We’re supposed to be living in the age of infinite, unimpeded access to the entire history of recorded music. The reality, of course, isn’t so simple. If streaming services are the new record stores, they can be just as susceptible to supply-side issues as their brick-and-mortar predecessors. In other words: sometimes, the album you really want to hear isn’t in stock. In the streamiverse, certain artists’ discographies can resemble digital Swiss cheese, particularly if they bounced between number of labels over the course of the career, and especially if some of those labels went belly up. Historically, reissues have taken the form of lavish packages that come loaded with outtakes, rare photos and detailed liner notes, and that often still is the case. But in this day and age, “reissue” has also just become a fancy code word for “old album I can now stream on Spotify.”As such, some of the year’s most welcome new arrivals to the streaming world were technically reissues of once-lost records whose preceding reissues had also gone out of print, such as Simply Saucer’s crucial early ‘70s proto-punk document Cyborgs Revisited or pre-teen disco-punk diva Chandra’s 1980-era Transportation. 2018 also proved that there are still obscure private-pressed singer-songwriters (like Colorado-based pro-rock-climber-turned-troubadour Pat Ament), ‘70s space-rock groups (Canada’s Melodic Energy Commission), ‘80s post-punk bands (New Zealand’s Nocturnal Projections) and unsung ‘90s grunge groups (Australia’s Magic Dirt) out there waiting to rediscovered; still unsung funk auteurs deserving to be rescued from the crates (Tim Jones a.k.a. Preacherman); still no limit to the synth-fueled freakery lurking in the back catalog of late electronic-music pioneer Bruce Haack (check the proto-rap jam “Party Machine”); and still no bottom to the well of wiggy grooves emanating from West Africa in the 1970s (see: the Benin-focused second edition of Analog Africa’s Africa Scream Contest series).Among more high-profile reclamation projects, The Beatles’ 50th-anniversary White Album box set proved to be the rare classic-rock cash grab whose bonus tracks are just as mythical as the original material. (On top of providing fans with official versions of oft-bootlegged curios like “Revolution 1 - Take 18”—which connects the familiar acoustic sing-along with the sound-collage chaos of “Revolution 9”—the alternate Take 10 version of “Good Night” suggests Ringo invented the third Velvet Underground album a few months early.) In some cases, reissues transported us back to a watershed moment in rock history, be it Detroit’s mid-’60s garage-band scene (via a pre-fame Bob Seger’s band the Last Heard) or Neil Young’s infamously rowdy post-Harvest/pre-Tonight’s the Night residency at the Roxy in Los Angeles circa 1973. With others, we revisited notoriously mercurial bands at a key early stage in their evolution, like when The Flaming Lips started to dress up their psych rock with bells and whistles (on the ‘92-era gem “Zero to a Million”) or when Brooklyn bruisers The Men started to infuse their punk-rock roar with more emotional undertones on “Wasted.” And then there were reissues that gave us an intimate audience to private moments of creation—like Prince’s largely improvised Piano & A Microphone1983, Julee Cruise’s early ethereal demos, or the 25th-anniversary excavation of Liz Phair’s lo-fi Girly-Sound Tapes, which was perfectly timed to reify her profound influence on a new generation of confessional indie-rockers.But some of this year’s most notable archival projects were less about satiating completists than commemorating lives cut short far too soon. Women guitarist Chris Reimer—who passed away suddenly in 2012 at age 26—was honored with a collection of private home recordings, Hello People, that showcased his budding talents as an ambient soundscaper. The legacy of Ross Shapiro, the late singer/guitarist for Athens indie-rock hopefuls The Glands, was fortified with the release of the outtakes collection Double Coda. The free-ranging career of Chris Cornell was encapsulated by an box set featuring a handful of previously unreleased oddities—including a cover of U2’s “One” that subs in the lyrics to Metallica’s “One”—that present a more playful portrait of the brooding grunge god. And a survey of Joe Strummer’s solo career, 001, was capped with the 1988-era castaway “U.S. North,” a valorous 10-minute cavalry charge that marks a rare reunion with Mick Jones, suggesting the sort of epic rock music The Clash might’ve headed toward had they survived into the late ‘80s. It’s a reminder that the best reissues and compilations don’t just preserve history, but allow us to imagine an alternate one.

Typing the words "mp3 blog" in 2018 feels a lot like typing the words "eight-track tape" or "Betamax" or "Friendster"——a snickering acknowledgement of a phenomenon that was once so ubiquitous, yet now feels so distant that its like it never existed. Oh sure, the basic premise of the mp3 blog——"download this cool new song by a band youve never heard before!"——endures across countless music sites these days, and someoftheOGs have miraculously avoided blogger burnout over the course of 15-odd years and/or fortified into robust, well-staffed sites. But gone are the days when mp3 blogs were touted as music-industry disruptors, armchair A&R reps, and your new favorite radio station all in one. (And so too are the days when Clap Your Hands Say Yeah represented the future of indie rock, after taking the online short cut from DIY obscurity to most talked-about band in America seemingly overnight.)"Blog rock" was essentially the "SoundCloud rap" of the 2000s——a nebulously defined subgenre more indicative of where the artists first gained exposure rather than the sound of the music they played. But for all the upheaval the internet had wrought on the music industry, and all the potential it unleashed for underground music scenes around the world, the bands that came to epitomize blog rock were essentially streamlined versions of the dominant indie groups of the day, be it the polished Arcade Fire histrionics of The Black Kids or the plastic Spoon-isms of Sound Team. A lot of the bands on this playlist couldnt bear the weight of the instant online buzz and didnt last longer than an album or two, becoming punchlines in the process in some cases. But in hindsight, blog rock represented another significant step in the ongoing refinement of indie rock——while there may be traces of Sung Tongs-era Animal Collective in The Dodos DNA, its also not a huge leap from the frenetic busker stomp of "Visitor" to the stadium-folk of Mumford & Sons.Presumably, you havent listened to a lot of these songs since you bricked your 80GB iPod Classic sometime in 2009. Heres your chance to revisit all your mid-2000s picks to right-click, without having to worry about your hard-drive capacity.

Of the infinite subgenres crammed under the rock ‘n’ roll umbrella, no two feel as diametrically opposed as country-rock and glam. The former is a emblematic of authenticity, traditonalism, humility, and lonesome landscapes; the latter is the product of artifice, stardust-speckled futurism, flamboyance, and seedy inner-city alleyways. But on his two solo releases to date—2016’s Dolls of Highland and the new Full Circle Nightmare—Portland-via-Shreveport tunesmith Kyle Craft effortlessly initiates a holy communion between roots and ritz, casting his audacious, satellite-chasing voice and saucy narratives in a downhome brew of teary-eyed guitars and barrelhouse piano rolls. And he’s just the latest, most visible participant in a long conversation between these polar-opposite aesthetics.Before they became ‘70s pomp-rock icons, David Bowie and Elton John cast their vivacious voices in more rustic settings on their early records, while their peers in The Rolling Stones wallowed in southern-bordello sleaze on Exile on Main Street. And ever since, glam-loving rock acts from The Flaming Lips to Jack White to Girls have twisted heartland sounds to suit their own whimsical worldviews or, in the case of The Replacements, expressed solidarity with gender-bending outsiders. There is, of course, also a deep history of openly queer artists—from renegade troubadour Patrick Haggerty (a.k.a. Lavender Country) to doomed glitter-rock sensation Jobriath to avant-disco polymath Arthur Russell to modern-day indie acts like The Hidden Cameras and Ezra Furman—who’ve infiltrated the notoriously conservative arena of Americana, balancing sly subversion with sincere appreciation. Follow the lipstick traces into the heartland with this playlist of artists who serve up the glitz with a side of grits.

Unlike most hyphenated sub-genres, soul-punk isn’t really a collision of two different musical forms. It’s not so much a modification of punk as a reassertion of what’s been embedded in the music all along——do-or-die, preacher-man passion, pulpit-shaking intensity, and floorboard-smashing backbeats. After all, when you strip down the sound of proto-punk legends like the MC5 and Stooges, you’ll find an engine powered by Motown spunk and James Brown funk. And that emphasis on rhythm certainly wasn’t lost on future generations of garage-rockers—from the New Bomb Turks to Make-Up to The Bellrays—who liked their rama-lama with a little fa-fa-fa.But soul-punk is more than just revved-up guitar carnage loosened up with hip-shakin’ moves. The conversation works both ways: In The Jam and Dexys Midnight Runners, you had bands that retained the formal qualities of classic ‘60s soul, but updated them with a working-class punk perspective. In the Afghan Whigs, you see the two forms fuse and explode into a cinematic maelstrom. And in the gospelized post-hardcore of the Constantines and the drum-machined manifestos of Algiers, you hear more modern variations that violently shake off soul-punk’s retro, party-hearty associations to forge a new kind of protest music for the here and now.

Despite its reputation as the No. 1 music-industry disruptor of 2019, Lil Nas X’s honky-hop hybrid “Old Town Road” owes a great deal of its success to an age-old formula: the promotion of the chorus from cleanup hitter to leadoff batter. Although its usage has gained considerable traction in the streaming era (when shortened attention spans demand that artists engineer their tracks to elicit love-at-first-click), you can find examples of chorus-verse-chorus songwriting throughout pop history. This playlist provides a brief history of songs in which the first verse is secondary, chronologically charting how the practice has evolved over time. Back in the days of Elvis and The Beatles, it was an instant invitation to get up and dance to the devil’s music. For iconoclastic rockers like Neil Young and The Clash, it was a means of putting their social messaging front and center. At the height of hair metal, bands like Bon Jovi and Twisted Sister put their shout-along refrains up front in anticipation of engaging with their arena-size audiences. And as hip-hop and R&B have become the dominant forms of pop music in the 21st century, it’s becoming increasingly common for artists in the former camp to lure you in with hooks steeped in the latter.

Remind us of why we were supposed to hate electroclash? Because it was cheap and disposable? Because it celebrated amateurism over art? Because it was a crude simulacrum of past musical innovations? Well, they said the same things about punk when it first hit. And, like punk, electroclash is the passing fad that never went away. For a sound that supposedly died out sometime in late 2003 in the clogged-up bathroom at some Vice-sponsored after-hours party in Williamsburg, electroclashs cocktail of primitive synth-pop, ripped-stocking attitude, and sexually charged provocation has become a permanent strain in the DNA of post-millennial indie.In its primordial late-90s state, electroclash represented the playfully scrappy antidote to the increasingly slick and aggressive nature of popular electronica, and a flirtatious, fashion-forward affront to the deliberately drab, self-effacing nature of wool-sweatered indie rock. Following a decade where A&R scouts were desperately seeking the next Seattle in Chapel Hill, Halifax, San Diego, and all points in between, electroclash represented perhaps the first instance of a post-internet, non-localized scene, with adherents springing up everywhere from New York (Fischerspooner) and Toronto (Peaches) to Munich (Chicks on Speed) and Liverpool (Ladytron). And by foregrounding female and queer voices, electroclash initiated a crucial early step in chipping away at the boys clubs that have traditionally dominated both indie rock and electronic music, a process that continues to this day.Like any hyped-up movement, electroclash was rife with flash-in-the-pan phenoms that time and Spotify have forgotten. (Pour out your complimentary energy drink of choice for W.I.T. and Ping Pong Bitches.) But you can also draw a direct line from electroclash to some of the most important artists of the 21st-century. This playlist compiles electroclashs definitive names alongside the established bands that stripped down their sound in response (Elastica, Broadcast), the seasoned DJs who embraced the neon vibe (Felix da Housecat, Ellen Allien), and the game-changing artists (M.I.A., The Knife) who elevated electroclash into a permanent feature of the modern musical lexicon.

To say Grant Hart lived a hard life is a gross understatement. With 80s noise-pop pioneers Husker Dü, he played the misfit McCartney to Bob Moulds lacerating Lennon, providing the honey chaser to his partners hoarse-throat howls. But just when the band seemed on the verge of following R.E.M. out of the college-radio fringes and into the mainstream, Hart was waylaid by a heroin addiction, not to mention an HIV diagnosis (which ultimately proved to be false). Following the bands extremely acrimonious break-up, Hart gradually faded into obscurity, releasing a small handful of under-the-radar records while Mould enjoyed a steady, successful career as an alt-rock elder statesman. Recent years had been especially trying: Hart lost both parents in quick succession, and he was injured in a fire that destroyed his longtime family home in South St. Paul. And then 2017 brought the diagnosis of the kidney cancer that ultimately claimed him on September 14 at the age of 56.But throughout Harts many trials and tribulations, he never lost the gifts for swooning melody and psychedelized experimentation that made Hüsker Dü the most adventurous band in 80s indie rock. Just when you had counted him out—or even completely forgotten about him—hed blindside you with the dizzying fuzz-pop of 1999s Good News for the Modern Man, the frayed-nerve garage-rock of 2009s Hot Wax (recorded with members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor), or the cinematic grandeur of 2013s Milton-inspired concept album, The Argument, a record that deserves to go down as his career-capping masterpiece.With this playlist, we pay tribute to the man who forged the Dave Grohl prototype of the shit-hot drummer who also a tender tunesmith, beginning with Harts greatest Hüsker Dü hits (including the peak-era duet with Mould on "Flip Your Wig"), and then on through his short-lived early 90s combo Nova Mob*, and his increasingly sporadic, exceedingly underrated solo work.* Note: Nova Mobs 1994 self-titled second album isnt available on Spotify.

Like R&B, indie rock is a genre whose current iteration bears zero aesthetic relation to its original incarnation. In fact, indie rock holds the rare distinction of being perhaps the only genre that has gradually mutated into the complete ideological inverse of everything it once stood for, while still retaining its name. As an alternately tuneful and experimental offshoot of hardcore, indie rock began as a fuzz-blasted assault on both the sleek veneer and materialist values of glossy 80s mainstream pop, but these days, its sometimes difficult to tell the difference between modern indie rock and the smooth sounds emanating from your parents favorite Lite-FM station. So how the hell did we get from the circle-pit fury of Black Flag to the artful adult-contemporary pop of Bon Iver? This playlist attempts to chart a linear, song-by-song course through three and a half decades of knotty aesthetic evolutions.Each track here is a link in a chain, one that built upon the innovations of its immediate predecessor and subtly pushed the ball forward into new directions. The leap from the snow-blind squall of early Dinosaur Jr. to the delicate pop of Elliott Smith isn’t quite so dramatic when you consider the ways Pavement, Sebadoh, and Guided by Voices squeezed melody from noise in the interim. And likewise, the chasm between the orchestral pomp of Arcade Fire and the gleaming synth-pop of M83 seems less daunting when you look at how bands like Animal Collective and Dirty Projectors melted down indie rock’s molecular structure with digital textures and R&B beats.These days, the term "indie rock" has effectively been rendered meaningless on both a musical and philosophical level, given that once-rigid aesthetic divisions have dissolved and every artist on the totem pole is now a slave to streaming stats. So let this playlist serve as a lifeline and anchor to an era when a band could really be your life, and not just an algorithm-generated background soundtrack to one.

Sure, at this point, KISS are less a band than an automated merchandise factory, with Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley essentially counting down the days until old age forces them to hire younger actors to slap on the facepaint and portray them in a never-ending Vegas musical revue. And, even in his own son’s opinion, Simmons is to rock ‘n’ roll what Donald Trump is to U.S. politics—except that Gene’s become even too big of an asshole for Fox News. But there’s a case to be made that, for all their relentless branding and ingrained arrogance, KISS are kinda underappreciated.They were always too craven in their careerism to acquire any of the dirtbag cool of early ‘70s glam peers like the New York Dolls, too pop-oriented to stand alongside more artful proto-metal giants like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath, too enamored with spectacle to attain the working-class cred of Thin Lizzy or AC/DC, too liberal with the shameless horn-dog metaphors to accrue the camp cachet of Queen. (Sorry kids, "Rocket Ride" is actually not about space travel.) And aside from the occasional spin of “Rock and Roll All Nite,” you’d still be hard-pressed to find them in regular rotation on any classic-rock radio station. However, when you strip away the make-up, upchucked blood, and one-piece open-chested unitards, the six studio albums KISS released in their 1974-77 golden period showcase a band with a preternatural gift for wrapping sticky melodies around sturdy riffs——a power-pop band with a steely command over both halves of the equation.While their many live albums and greatest-hits sets tend to prioritize the songs that go best with pyro, those early KISS records are loaded with more modestly scaled tunes that betray the group’s affinity for ’60s garage nuggets (see: “Love Her All I Can,” a blatant rewrite of The Nazz’s “Open Your Eyes”), harmony-rich sing-alongs that wouldnt sound out of place on a Big Star or Raspberries album (“Comin’ Home”), acoustic-powered Rod Stewart-style serenades (“Hard Luck Woman”—the plaintive Peter Criss antidote to the more popular and opulent “Beth”), and a lean, punkish propulsion (“Plaster Caster”—well, as close to punk as you can get when youre a rock star singing about getting a souvenir of your dick made by the world’s most famous groupie). Heck, debut-album deep cuts like "Let Me Know" could almost pass for Three Dog Night. And while “I Was Made for Lovin’ You” has come to epitomize KISS’ disco phase, it’s better represented by the ultra-smooth, mirror-ball-twirling slow jams “Sure Know Something” and “Shandi” (which features the sort of gilded, glistening jangle that’s become indie-ubiqutious in a post-Mac DeMarco world). The band’s core philosophy may have never evolved beyond rockin’ and rollin’ all night, but this playlist highlights the KISS songs you can still respect in the morning.

Back in the mid-‘80s, Geffen Records sued Neil Young for not sounding like himself, because they couldn’t handle the fact he was just being himself. Ever since he followed up his biggest album (1972’s Harvest) with his bleakest (1974’s On the Beach), Neil has endured as the world’s most reluctant rock star: unpredictable, contrarian, always zagging when everyone—his label, his fans, even his bandmates—would prefer to zig. And though he answered his infamously eclectic ‘80s discography by more eagerly embracing an elder-statesman role in the ‘90s—whether producing sequels to his ‘70s classics or coronating his godfather-of-grunge status—his post-2000s work has struck a wobbly balance between crowd-pleasing classicism and unfettered eccentricity.Sure, there’s nothing in Neil’s recent canon as stylistically outré as 1982’s synth-pop experiment Trans, or as self-consciously cheeky as 1983’s Everybody’s Rockin’. But he has reframed his traditional acoustic/electric modes with high-concept hijinks, be it the eco-themed concept album Greendale or the sepia-toned recording-booth crackle of A Letter Home. Even as his work has turned more impulsively political—see: 2006’s Dubya-dissing Living With War—the rage has been tempered with a healthy dose of whimsy (which, in that album’s case, took the form of amateur choirs and cavalry horns). And often, his post-2000 output has toed the line between audacious and ridiculous: The previous four decades of epic guitar jams feel like mere warm-ups for 2012’s “Driftin’ Back,” which churns and drones for over 27 minutes. Next to that, the 18-minute grunge-blues grind “Ordinary People” feels like a pop single.As that latter song exemplifies, a playlist of 21st-century Neil Young songs needs to come with some asterisks—“Ordinary People” was actually recorded with his brassy bar band The Bluenotes in 1988, but didn’t see the light of day until 2006’s Chrome Dreams II (with the carbon-dating Lee Iacocca reference intact). Neil has regularly dipped into his fabled stash of unreleased ‘70s and ‘80s-era songs on his post-millennial records, at times strategically deploying them like a game-saving immunity idol on Survivor. The otherwise slight 2000 album Silver and Gold climaxes with the stunning mid-‘70s holdover “Razor Love,” which mediates between his gentle Harvest hits and his hazy-headed Ditch Trilogy. And Neil’s best album of this century—the Daniel Lanois-produced solo-electric opus Le Noise—centers around the chilling travelogue “Hitchhiker,” another mid-‘70s obscurity that resurfaced in its original acoustic form when Neil released his “lost” 1976 album of the same name in the summer of 2017. In typically inscrutable Youngian psychology, navigating the 21st-century sometimes requires taking a journey through the past.