artist’s talent is belittled just as their star rises, like when popularity invited cynicism to Lil Peep and Juice WLRD until their premature demises rendered their geniuses unimpeachable. If the tragedies in rap of the last few years — from Pop Smoke to King Von to Nipsey Hussle, and the list goes on and on — have spoken to anything broken in our culture, beyond the complete callousness with which we treat the lives of young hip-hop musicians, it’s that we fail to adequately celebrate our artists until they are no longer able to join in themselves.

Fifty years ago, Paul Simon wondered how terribly strange he’d feel at 70. Today, after becoming one of the 20th century’s greatest songwriters, he turns 80. Happy birthday, Paul.

Abacab, the 11th studio album by UK prog/pop legends Genesis, turns 40 tomorrow. Nursery Cryme, the band’s first album with drummer Phil Collins and guitarist Steve Hackett, turns 50 in November. Meanwhile, the band’s SECOND reunion tour begins in the UK Sept. 20, with US dates to follow in November (fingers crossed!). Their drummer for the tour is Phil Collins’ son Nic, who wasn’t even alive when his father last wrote original material for the band 30 years ago.

Steely Dan’s Gaucho turned 40 last week. Forty is the perfect anniversary for a Steely Dan album, since so many of their narrators, on that album in particular but throughout their catalog, seem to be middle-aged men bemoaning their lost youth. Which makes it all the more astonishing/horrifying that the band’s two creative voices, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, were 24 and 22, respectively, when their first album, Can’t Buy A Thrill, was released in 1972. By the time they broke the “band” up in 1981, they were in their early thirties but seemed much older.

Music wasn’t the plan for Jason Lytle. In fact, for most of his adolescence it wasn’t even the dream. Lytle began his young adult life as a professional skateboarder, a logical hobby given his suburban Californian upbringing, before a knee injury abruptly ended his athletic career. In his recovery, he poured his attention into music, recording small demos. Those songs would become his first releases as Grandaddy, a project that has expanded and contracted with time but has consistently been a home for Lytle’s lyrics and, by extension, his anxieties. And as is befitting of a band born from the painful failings of the human form, Grandaddy’s discography excavates the splendor in our inevitable degradation.

For years, Chris Stapleton had been an unstoppable force in Nashville — but one working mostly behind the scenes as a songwriter and member of his bluegrass group the Steeldrivers, letting others take the limelight with his words. Writing for everyone from Patty Loveless to Luke Bryan, he gave country music a lot of its heart, soul, and southern-rock swamp from the early 2000s on (yes, even for Luke Bryan). But on his 2015 solo debut, Traveller, Stapleton broke all the norms: He found stardom in his thirties, put country music — not pop country or bro country — back on the map, sang with Justin Timberlake, and sold millions of records in the process. He’s now not only one of the genre’s biggest stars, but he’s managed to create a wave of interest in country traditionalism in his wake.

Krill, Krill, Krill forever! If someone you know was super into the Boston strain of indie rock that came up in the 2010s, you have probably had this refrain shouted at you, most likely brought on by a long bout of listening to Krill, a band that developed a cultishly devoted following before they broke up in 2015. For a brief period of time there, Krill represented all that was good in the world, music that made you feel better by being about all of the things that make you feel infinitely worse.

Katie Crutchfield decamped to her parents' home in the dead of winter to record an album. It was 2011 and Crutchfield was nearing the end of P.S. Eliot, the band she had started with her twin sister Allison a few years earlier. Like many bands before them, its members wanted to go in different directions, and Katie's path led her to that house, hunkered down during a rare Alabama snowstorm. Shortly after New Year's Day and right around her 22nd birthday, she spent a week recording what would become American Weekend, her first album as Waxahatchee, a project that she named after a nearby creek that snaked through her childhood memories and a name that would come to define her adult life.

Run The Jewels always made it easy to root for them. Two artists with very different backgrounds and milieus, joining together in their late 30s and, instead of functioning like a one-off or a curiosity, unlocking a whole new chapter of their lives. Two artists pushing each other to new heights, two men who found a new best friend in middle age. Two artists who were respected but seemed destined for perennial underdog status. And then, once they got together, everything changed -- a casual experiment that led to crowd-pleasing victory laps and creative evolution. It's a story everyone could get behind, and they did.

Mike Hadreas had already lived a lot of life before he became Perfume Genius. Growing up, he struggled with Crohn's disease, and the cruelty of homophobic bullies in high school. He witnessed domestic abuse, and then he had his own battle with substance abuse. A stint in New York led him back home to Seattle, and to rehab. And then, on the other side of it all, he decided to start making songs. All of which is to say: By the time Mike Hadreas became Perfume Genius, he had already survived and become another version of himself. But once he did take on the name and began releasing albums, it was evident just how many versions there could be.

When Gerard Way watched the Twin Towers go down from Hudson River Pier, he, like many people at the time, had a revelation: Life is fragile, and its ending seems arbitrary. A few months later, he decided his job making cartoons for a large corporation was not his current calling. Instead, he called up a few friends and suggested they form a band.

You may not recognize Mark Ronson, but you'd definitely recognize at least one of the countless hits he's worked on in the past 10 years. He began as a socialite DJ back in the '90s, a New York cool kid who went from spinning at hip-hop clubs to high-fashion parties. Born in London in 1975, Ronson moved to NYC in the early '80s, and his catalog celebrates the city that was rebuilding itself from ruins, inspired by disco and hip-hop.

Do you remember what the early aughts felt like? The smell of leather jackets and canvas shoes pressed into vinyl booths, stage dives at dive bars, alternate cover art and lost tracks internalized into "if you know, you know" attitudes. At least that's the mythos we remember, a perception built in New York and then distributed via the burgeoning blogging and RSS-based "Web 2.0" across the rest of the nation. The novelty of being tuned in in real time coupled with the high concentration of classic albums coming out of a relatively compact setting created a magical tension in the air, a mixture of sawdust and gunpowder that could ignite at the strike of a well-mic'd kick drum. The next big thing felt like it was perpetually coming, a groundswell you could feel both in the streets and on the virtual highways.

By the end of the '90s, Britpop had collapsed. Its primary and ancillary artists alike had taken the ideas and sounds of that dizzying moment as far as they could go. Some of the biggest names were only years away from breaking up, some drifted off into the periphery. Others forged new artistic paths far removed from the characteristics of the cultural firestorm they'd come to prominence within. And at the same time, a new chapter was beginning. Existing in the shadow of Radiohead, a new guard of British guitar bands came up, offering music that on the surface scanned as far more downtrodden, music that greeted the new millennium with greyed world-weariness and introspection. One of those bands was called Doves.

It’s almost a cliché to call something the "new Chinese Democracy" when referring to an oft-delayed album, but if we have one in 2018, it’s Chromatics’ long-awaited Dear Tommy. First announced in 2014, the assumed follow-up to 2012’s noir masterpiece Kill For Love has been on the minds of fans for so long that it’s reached mythic levels. There have been twists and turns in the story of Dear Tommy; from an initial barrage of well-received singles, to years gone by without updates, to 2017 reports that the album was nearly complete when frontman and creative mastermind Johnny Jewel trashed it all to start over after a near-death experience. Whatever the case for the long delay, one thing is for sure: the Dear Tommy hype has not died down.

Imogen Heap is a mystical force that has loomed over pop music for nearly two decades, delivering elaborate pop and fiery rock imbued with whimsy and enigmatic curiosity. The British innovator’s glittering presence has been apparent on the Top 40 even when her name isn’t the main credit.

The notion that every city or time period has a signature sound is more or less lost to laptops. Online communities foster genres and styles regardless of physical geography. New sonic ideas are being conceived and spread all the time. With a readily available source of music from every decade and location, inspiration doesn’t have to adhere to region.

Every band of note has fans. That's a given, that's how art-as-commerce works. But there are some bands that go beyond that. They become ecosystems in and of themselves. There are codes and references shared within the community, there are fans so devoted they spend all their money following an artist to any remotely nearby show -- and sometimes quite a bit farther. They collect bootlegs, compare setlist notes, annotate the convoluted trajectories of particular songs. Ecosystems, after all, are differentiated by the unique types of beings they support. Plenty of bands are beloved. A small amount become a way of life.

After the collapse of Britpop's '90s heyday, there was a period of fragmentation. By the middle of the next decade, there would be a new generation of bratty, punk-inflected British rock bands of varying quality, from Kasabian to Libertines, Kaiser Chiefs to Arctic Monkeys. Before that, though, there was a moment where electronica was positioned as the absolute future, and the rock bands that did emerge immediately after the superstardom of Blur and Oasis and Pulp were of a distinctly different breed. Descended almost directly from Radiohead (as it seemed, at least), it was a group of artists that favored anthemic melodies atop atmospheric and rain-soaked instrumentation, inverting their pop sensibilities into a downtrodden meditativeness.

"I just wanna take you there." These were the first words we ever heard from Abel Tesfaye, uttered in a sinful, irresistible whisper over a warped-out fairytale score backed by lurching 808s. This was in 2011, when the Canadian high school dropout was still in the midst of a perfectly crafted mystique -- a veiled internet auteur existing in the same prodigious moment alongside his equally elusive peers Jai Paul and Frank Ocean. He taunted us on the portentous opening lines of another one of his earliest singles: "You don’t know what’s in store/ But you know what you're here for."

We often perceive indie rock of the early 21st century through two defining lenses: the era of New York's early '00s retro-revival and the rise of Brooklyn and mainstream indie that supplanted it by the end of that decade. There were, of course, all sorts of other scenes in other places -- in orbit or influenced by the cultural signifier of Brooklyn's scene, or working as counter-narratives and parallel trajectories. One of those counter-narratives happened in Baltimore, which became an unlikely nexus for a young, artsy group of bands that often seemed to be operating adjacent to the mainstream indie narrative without ever fully joining it.

Throughout the long and tumultuous history of the Smashing Pumpkins, there's never really been a prolonged period of anything resembling tranquility. There's never been a moment where they could actually bring themselves to sit back and enjoy their victory together. From the earliest days, there were breakups and addiction. There was Billy Corgan at the center, the dictator who had the vision to justify his control-freak tendencies, but who still wouldn't escape being called insufferable or delusional or megalomaniacal by his peers (and his bandmates). Sometimes you want the band-as-gang-of-friends mythology, sometimes you want the self-destructive band imploding for the sake of classic art mythology. The Smashing Pumpkins often tried to present the former, and excelled at the latter.