When Black Rebel Motorcycle Club sang, "Whatever Happened to My Rock n Roll" on their 2001 debut, they were gazing upon a contemporary rock landscape overpopulated with backward red baseball caps and greasy grunge-oil salesmen, and lamenting the lack of raw, raucous, life-changing (and corrupting) devils music on the radio. In this case, the complaining actually worked: Within a year, BRMC found themselves standing alongside The Strokes, The White Stripes, The Hives, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, and many other disgruntled guitar-slingers, perched on the precipice of the last moment in history when the words "rock" and "revolution" could be uttered together with a straight face. And mobilizing right behind them were all the bands on this playlist——groups that may have enjoyed a few spins on Subterranean, earned a glossy magazine spread or two, got name-dropped by Jack White in an interview, or scored a prime opening slot on a Franz Ferdinand tour, but never quite achieved the same notoriety or longevity as the aforementioned acts.The early 2000s were, of course, a transformative moment in the music industry: The advent of mp3s and file-sharing opened up new portals for underground bands to achieve more widespread visibility; at the same time, old-school publications like NME and SPIN still wielded enough king-making power to anoint new rock saviors on a seemingly weekly basis, while labels were scooping up any band with unkempt hair and thrift-store blazers. The result was a cyclonic swirl of hype that sucked in MTV2-ready arena-indie acts (Longwave, Ambulance Ltd.), stylish post-punk revivalists (The Stills, Hot Hot Heat), unruly post-punk revivalists (Ikara Colt, Radio 4), unrulier post-hardcore miscreants (The Icarus Line, The Bronx), post-hardcore 70s-rock fetishists (Danko Jones, Rye Coalition), brainiac Brits (The Futureheads, Clearlake), seasoned garage acts gunning for a long-deserved close-up (Billy Childish with the Buff Medways, Mick Collins with the Dirtbombs), new-school misfits (The Ponys, The Gris Gris, Vietnam), and, thanks to The Hives surprise crossover success, an uncommon amount of Swedes (Sahara Hotnights, Division of Laura Lee, Mando Daio, The Concretes)——not to mention Canadians (The Deadly Snakes, Tangiers, The Marble Index), New Zealanders (The D4, The Datsuns), and Icelandians (Singapore Sling).Though a handful of these acts have managed to duke it out to this day, many didnt survive the 2000s. And a quick glance at this years Coachella line-up shows that the question posed by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club at the top of this post has, in the long run, only become more existentially pertinent. However, if the early 2000s garage-rock uprising didnt alter the course of popular music in the way its adherents had hoped, its impact can still be felt in less tangible ways. The eras blurring of indie aesthetics and mainstream aspirations has become manifest in everything from satellite-radio formats to boy bands sporting skinny jeans and salon-sculpted messy haircuts to the sheer number of annual alterna-festivals that didnt exist before 2001. Meanwhile, Lizzy Goodmans recent tell-all oral history Meet Me in the Bathroom has effectively mythologized the Strokes heyday for a new generation just as Please Kill Me did with the 70s CBGB scene (with a documentary adaptation to come). And right on cue, several long-dormant early-2000s phenoms——including Franz Ferdinand, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and BRMC——are resurfacing with new albums and/or reunion appearances; you can also expect 2018 releases from Jack White, ex-Walkmen singer Hamilton Leithauser, and Julian Casabalancas garage-prog side band The Voidz.But here, we remember those bygone would-be hype magnets who are less likely to fire up newsfeeds in 2018. Just as Lenny Kayes 1972 compilation Nuggets commemorated the countless short-lived garage bands that formed in the wake of the mid-60s British Invasion, this playlist forsakes the most hyped and heavily rotated bands of the 2000-2005 era to focus on the forgotten phenoms, unsung instigators, and steady-as-she-goes survivors who, in their own little ways, intensified the hysteria of that moment. (It also excludes groups like The Kills, The Black Keys, and Gossip, who, while still relatively under-the-radar at the time, would go on to much greater success. You may also note the absence of The Libertines, who quickly transcended their second-hand Strokes roots to spawn a landfill-indie legacy all their own.)This is a mix for anyone who actually bought a stellastar* single based on the NMEs recommendation, anyone who was momentarily convinced The Mooney Suzuki (pictured at top) were the future of rock n roll, and anyone who thought Elefant would be as big as Elephant. Our Cheap Monday jeans may not fit anymore and our once fulsome shag cuts may have given way to receding hairlines, but lets do a bump for old times sake——this bathrooms got your choice of 50 stalls.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ve all heard that “rock is dead.” But if we are to believe its original edict of living fast, dying young, and leaving a good-looking corpse, then rock is still very much sitting pretty, mainlining a bottomless supply of embalming fluid. For all the perpetual hand-wringing over rock’s health status—Is it still relevant to anyone under the age of 35? Will we ever see another Nirvana? Do The 1975 and Twenty One Pilots count?—each year yields bountiful evidence that there’s really nothing to worry about. If dominant pop-cultural trends are waves crashing onto a beach, then rock ’n’ roll is the sand—a vast mosaic comprising infinite grains of different shades and shapes. Though it may not be able to compete with the wave for sheer attention-seizing impact, it ain’t going anywhere anytime soon.

But whereas many of the 2019 BestRockAlbums lists embrace a more liberal definition of the genre that encompasses the brittle serenades of Big Thief, the avant-yacht rock of Bon Iver, and the ambient symphonies of Nick Cave on his latest, our survey takes a more brutally reductionist tack—here, we celebrate all things noisy and/or nasty. The songs on this year-end survey span garage rock (The Schizophonics), post-punk (FONTAINES D.C.), arena-ready alt-rock (Chastity), psych (Mdou Moctar), power pop (Young Guv), post-hardcore (Fury), unruly emo (PUP), cacophonous protest music (Brittany Howard), scrappy jangle (Kiwi jr.), avant-garde dissonance (Kim Gordon), drum-machined minimalism (Sleaford Mods), and whatever the fuck you want to call black midi, but they all reinforce the idea of rock as not so much a guitar/bass/drums-driven sound as an anxious, agitated attitude and bone-shaking physical sensation.‍

Photo Credit: Daniel Topete

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: We’re in the midst of a post-punk renaissance! It’s a phrase that was on every music critic’s lips back in the early 2000s, when The Rapture were mining Gang of Four’s solid gold, Interpol were summoning the ghost of Ian Curtis, and !!! staked out the common dance-floor turf between PiL and ESG. And there’s evidence to suggest that the revival never really ended, as post-punk’s rhythmic principles have become firmly embedded in the DNA of modern indie rock. But whereas the post-millennial post-punkers offered a hedonistic escape from the looming black clouds of 9/11 and the Iraq war, the current class cropping in the U.K. and Ireland is forcing listeners to reckon with reality as if thrusting your head into an unserviced porta-potty on the final day of a weekend festival.

There’s an old line of wishful thinking that suggests political turmoil makes for the best music (as if a couple of great records would be enough to compensate for the rise in income inequality, the degradation of the environment, and the proliferation of fascism). But the theory bears out when you consider all the exciting—and fiercely antagonistic—artists from the Isles who are thriving amid the chaos of the post-Brexit era. From the working-class warfare of Sleaford Mods to the pub-brawl poetry of Fontaines D.C. to the inspirational aggression of IDLES, these are good times for music about the bad times. But if these groups reinforce a definition of post-punk that centers on bruising basslines and melody-averse admonishments from vocalists with thick regional accents, other artists featured on this playlist uphold post-punk’s legacy of fearless, nonconformist experimentation, as manifest in the oblique artcore of black midi, the hypnotic pulse of Vanishing Twin, and the extended percussive odysseys of the aptly named Nottingham duo Rattle. That’s why post-punk revivals never go out of style: There are always so many different kinds of post-punk to revive.

‍Photo courtesy of Daniel Topete

The legend of The Stooges has been documented in every medium possible—books, documentaries, box sets, Audi commercials—and all support the undeniable case that punk rock as we know it would not exist without the glass-smashing, chest-slashing hysterics of Iggy Pop and his Ann Arbor bastard brethren. But while it’s tempting to plot The Stooges along a linear fuse that led to punk’s big bang, the group’s 1970 sophomore release, Fun House, has always defied such a simple narrative.

Most of what we refer to as proto-punk—be it the sneering garage rock compiled on Nuggets or the heavy-duty psychedelic blues of Blue Cheer—is really just a louder, scrappier take on the British Invasion sounds that dominated the ’60s. And even the wild, death-trippin’ rock ’n’ roll of The Stooges’ canonical 1973 album Raw Power wasn’t that far removed from, say, the raunchy thrust of early KISS or Aerosmith. But from Ron Asheton’s opening guitar strike on “Down on the Street,” Fun House instantly feels so much darker, heavier, and—thanks to Ron’s drummer brother Scott and bassist Dave Alexander—funkier than anything of its vintage. A boiling-hot cauldron of early heavy metal, bad-trip psychedelia, James Brown, and free jazz, Fun House is anarchy executed with military precision—not so much a display of controlled chaos as chaotic control. To mark the album’s 30th anniversary in 2000, Rhino Records released a box set, 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions, that compiled every single take from the album’s original recording sessions—we’re talking 142 tracks to document a seven-song album that yielded no viable non-album outtakes. And on the occasion of its 50th anniversary in July 2020, the box set is being issued on vinyl for the first time at a price tag of $400. But while some may question the value of hearing 14 versions of “T.V. Eye” in a row, for Fun House devotees, such financial and practical considerations are immaterial. Because that’s what Fun House does to you—it’s less a record than a sinister spell, that mysterious cursed object in a horror movie that you’re warned not to upset, lest you unleash its horrible powers, but you do it anyway. More than a mere proto-punk classic, this album belongs to its own subterranean netherworld, one whose pathways continue to burrow into all corners of the underground, as this playlist of Fun House favorites and followers can attest.

The great irony about the MTV Unplugged phenomenon of the 1990s is that the performances were often less stripped down than gussied up. Sure, the series provided a forum for rock artists to reimagine their riffed-up repertoires as campfire fare, but it also gave them license to crowd the stage with string players, woodwind sections, and other auxiliary personnel. Even a punk-conscious band like Nirvana weren’t immune to this when they sat down for their now-iconic Unplugged taping in November 1993 (released a year later as MTV Unplugged in New York), as they brought along a cello player and a couple of Meat Puppets. But the band’s quietest performance ever proved to be their most intense, no more so than on Kurt Cobain’s traumatic excavation of the Lead Belly standard “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.”

That song didn’t just become a key part of Nirvana’s legacy; it set the gold standard for acoustic-administered emotional exorcisms, clearing the bar set by white-knuckled strummers like Bob Dylan and Richie Havens. The other performances collected on this playlist may not approach the same soul-wrenching extremes, but they each document a revelatory moment in a career (such as a young David Bowie finding his flamboyant voice in Jacques Brel’s “Port of Amsterdam” and the early Jane’s Addiction showcasing their range with the harmonica-honked anomaly “My Time”), or they capture a legend in their purest, most primal state (see: Lauryn Hill’s epic freestyle on “Mystery of Iniquity” and Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum stretching the physical limits of his voice on the haunting “Oh Comely”). The casual nature of acoustic performances has also presented artists with a forum for making other people’s songs their own, like Wings’ dramatic reading of Paul Simon’s “Richard Cory” (in which Macca cedes lead vocal duties to Denny Laine) and Heart’s Ann and Nancy Wilson’s arresting rendition of Led Zeppelin’s “The Battle of Evermore” (released on the Singles soundtrack under their Lovemongers alias). And no survey of quality acoustica is complete without oft-overlooked hair-metal outsiders Tesla, whose Five Man Acoustical Jam record actually predated the first proper MTV Unplugged release by six months.