I’m the narrator, and this is just the prologue, Brendon Urie sang in 2005. Here’s how the story goes: Four guys in Las Vegas got together and started playing music. First a Blink-182 cover band, they rehearsed in the drummer’s grandmother’s living room before making their own music. One member spammed the internet with their demos, and eventually Pete Wentz caved in and listened, prepared to tell these pests that the songs sucked. Instead, the Fall Out Boy bassist — in Los Angeles recording From Under The Cork Tree at the time — was in awe and drove down to Sin City to sign the group to his label. Thus began Panic! At The Disco, whose 19-year career had one of the bleakest arcs in recent history.

Stereogum reader, I am going to assume you are constantly hoping, wishing, praying for hypotheticals that allow you to take comment section chatter into the real world. And so let’s start: What’s your platonic ideal of an indie rock song? Not necessarily the best indie rock song or even your favorite. But let’s suppose you’re shooting the shit at work, the conversation turns to “what kind of music do you like,” and someone says “indie rock.” To be specific, a conceptualization of indie rock that clashes with your own. (Pulling from my own real life experience, they probably mean Djo or Still Woozy or Glass Animals.) When you say you’re into indie rock, what’s a song that explains what you mean by that?

The story goes that The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die’s band name was inspired by the repeated final lyrics to Neva Dinova’s 2005 song “I’ve Got A Feeling”: “The world’s a shitty place and I can’t wait to die.” Though the ever-changing Connecticut collective has regularly been lumped into the nebulous “emo revival” movement, their entire ethos — aside from, say, their shared admiration for Brand New or those shows they played with Algernon Cadwallader that one time — often seemed almost contradictory to what made emo “emo” in the first place. TWIABP, whether it came from a genuine place or they were just trying to convince themselves, evoked some sense of hope. Here’s the comically long-ass band name to prove it.

It’s almost uncannily fitting that Trish Keenan only exists now in memory, because Keenan was never too firmly tethered to the present. The British singer-songwriter was at a ’60s-themed psychedelic club, after all, when she met musician James Cargill in the mid-’90s, and for the next 20 years she’d excavate cultural and spiritual references of yore into the indietronica band they formed together. Broadcast were a singular group from the start, and it took them a while to find their niche: Their big break came shortly after their formation when their non-album song “The Book Lovers” was featured in Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery, a film that often dragged ’60s aesthetics and British humor into sheer mockery. Broadcast’s girl-group harmonies and tinny synths suited Mike Myers’ free-love, technicolored escapades, but Keenan never set out for mere nostalgia bait. She wanted her art to feel it existed outside of typical time and space. In that endeavor, she succeeded, right up until she died of pneumonia in 2011 at only 42 years old.

Carl Newman was on an unstoppable tear — an all-time NBA Jam “HE’S ON FIRE” power-pop onslaught. His band the New Pornographers had exploded out of Vancouver with their high-powered, ultra-catchy 2000 debut album Mass Romantic, becoming an underground sensation and somewhat of a supergroup in reverse (as the New Pornos further bolstered Neko Case’s already ascendant alt-country career, shined a much brighter spotlight on oblique poet-crank Dan Bejar’s eternally evolving Destroyer project, and confirmed Newman as a generational talent in his own right). The band’s second album, 2003’s Electric Version, kept that momentum going with another set of turbo-charged pop-rock tracks that made impressive use of the group’s multi-vocalist arsenal. And with The Slow Wonder, his 2004 solo debut album as A.C. Newman, he’d delivered some of the finest songs of his career, tunes that proved he could thrive both inside and outside the New Pornographers’ blown-out template.

Patrick Stickles was onstage, every fiber of his being soaked through with sweat, wearing nothing but black underpants, while his band played “Freebird.” To the uninitiated, the premise would be absurd: a punk band wrapping up a five-night residency at the (now-dearly-departed) Brooklyn DIY institution Shea Stadium with a slew of classic rock covers. To anyone familiar with Titus Andronicus, there was no better culmination. Shea was a tiny room hidden on a dark industrial street in the no man’s land between Williamsburg and Bushwick, and the residency had been a feverish, oppressively hot week leading up to Patrick Stickles’ 30th birthday, the day Titus Andronicus released their fourth album, The Most Lamentable Tragedy. He turns 40 today, and the album turns 10.

Hayley Williams was merely 14 years old when she inked her first major label record deal. She’d recently relocated from her native Mississippi with her mother to Franklin, Tennessee, an aftereffect of her parents’ divorce. Now just a half-hour drive away from Nashville, the aspiring singer had access to the city’s premiere songwriters and vocal coaches. She began recording her first demos, which, through that web of songwriters, eventually caught the ear of Atlantic Records. The label’s plan was to make her the next big pop princess. There was just one problem: Some of Williams’ friends at her new school had already asked her to join their rock band. “I don’t see myself being the next Madonna,” she told her manager at the time. What she really wanted to be was more like the next Jim Adkins or Jeremy Enigk — just with her disarming, four-octave-spanning soprano.

Last time he checked, he was the man on these streets. He used to hit the kitchen lights — cockroaches everywhere. He hits the kitchen lights now — marble floors everywhere. Once upon a time, he used to grind all night with that residue that was iPod white. He’s tryna get Boston George and Diego money and stack it all up like it’s Lego money. He’s emotional; he hugs the block. You ain’t never seen them pies; he’s talking so much white it’ll hurt your eyes. He really lived it, man, counting so much paper it’ll hurt your hands.

At first, Kevin Parker seemed to have emerged from another era. On Tame Impala’s earliest recordings, Parker expertly evoked the sound of soaring ‘60s psychedelic rock. He leaned into a vintage aesthetic and somehow made it feel fresh — fresher, even, than some of the more forward-thinking music that was being served up by their psychedelic peers at the time. On Tame’s 2010 debut InnerSpeaker, the Perth-area studio rat and his bandmates — this was before he started calling Tame Impala his solo project — were a traditionalist’s dream, channeling Hendrix, Blue Cheer, and the Beatles in kaleidoscopic pop songs that never forgot to rock.

“Best thing I ever did was fall out of love,” Future says near the end of DS2. It’s a quintessential Future line, plainspoken but subliminal, steely but wounded, a flex that’s obviously spin — especially in the context of the bitter and addled music that precedes it. Falling out of love isn’t a choice; like an actual fall, it happens to you, the decision-making taking place after the plummet is underway. But in the topsy-turvy world of DS2, which turns 10 today, everything gets screwy: cause and effect, joy and pain.

“There were days when I had no sense of time or reality, and I wasn’t functioning on a practical level, a day-to-day, matter-of-fact level. I was functioning on a supernatural level, in my mind, in my imagination. That was sustained for days and weeks, and sometimes months. It was really exciting. To be in that space that is so personal yet so epic, as well, and so supernatural, I don’t think it’s really healthy for people for long periods of time. It’s very self-consumed. And also self-consuming. But it’s very enjoyable.”

“Hey!” Vince Staples shouts with the cheer of a late-night host walking out to the audience. The greeting is the first word on his debut album, and sets up the black humor that follows: “I’m just a nigga, until I fill my pockets/ And then I’m Mr. Nigga, they follow me while shopping.” Just two lines in, Staples is already joking, serious, and referencing a deep cut from Black On Both Sides.

Few moments in 2000s indie were more explicitly “You had to be there” than Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s debut album. I mean this in a very literal sense: While prepping for this essay, I asked my wife — a fellow ex-Pitchfork contributor who started meaningfully paying attention to indie’s myriad trends and shifts just two years after the Philadelphia band’s self-titled 2005 bow — if they ever meant anything significant to her as a college-aged listener at the time. “Not really,” she shrugged with casual indifference.

There’s a recent Chris Fleming standup bit that kicks off with him chastising a friend for daring to have a crush at a time like this.

Golden, Texas is kind of a misnomer. Eighty minutes outside of Dallas, its claim to fame is an entire festival dedicated to tubers, with parades and music and something called mutton bustin’. But the small town is known for neither the gilded flesh of its yukons nor its butterballs; instead, its pride and joy is the humble, orange-gutted Ipomoea batatas — the sweet potato.

The prop guys have finished adding giant, chunky lifts to the black dress shoes that I bought for my grandfather’s funeral. A crowd gathers around me as I try them on, and people literally gasp when I stand up. With these lifts on my shoes, I am something like eight feet tall. A crowd of upturned faces hovers around my waist level. I feel like Dorothy in Munchkinland, except I am terrified. I’m supposed to walk in these things? The assistant director tells me to get used to them, to walk around, so that’s what I do. I clomp all over that set, and I feel like an absolute freak, which is the entire idea. I’m here because I’m a freak. A freak is what the White Stripes need.

You can only see Jamie Smith’s face for about one second in the “Crystalised” video. The xx’s debut single arrived in 2009 with a clip as simple and understated as the song: A crew of South London 20-year-olds wielding their instruments in a plain room, illuminated by the soft, distorted glow of a projector. Singer/songwriters Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim look into the light as they exchange sultry verses in a vaguely-stoned lilt. To their far right is Smith — the producer and DJ now better known as Jamie xx — locked the fuck in on his drum machine, an overgrown mop of dark brown curls conveniently obscuring his eyes. He’s not the star of “Crystalised”; he’s its heartbeat.

Country music loves horses. Not as an animal, but as metaphor. How many country stars actually rode a horse outside of a photoshoot? Porter Wagoner certainly couldn’t in his Nudie Suits. But the idea of a horse — an animal that symbolized the American west, Native American culture, and, above all, freedom — could be slapped onto any song.

“We just wanted things to really explode.” Mission accomplished, Corin Tucker.

It must have been strange to constantly hear yourself introducing yourself. “On The Regular,” the breakout single from Shamir’s debut album Ratchet — released 10 years ago today — opened with the 20-year-old Vegas countertenor rattling off a list of superlatives about himself over DFA cowbells and Lone-flavored chords, and it instantly bludgeoned the world over the head with the knowledge that this is the new thing you like! It’s not a bad song by any means, but it’s the kind of thing that can get out of control a little easily. You imagine Perfect Blue-style nightmares where the singer’s own reduplicating face taunts him in the dead of night: “Hi hi, howdy howdy, hi hi!” If the ubiquitous Spotify ad wore on you, imagine how the person who soundtracked it must have felt, continuing to tell everyone day to day that this was “me on the regular” as if stuck in the disco version of Groundhog Day.

There he was: Britt Daniel, carrying his camera around Times Square. It was the fall of 2003, maybe 2004. I was a scrubby Midwestern undergrad visiting New York City for the CMJ Music Marathon, a sort of “SXSW in NYC” situation where buzz bands played umpteen times in venues around town. Spoon were not on the lineup, and setlist.fm does not indicate they had a show in the area at those times. He seemed a bit surprised when I recognized him and said hi. I was surprised to spot him there, too. It was not unthinkable to run into a rock star in Times Square during the TRL era, but Spoon were the province of MTV2, having scored a low-key hit with “The Way We Get By.” He was too cool to be there, but he was right in front me, stalking the city’s gaudiest tourist trap, snapping photos.

Demon Days wasn’t supposed to happen. When Gorillaz’ self-titled dropped in 2001, it was easy to imagine as a one-off: Famed Britpop frontman Damon Albarn bids farewell to the decade of his stardom by disappearing into a side project represented by cartoon characters dreamt up by Tank Girl artist Jamie Hewlett. Even after the success of Gorillaz, that sounded like the sort of story destined to be an oddity, a fun footnote in a musician’s career. But when Demon Days arrived — 20 years ago this Sunday in Japan, a couple weeks later in the UK and US — it didn’t just establish Gorillaz as an ongoing prospect. It laid groundwork for the argument that Albarn’s seeming lark could become as important, or even more so, than the generation-defining work he’d already made with Blur.

Would I be as devoted to left-of-center sounds as I am today without Brainfeeder? While it’s impossible to say for sure, I doubt it. Flying Lotus’ skunky, grotesque label spent the 2010s emphasizing the gray area between jazz, hip-hop, and electronic experimentation. It uplifted a sphere of woozy California weirdos delivering what, at the time, was truly mind-boggling material. Artists including Teebs, Daedelus, and Ras G beamed utopian melodies through layers of warbled chords and trippy effects, evoking thick smoke wafting through a Venice Beach apartment. Obsessing over Brainfeeder releases as a teenager took me somewhere deeply cosmic and a little seedy — a universe far more alluring than that of my bedroom in Northern Virginia.

In 2020, Nine Inch Nails were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame, an inclusion that would have seemed unthinkable at one point but by then seemed well overdue. It was a sign of the Rock Hall finally, begrudgingly, moving past its All Boomers Everything roots. In the introductory video, Annie Clark talks about NIN mastermind Trent Reznor’s impact on music. With a voice tinged with both admiration and astonishment, she makes a very good point: “‘Head Like a Hole’ has two choruses!” And you know, when she’s right, she’s right.

Turnover started off as a pop-punk band. Before their breakthrough sophomore album Peripheral Vision, and even before its edgy predecessor Magnolia, there was the 2011 self-titled EP, which contained five angsty anthems full of shouts and headbang-worthy bridges that landed them on bills alongside post-hardcore fixtures like Title Fight and Balance And Composure. “That was what made our band click, that scene,” bassist Danny Dempsey told Billboard around the release of Peripheral Vision. “But now we’re all older.”

Tad Kubler tosses his guitar over his shoulder. He’s in the middle of a solo. The instrument spins around his body like a helicopter blade before coming right back to his hands. The solo keeps going; he doesn’t miss a beat. It’s a beautiful summer day in 2005, and Kubler and his band the Hold Steady are up onstage in front of what might be the biggest crowd that they’ve ever had. This is the Intonation Music Festival, the Chicago one-off that, one year later, will return as the Pitchfork Music Festival. It’s a magical weekend because it represents something new — the internet intruding on real life, a bunch of blog-friendly indie bands who are used to playing tiny dive bars getting the chance to play for actual crowds. Maybe this is nothing new for some of them. Maybe they’ve been playing festivals like this in Europe for a while. But for those of us in the crowd, it feels like something entirely new is happening. When the Hold Steady hold down that mid-afternoon slot, these veteran weekend warriors don’t necessarily seem like they’re playing around with the signifiers of old-school arena rock stardom. They start to look something like rock stars.

“AM I MORE THAN YOU BARGAINED FOR YET?” is the perfect introduction to Fall Out Boy, and for millions of listeners, that’s what it became.

In the music blogosphere, the sales pitch for Robyn’s self-titled album went something like this: Hey, remember Robyn? That Swedish teenager who had that song called “Show Me Love”? No, not that song called “Show Me Love.” That was Robin S. She’s not a Swedish teenager. Yes, I agree, that song ruled. But remember how there was another song called “Show Me Love,” and it was also a big radio hit, and it came out around the same time, and the two singers had pretty much the same name? Yeah, in retrospect, that was weird. Anyway, the other Robyn has her own label now, and she makes really winky and fun electro-pop, and sometimes her songs are almost upsettingly emotional.

One of the pro wrestlers is starstruck. I was not expecting this. It’s 2015, and I’m in the Mid-Atlantic Sportatorium, a small room in a North Carolina strip mall that’s entirely dedicated to independent wrestling shows. This particular one is being held by Chikara, a cartoonish American lucha libre company that will later shut down amidst abuse allegations against its owner. Some of the wrestlers on this card tonight will later make it to WWE or AEW. Most will not. One of the ones who will not is Argus, a rookie masked wrestler with a lizard-man character. On this night, Argus will lose to Hallowicked, a more experienced masked wrestler with a pumpkin-man character. But Argus wins something because he gets to meet John Darnielle. In the audience, Argus shyly approaches Darnielle, introduces himself, and then zips back to the locker room to grab his mask so that he can take a picture with the man. Even on this level, the lucha mask is sacrosanct. If Argus is going to get a photo with Darnielle, he will need the mask.

One of the most bizarre videos that Young Thug ever posted to Instagram — and that is saying a lot — is one where he promotes the imminent release of Barter 6 by threatening his idol, Lil Wayne. The video begins with Thug in the studio, pouring up a styrofoam cup with what is implied to be lean, before taking an obviously fake sip. He announces to the camera that Barter 6 (then still titled Carter 6, before Wayne allegedly threatened to sue) will be out that Friday and that the album release show will take place in Wayne’s home neighborhood of Hollygrove. “Meet me there, better yet, beat me there, yadigg,” he mumbles before someone off screen shouts, “With them dicks too!” and the camera cuts to a group of unnamed men brandishing automatic weapons. The clip is vaguely menacing but also a little surreal — an obvious bit of theater clearly meant to provoke a response. We didn’t yet know that we were watching a master at work.

You can hear them becoming the National in real time. That picture of Matt Berninger on the cover is a little blurry, which feels right because the band as we now know them wouldn’t properly come into focus until the next album. But on Alligator, the suave and mangy masterpiece they released 20 years ago this Saturday, it’s happening before your ears: These five guys from Ohio are figuring out an approach to indie rock that will launch them to stardom and, for better or worse, change the genre forever.

I hope you can’t relate to Carrie & Lowell. I hope, like me, you have no idea what it feels like to be abandoned by your mother, to spend decades estranged from her, to have your grief about her death tainted by your shame about her life. Lord willing, when you listen to the album Sufjan Stevens released 10 years ago today, you do not hear your own story reflected back in it. The overwhelming despair and confusion captured here are feelings that should not be thrust upon you by someone else’s choices, least of all someone who is supposed to nurture and protect you. And yet, in this broken world, the trials chronicled by Stevens here resonate with far too many.

From their very beginnings, Death Grips always sounded like a group far-flung from some alternate future, even when their touchpoints were rooted in a firm past. Though most of their early work was built off samples of rock and pop icons like Pink Floyd, Bad Brains, Nancy Sinatra, and Link Wray, the way they warped and inverted the samples into noisy infernos felt like an alien production language of their own. Their atypical configuration — one MC by the name of Stefan Burnett (or Ride), one producer (Andy Morin), and a live drummer (Zach Hill of Hella) — was compounded by their arresting sound, which could and did vary intensely with every passing release. At their earliest, you could be hearing the industrial garbles of what sounded like Burnett screaming over a fax machine beat on “Face Melter (How To Do Impossible Things),” and then the very next year, you’d be walking face-first into billowing pillars of bass tones and skittering V-drum hi-hats on “Come Up And Get Me.”

For the first 10 years of his career, the idea of the “real” Beck was up for grabs. You had the lo-fi folkie, the slacker white-boy rapper, the is-he-for-real Prince impersonator, the epically bummed-out orchestral singer-songwriter. Depending on who you talked to, some of these personas were derided, and some were hallowed. Depending on who you talked to, he was a great Gen X shapeshifter or a ’90s ironist confounding fans with insincere genre exercises. But if there was any consensus or accepted wisdom about Beck’s career, it was his 1996 free-for-all collage Odelay that was the truest representation of him — wry, vivid, spiritually cohesive while stylistically agnostic.

Beanie Sigel approached every bar like a 400-pound deadlift, but he never let you forget how easy it came to him. “I gotta laugh ‘cause y’all work hard at this shit/ Think about it yo, I just started this shit/ Imagine if I put my heart in this shit,” he boomed on 1999’s “Pop 4 Roc,” the latest in a series of Jay-Z album tracks where he murdered his boss on his own shit. I’ve long suspected that “compared to Beans, you wack” hit harder than the Eminem line from “Ether,” but this being Jay-Z, he would not lose. Theirs was a symbiotic relationship, as the Broad Street Bully allowed Roc-a-Fella to keep one foot in the gutter during the increasingly flossy In My Lifetime trilogy and gave Jay-Z a more compelling foil than, say, Memphis Bleek or Amil — an in-house Scarface that could hold his own against the genuine article, a rapper of profound gravity that commanded love, fear, and, above all, respect.

Don’t try to reconcile it. You can’t, and it ultimately doesn’t matter. M.I.A. was the most exciting young artist in the world two decades ago, and now she hangs out with Alex Jones and hawks clothes that are supposed to block 5G signals. It happens. There’s no natural law that says charismatic young radicals have to age into middle-aged reactionary cranks, and plenty avoid that fate, but it’s still a well-trod path. M.I.A. wasn’t the first great artist to get fucked-up and spun-around, and she won’t be the last. Don’t let that spoil your appreciation for Arular, the joyously provocative energy-blast of an album that will celebrate its 20th anniversary on Saturday. M.I.A. the person might be a lost cause, but Arular is forever.

When I saw the Decemberists play NYC venue Webster Hall in the fall of 2005 — a little over six months after the band released their third album Picaresque — there was a sense that Colin Meloy and his highly whimsical crew of Portland-hailing folk-rock myth-makers were on the type of career trajectory that bands of their ilk can only dream of. You could quite literally feel it in the room, as Meloy dropped some mid-set banter about how major-label folks were hanging out in the upper balcony that constitutes Webster’s VIP area; his tone while doing so was a little sneering and more than a little self-effacing, but also grounded in an appreciative reality of the situation.

“The paramedic says I’m clever ‘cos I play guitar,” sings Courtney Barnett on “Avant Gardener. “I say she’s clever ‘cos she stops people dying.” That was the Australian singer-songwriter’s breakout song, a scary-mundane yarn about an asthma attack she suffered while gardening. It’s the kind of track that draws all attention to itself in a room, making anyone present ask: Who is this? I first heard it while attempting to play cards with a group of friends, and it was impossible to focus on anything else while it was on. Released in 2013 in a punchline-heavy era for indie rock, the song was zinger after zinger, and yet its most crucial line — on top of reinforcing Barnett’s slacker bona fides by expressing a twentysomething musician’s self-consciousness about not having a “real” job — gave away her unease about the adjective most often used to describe her.