Lizzy Goodman’s new book, Meet Me In The Bathroom, documents an era in rock music that many of us remember well. It uses oral history to tell the story of the great New York rock boom of the early ’00s, the time when the Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Interpol and the Rapture wandered the earth as larger-than-life avatars of sex and fashion and glamor and desire. It gives a long look at that moment, at all the drunken nights and cocaine hangovers and ill-advised major-label deals and long-festering grudges that helped it to happen, and helped it to end. If you care about music — and if you’re reading this website, you presumably do — it’s an absolute must-read. But once you get over the pure nostalgia of it all, you might find yourself wondering why we haven’t had a moment like that since. Where are all the exciting young rock bands?
Well, they’re out there. They exist. They’re releasing music, and a lot of the time it’s really great music. The main difference is that the exciting young rock bands of today are, by and large, not supremely stylish young deities. They’re not pretty snarlers who look like they just stepped off of a magazine cover. They look like rock bands. They look like rumpled-ass kids who have been sitting in a van for the past two weeks. They come from New Hampshire or Alabama or Cameroon, and they populate Bandcamp pages and basement shows. But they can be as great as anything that came out of New York City in 2001. And a lot of them are on this list.
On this list, those exciting young rock bands share space with exciting old rock bands and exciting rap stars and exciting doom-metal virtuosos and exciting experimental producers and exciting introverted singer-songwriters and a whole lot of other exciting but hard-to-categorize stuff. We’re living through an era when great music is all over the place, but it’s also an era when you often have to dig deeper, when the great artists don’t always just come right out and introduce themselves as great artists. (But, then, sometimes they do. A lot of the albums on our list, including the one up top, are among the most popular of the year thus far.)
We know the year isn’t really half over. But we also know that there is so much great music out there that it can be hard to keep up. And so here’s our cheat sheet: 50 new albums, from all around the map, that blew our wig back this year. There have been a lot of them, and there will be a lot more. And as fun as it can be to rhapsodize about the recent past, we shouldn’t forget that we’re living through some pretty great times right now, too. (At least for music. Everything else is garbage.) Any LP released between 1/1 and 6/30 was eligible for this list, excluding releases we haven’t heard yet (looking at you, Vince Staples). —Tom Breihan
50 Strand Of Oaks – Hard Love (Dead Oceans)
Following years of folky dalliances, Tim Showalter finally broke through with the hyper-confessional HEAL in 2014. After that, he wanted to trade all the singer-songwriter business for big, loud rock music in the vein of his ’90s childhood heroes. While the delivery mechanism might’ve changed, Hard Love is still a chronicle of everything that happened in Showalter’s life in those interim years: a marriage straining then piecing itself back together, a brother’s near-death experience, a nascent rockstar partying his way across the globe. It’s more of a collage than HEAL, appropriately psychedelic and loopy throughout (especially on centerpiece/turning point “On The Hill”) but anchored with anthems like the matured, self-aware nostalgia of “Radio Kids.” —Ryan Leas
STREAM IT: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp
49 The New Pornographers – Whiteout Conditions (Collected Works/Concord)
Like fellow indie stalwarts Spoon, the New Pornographers are so unwaveringly adept at churning out hooks that we’ve started to take them for granted. Picking up where 2014’s synth-laden Brill Bruisers left off, Whiteout Conditions finds New Pornos ringleader A.C. Newman aiming for “bubblegum krautrock.” You can hear what he means in songs like “Whiteout Conditions,” “Avalanche Alley,” and “High Ticket Attractions,” where the band sticks to breakneck speeds and repetitive grooves, heaping infectious melody on top of infectious melody, crunchy guitars mingling with sugar-overdose synths. The result is one of the finest entries in the now-veteran outfit’s catalog. —Ryan
STREAM IT: Spotify | Apple Music
48 Spencer Radcliffe & Everybody Else – Enjoy The Great Outdoors (Run For Cover)
Spencer Radcliffe has been putting out idiosyncratic music for years now, but Enjoy The Great Outdoors is the first album on which he’s invited others to collaborate and play alongside him, which only helped bolster the devilishly clever compositions and creeping sense of unease that have been hallmarks of his work since the beginning. Radcliffe treats the whole world as one big cosmic joke that’s inevitably going to come crashing down around us, but these songs are anything but cynical. Instead, they’re warm and inviting and encourage you to value the little things, like the power of friendship or a crisp, refreshing breeze. —James Rettig
STREAM IT: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp
47 Tonstartssbandht – Sorcerer (Mexican Summer)
It’s pronounced “TAHN-starts-bandit.” Since 2008, brothers Andy and Edwin White have used that melted, abstruse moniker to crank out melted, abstruse music, reshaping decades of psych-rock history into their own Bandcamp stoner image. Their latest, Sorcerer, is their clearest, most fully realized statement yet, upping the fidelity and the song length without sacrificing any of the ramshackle charm. These three exploratory song-suites feel like living, breathing creatures, and you’ll want to follow them straight into the cosmos. —Peter Helman
STREAM IT: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp
46 Blanck Mass – World Eater (Sacred Bones)
Leave it to global politics’ current disarray to let Benjamin John Power really find his groove on his third album as Blanck Mass. Power makes sprawling cinematic music as one-half of Fuck Buttons, but he’s never sounded as vital and timely as he does on World Eater. He translates breakdowns in communication and crippling frustration into dense and disorienting soundscapes, angry and demonic bursts of pure id that allow for a messy, cathartic rush. The noise helps to drown out the rest of the world’s chatter, if only for a little while. —James
STREAM IT: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp
45 Arca – Arca (XL)
We have Björk to thank. Arca worked on her 2015 opus, Vulnicura, and she’s the one who suggested that he sing on his own songs, something he hadn’t done since his bright, bouncy synthpop days as a teenager. Alejandro Ghersi’s voice is a wounded, operatic thing, and it lends some humanity and some structure to the radical fluidity of his harsh alien soundscapes. What we’re left with is some of the most punishing music he’s ever made and some of the most beautiful; a cracked, bleeding paean to queer self-discovery. —Peter
STREAM IT: Spotify | Apple Music
44 Fleet Foxes – Crack-Up (Nonesuch)
Fleet Foxes’ last LP, 2011’s Helplessness Blues, captured the sound of uncertain entry into uncharted adulthood in rich, redolent detail. Crack-Up is another masterfully crafted and lovingly labored beast by the chamber-folk ensemble, and it continues Robin Pecknold’s existential journey to discern meaning from experience. His conclusions are often heavy, exemplified by his assessment that working on the album found him failing to produce an “objective reason to live.” Pecknold arrives at the end of Crack-Up‘s inner-conflict narrative by forging his own reason to go forward. As usual, his expression of resolve yields some of the grandest, most yearning music you’ll hear in any year. —Pranav Trewn
43 G Perico – All Blue (Self-released)
The funky gangland rider music YG does so well apparently sounds just as good from the other side of the Crip-Blood divide. G Perico spells out his allegiances from the album title on down, and All Blue in turn demonstrates just how compelling he can be on the microphone when accompanied by the bounciest synths and 808s California has to offer. Every lyric is delivered with an exclamation point — even the ones that suggest subtlety, like “I’m complicated, ain’t no telling what I might be on” — and when all is said and done, you feel as revved-up as Perico sounds. —Chris DeVille
STREAM IT: Spotify | Apple Music
42 The Mountain Goats – Goths (Merge)
This is easily one of the top-five easy listening concept albums about darkness-obsessed ‘80s subcultures that you will hear this year. John Darnielle writes about all the intricacies of Californian goth life — the sunshine beating down on black clothes, the rumors about a skinhead fight at a show in Pomona, the fond memories of the aging musicians who had to get real jobs — with an easy, eloquent empathy. And on his band’s first-ever guitar-free album, he’s found a lush, full-bodied cinematic sweep, an amazing come-up for a project that was once just one guy, an acoustic guitar, and a boom box. —Tom
STREAM IT: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp