20. Kate Bush – 50 Words for Snow (2011)

Bush’s only release of original material in the decade fittingly felt like it was thought about and labored over forever. Looking to capture the theme of winter, she set her lengthy, piano-based songs to the motif of falling snow, creating stories with narrators that sounded like they had been stuck indoors by themselves for years. On “Wild Man,” she empathized with the misunderstood and hunted Yeti, while song of the decade candidate “Misty” told the story of a doomed tryst with a snowman over 13 spellbinding minutes. In a way that only she could, Bush captured feelings of longing, loneliness, and introversion in possibly her most unusual work yet.

19. Melody’s Echo Chamber – Bon Voyage (2018)

After suffering a serious accident that delayed her follow-up to 2012’s self-titled debut, Melody Prochet released years worth of kooky ideas in 30 rollercoaster minutes on the restlessly strange Bon Voyage. Blending French pop, shoegaze, psychedelia, jazz, and just plain nonsense, this album resembled an abstract musical splatter painting, and there was joy in hearing its manic unhinged creativity and its desire to surprise. Few albums have done more to capture pure imagination in all of its eccentric glory.

18. Throwing Muses –  Purgatory/Paradise (2013)

In a decade partially defined by awful band reunions, Throwing Muses were one of the few bands to get it right. Instead of performing the old hits, Kristin Hersh daringly pushed the band into new — yet still familiar — territory, smashing up their trademark cryptic sound into fragmented songs that led to a unique and disorienting listening experience. Two-part tracks like “Morning Birds” showed up early, then resurfaced later on the album as either a continuation or a reimagining of the first half, providing a weird sense of deja vu. The 32 bruised, beautiful songs on this sprawling album spanned all of the band’s different sounds through the years and served as a reminder of how vital and distinct Hersh’s voice is as both a singer and writer.

17. EMA – Past Life Martyred Saints (2011)

At one point, Erika M. Anderson’s website was called “came outta nowhere,” which described her debut solo album well. Released on an obscure record label, Past Life Martyred Saints practically demanded attention because of its raw, provocative songwriting and abrasive arrangements, which stood out at the time because indie had become very buttoned-up and prim. Her most jolting track, “California,” was a Laurie Anderson/Patti Smith/Nirvana hybrid full of scathing one-liners, while songs like “Marked” and “Butterfly Knife” confronted self-harm in vivid emotional detail. EMA was served well by her complete fearlessness and willingness to go deeper into painful material than almost anyone else.

16. Cold Beat – Chaos By Invitation (2017)

Hannah Lew’s group might have been too subtle for their own good, as their amorphous goth-synth-punk-pop style never quite seemed to catch on with anyone who wrote about music other than me. Chaos By Invitation went in an 80s-inspired synth direction that was hinted at on their previous album, Into the Air, and had a variety of evocative songs that didn’t necessarily present obvious interpretations or moods, instead allowing the listener to react to everything in their own way. Some songs like “Thin Ice” and “Don’t Touch” had a twitchy anxiety and urgency to them, while the shimmering opener “In Motion” was vast and emotive. Every song was an intricate balance of styles with an underlying strangeness that made me keep listening.

15. Priests – The Seduction of Kansas (2019)

 The election of a grifter president created a lot of grifters on the opposite end of the political spectrum who peddled empty outrage and anger targeted at frightened liberals. In that context, The Seduction of Kansas felt like one of the only true punk albums I heard, because it avoided the easy answers and conclusions everyone craved and instead did the more difficult, worthwhile work of looking inward and examining the state of the country as a whole. While still having some aggression to it, this album focused on being thoughtful, and it told cryptic, ambiguous stories through characters that sketched out life in America in accurate detail. The depth of the lyrics was matched with a variety of sounds and textures that were sophisticated while still maintaining the band’s trademark fire. The Seduction of Kansas was everything rock music should be but so rarely is: timely, thought-provoking, and full of creative energy.

14. No Joy – Wait to Pleasure (2013)

Wait to Pleasure wasn’t the sort of album that generates a ton of discussion or deep theorizing about the meaning of the songs, but it was one of the decade’s most compelling and fresh explorations of the shoegaze sound. No Joy excelled by pushing the beauty and noise contrasts in their music to the furthest length possible with extremely loud guitar maelstroms from Laura Lloyd and Jasamine White-Gluz’s vocals, which were pleasant and light to the point of being uncanny. The clash of those two instruments, along with the band’s addictive pop hooks, led to songs that sort of felt like the sun was exploding.

13. Janelle Monae – The Archandroid (2010)

I’ve been let down by Monae in the years since this album, but The Archandroid will always be a reminder of the staggering talent she has. Her story of an android named Cindy Mayweather linked this suite of songs that jumped fearlessly and joyfully across genres and styles, showcasing a dizzying amount of raw ambition and creativity. While most people were praising the conventional pop songs like “Tightrope” on this album, I was geeking out over its weird back half, which had psychedelic rock (“Mushrooms & Roses”), soul with an alien rap interlude (“Neon Valley Street”), Simon and Garfunkel style folk (“57821”) and cosmic electropop (“Wondaland”). Monae’s refusal to put limits on herself was inspiring, but what really made this album great was its spirit of adventure and appeal to fantasy and imagination, traits that are all largely absent in other radio-aspiring pop.

12. SubRosa – For This We Fought the Battle of Ages (2016)

SubRosa did a lot of things I love in music at the most extreme level: their songs were epic in length with massive dynamic shifts, dramatic storytelling, and a collision of beauty and ugliness that was second to none. While they were a metal band and mostly stuck to their own world, I felt like they were almost unintentionally a shoegaze band. For This We Fought the Battle of Ages was their album with the most to say, about surveillance, power dynamics, and how suffering can define people. But it’s that sound, with the thunderous guitars, electric violins, and feminine vocals that made them my choice for the most distinct rock band of the decade.

11. Beach House – Thank Your Lucky Stars (2015)

Beach House were one of the most consistent bands of the decade, almost to their detriment in my mind — it got to a point where it felt like I knew what every song would sound like and I stopped getting excited for their releases. But when I listened to Thank Your Lucky Stars, expecting to be underwhelmed, I was blown away. Released shortly after their other 2015 album, Depression Cherry (which I didn’t even like much, for the aforementioned reasons), this album evolved their sound into something that felt more cloudy and ambiguous instead of sunshine dream pop. Likely influenced by the cover art, listening to it made me feel like I had uncovered something amazing in a dusty old attic, like each song was a window into a different time and maybe a different universe. All of this band’s music is gorgeous, but this is their one album that really resonates with me — the fact that I still have a hard time explaining why is part of its intangible greatness.

30. Free Cake For Every Creature – The Bluest Star (2018)

Katie Bennett’s home recording project started as a low-stakes creative outlet with her friends and ended with The Bluest Star, an album that expanded on the vision of her whispery songs while maintaining the humble charm that made them so endearing to begin with. Backed by mostly jangly guitar, Bennett’s no-frills songs were full of wonderful true-to-life details and created their own universe full of memorable characters and friendships. The Bluest Star might have been the decade’s strongest argument that being genuine and thoughtful is worth more than any money you could spend on production.

29. A Sunny Day in Glasgow – Sea When Absent (2014)

A Sunny Day in Glasgow’s innovation in shoegaze was to do a little too much on every single song, resulting in an overcooked mess of noisy guitar parts and overlapping harmonies that nonetheless cohered into something great. Every song on Sea When Absent sounds like it was made out of parts from 15 other songs and then recorded by a group of 40 people who were all in separate rooms. The “too many cooks” style ended up making it unique: the fun with this album was hearing all these disparate parts come together and experiencing the creative sugar rush from everyone jamming as many ideas as possible into each song.

28. Deerhunter – Halcyon Digest (2010)

If you can’t tell by now, I wasn’t that interested in the typical acclaimed indie rock bands this decade, since I felt like they all sounded about the same and weren’t particularly interesting. Deerhunter were the one band that always brought something new to the table, though, in part because of Bradford Cox’s odd charisma and his willingness to put artsy emotion into his songs. He and guitarist Lockett Pundt wrote some of their most catchy and thoughtful material on this album, which had a more low-key psychedelic sound that helped spotlight some of the unique stories like “Helicopter.”

27. Lotus Plaza –  Spooky Action at a Distance (2012)

As The Shy One in the Deerhunter boy band, Lockett Pundt was rarely the center of attention, instead ceding the spotlight to outspoken frontman Bradford Cox. Less prolific and flashy, Pundt still provided many Deerhunter highlights, including the epic “Desire Lines,” and on Spooky Action at a Distance he fully branched out on his own with a series of songs in a similar hypnotizing and repetitious mold. There wasn’t a ton to the lyrics or a lot of variety, but Lockett’s low-key guitar heroics and pleasant, nostalgic vocals made this some of the best pure ear candy of the decade.

26. Bat For Lashes – The Bride (2016)

Natasha Khan’s fourth album was almost comically unmarketable, with a misery-inducing premise (a bride-to-be’s fiancé dies on the way to the wedding so she goes on a honeymoon by herself) and slow, piano and synth-driven songs that focused on feminine emotion and drama. It wasn’t easy to get people amped up to listen to songs with titles like “Never Forgive the Angels.” That became part of why I liked the album so much: there was a daringness in Khan’s decision to commit so fully to the story while telling it at her own pace on her own terms, particularly in the internet context that prioritizes attention over everything else. She rewarded patient and thoughtful listeners with an album that contained true artistry and emotion-packed, cathartic songs.

25. Dum Dum Girls – Only in Dreams (2011)

When Only in Dreams came out, I felt like Dum Dum Girls were just a novelty retro act, but over time I came to appreciate its mastermind Kristin Gundred’s (at the time known as Dee Dee) gift for basic, structured songwriting and her ability to put real emotion into a classic pop framework. Written during and after her mother’s death from cancer, Only in Dreams infused its girl-group-meets-Pretenders sound with moving themes of grief and separation from loved ones. The album was strengthened by its rigid structure: the songs felt like they could have existed in any era because of their universal pop language, and when the band finally broke their own rules on the lengthy, towering “Coming Down,” it made for one of the most powerful songs of the decade.

24. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith – Ears (2016)

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith spent several albums essentially tinkering around on some modular synthesizers she acquired from a neighbor before her breakthrough album, Ears, which finally seemed to focus all of the lessons she’d learned into something resembling pop songs. Utilizing her voice much more and with woodwinds aiding her synth textures, Smith made songs that seemed to form their own natural worlds, full of lush details and quirks. Her wondrous sounds somehow merged the artificial and the organic; songs like “Rare Things Grow” simulated plants growing in a rain forest with water dropping on their leaves while the opener, “First Flight,” evoked looking over a canyon on a windy day. I still don’t understand how she did any of this.

23. Wax Idols – American Tragic (2015)

Hether Fortune was one of the decade’s most underappreciated band leaders, and American Tragic showed her charisma and ability to write dark, meaningful goth rock. Coming off a divorce, she put feelings of love and pain into these songs, turning her real-life experiences into theatrical music drama. Songs like “Lonely You” and “Severely Yours” also showed her sharpening pop instincts; their gorgeous, clear guitar parts and catchy choruses only made Fortune’s lyrics cut deeper.

22. Chelsea Wolfe – Abyss (2015)

Known previously for sullen folk music, Chelsea Wolfe expanded her scale considerably on Abyss, adding scuzzy doom metal guitars that contrasted with her quieter passages. Her songs were so dramatic with the dynamic shifts that they teetered to the edge of being histrionic and over-the-top, but never quite crossed that threshold. Instead, this album’s collision of noise and beauty captured a sense of all-enveloping pitch-black darkness and despair, making it a draining but cathartic listen.

21. Kristin Kontrol – X-Communicate (2016)

After ending Dum Dum Girls, Kristin Gundred took on the persona of Kristin Kontrol and moved into a synth pop style that felt entirely different, but still had the same virtuosic pop songwriting. While continuing to use the structures of verses, choruses, and bridges, X-Communicate had a sense of musical freedom coming off Dum Dum Girls, who were always locked into certain specific aesthetics and moods. Kristin showed a wider range of emotions, showed more of her vocal ability, and showed how joyous it can be to hear an artist reinvent themselves. In my esteemed opinion, no one in this decade was better at twisting well-known pop sounds into something that felt new and personal.

40. Hand Habits –  Wildly Idle (Humble Before the Void) (2017)

Meg Duffy was an accomplished studio musician and guitarist before they finally recorded their first solo work. Befitting an artist used to being in the background, Wildly Idle was low-key and unassuming, with moseying songs that showcased their lyrical guitar playing and vulnerable vocals. Duffy’s songs portrayed introversion and shyness with startling clarity; the way they were constructed to start slowly and then open up on the choruses was reflective of most of my experiences interacting with people as a weirdly timid person.

39. Frankie Rose – Cage Tropical (2017)

Rose was a staple of the noise pop/girl group revival that started just before the turn of the decade, performing as a drummer in Vivian Girls, Dum Dum Girls, and then fronting her own band, The Outs. Under her own name, she started playing synth-driven pop and she peaked (thus far) with Cage Tropical, which used her life and music experience as the basis for a series of masterfully written pop gems. Her smooth, shiny production and songwriting was enough to make this album a great listen, but Rose’s lyrics and themes of self-doubt added layers of wistful emotion that made it stand out from the vast amount of synth releases.

38. Allo Darlin’ – Europe (2012)

Allo Darlin’ were the type of band that got left behind this decade, as original heart-on-sleeve indie pop was tossed to the side so every site could cheerlead for celebrities to try to drive meaningless clicks to their websites. Powered by Elizabeth Morris’ sweet and heartfelt vocals and lyrics, Europe was an irresistible jangly throwback that prioritized warmth, humanity and craft over gimmicks. This album was so sincere and gentle that it almost felt like real punk in a context where everyone else was trying so hard to be cool and edgy.

37. The Green Child – The Green Child (2018)

This collaboration between Mikey Young of Total Control and Raven Mahon, formerly of Grass Widow, was the exact kind of subtle retro-futuristic psychedelia I love. Channeling the usual bands I name in every post (Stereolab, Broadcast, etc.), they still found their own sound on their self-titled debut, which was a mix of swirly synths and Mahon’s floating vocals, which added a haunting ambiguity to the songs. The best tracks, like the stunning “Her Majesty II,” combined sounds from multiple different eras into a single thought-provoking and timeless package.

36. Field Mouse – Meaning (2019)

Rachel Browne faced an existential crisis of sorts prior to the recording of Meaning, wondering if there was any point in making art in a landscape that often seems to punish worthwhile work. Luckily, instead she channeled those fears into a relatable, endearing album with bright guitar pop songwriting and introspective lyrics that offered a rare level of insight into an artist’s frustrations. The cruel irony was Meaning going completely ignored by music outlets, somewhat proving Browne’s fears, even though this album was more timely, relevant, and enjoyable to listen to than almost anything I heard in 2019.

35. Nona – Through the Head (2013)

One of the true hidden gems of the decade, Nona released just this one album, which didn’t make it too far outside of their local Philadelphia scene (I was lucky to hear about it on Twitter). Through the Head had that scrappy local indie band charm, with songs that rocked and were fun to listen to without any pretension. But what really made them special was singer Mimi Gallagher, who had a voice unlike anyone else’s — her high-pitched, energetic singing and lyrics about riding the bus, youthful crushes and anxiety were a portal back to childhood, including some of the parts you’d rather forget.

34. Girlpool – Powerplant (2017)

Girlpool started off making intentionally amateurish music that centered on the unique bond and musical chemistry of Cleo Tucker and Harmony Tividad. On Powerplant, the band added a drummer and daringly made actual rock songs, but instead of watering the band down, the pair’s strengths shined through even more. The vulnerable lockstep harmonies now were met with noisy blasts of guitar on songs with quiet/loud dynamics, which gave the album the feeling of young people entering the frightening real world while still having each other’s backs.

33. Widowspeak – Expect the Best (2017)

By the time they released Expect the Best, Widowspeak had established themselves as a band that made gorgeous sounds but seemed to live in the past too much. This album played off that perception of them, weaponizing the natural nostalgia in their music and asking difficult questions to the listener and themselves, about the dangers of inertia and not moving forward. Singer Molly Hamilton had one of the best pure voices in music, and on Expect the Best she matched it with a powerful emotional core.

32. Afrirampo – We Are Uchu No Ko (2010)

I have to go on memory on this one because We Are Uchu No Ko is impossible to find now and I lost the mp3s two laptops ago. The Japanese noise band’s presumed final album added a slight layer of sophistication to their trademark chaotic bursts of noise and energy, showing all of their many strengths gained through an odd career that included touring with Sonic Youth and living with African pygmy tribes. The songs on the album’s front half, including single “Miracle Lucky Girls,” were loud and frantic bursts of craziness and joy, while its back half showed Oni and Pika’s more meditative side with a long instrumental passage that was psychedelic and entrancing.

31. Weyes Blood – Titanic Rising (2019)

In the mold of a few albums on this list, Titanic Rising was a beautiful album made with disaster looming over it. Weyes Blood was inspired by climate change, but thankfully didn’t fall into the trap of singing about glaciers melting in an obvious, pandering way. She imagined herself as a character living her life as a movie — a relatable conceit to everyone living through these heightened, unreal times — and she soundtracked her film with opulent strings and piano, which along with her rich vocals gave the album a pleasant throwback vibe that added power to the internal struggles in its lyrics.