Anti-Folk
A community cultivated at a long-running open-mic night at New York's Sidewalk Café, anti-folk songsmiths mix rudimentary musicianship with dexterous, evocative, often hilarious lyricism.
Defining Acts: The Moldy Peaches, Jeffrey Lewis, Diane Cluck
Baggy
Named after its practitioners' unflattering trousers, Baggy —which mixed funk, psychedelia, and acid-house— had a fleeting reign in the UK, heavily hyped then swiftly abandoned by the British music weeklies.
Defining Acts: The Stone Roses, The Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets
Dream-Pop
A precursor to shoegaze, dream-pop described a community of English acts centered around the Cocteau Twins. Breathy and ethereal, their take on 'pop' was particularly ambient, with a focus on texture.
Defining Acts: The Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, AR Kane
Freak-Folk
Influenced by reissues of 'lost' folk classics (Vashti Bunyan, Linda Perhacs, Karen Dalton et al.), freak-folk sprouted up in a growth of beards, hair, and flowers; a neo-primitive recidivism for the new millennium.
Defining Acts: Vashti Bunyan, Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom
Garage-Rock
With its roots stretching back to the late '50s, garage is steeped in history. Fittingly, its practitioners favor a form of bare-bones rock'n'roll based on willful primitivism and proud timelessness.
Defining Acts: Question Mark & the Mysterions, Billy Childish, The White Stripes
Grunge
The early-'90s' defining musical movement, grunge was a sludgy, aggressive form of garage-rock, defined by distorted guitars and hoarse vocals.
Defining Acts: Mudhoney, Nirvana, The Melvins
Krautrock
A scene of late-'60s/early-'70s German experimentalists informed by free-jazz and psychedelia, krautrockers favored a persistent repetition whose seemingly-mechanized rhythms mirrored the imminent electronic age. Decades on, krautrock was a key influence upon post-rock.
Defining Acts: Can, Neu!, Faust
Lo-Fi
Wearing poor audio like a badge of honor, lo-fi acolytes are the proud antithesis to hi-fi, reveling in the tape-hiss of 'bad' sounding home cassette-recordings. Recent years have found a rise in lo-fi revivalists, thumbing their nose at the clarity and ease of computer-recordings.
Defining Acts: Daniel Johnston, Guided by Voices, The Mountain Goats
Top 10 Lo-Fi Albums
Math-Rock
As befitting their name, math-rockers play precise, complex, time-signature-shifting music, but do so with a punk humility. Though largely confined to the US Midwest in the mid-'90s, recently Foals and Battles have taken math-rock-ish music to new, unsuspecting audiences.
Defining Acts: Breadwinner, Don Caballero, Hella
Noise-Rock
Befitting its name, noise-rock is a loosely-defined realm of bands embracing the dissonance and atonalism of guitar feedback and/or modern composition, whilst still maintaining the basic semblance of 'band' structure.
Defining Acts: Sonic Youth, Royal Trux, Liars
No-Wave
A caustic amalgam of NY punk and experimentalism, no-wave exploded familiar musical form, turning guitar rock from melodious and harmonious into atonal and chaotic.
Defining Acts: DNA, Mars, Teenage Jesus & the Jerks
Paisley Underground
In a 1980s Los Angeles overrun by hair-metal peacocks and macho hardcore zealots, a scene of retro-minded guitar bands —with a fondness for paisley shirts— harkened back to '60s/'70s LA acts like The Byrds and The Mamas & The Papas.
Defining Acts: Rain Parade, The Three O'Clock, the Dream Syndicate
Post-Punk
Literally the music that followed punk, this broad-reaching term generally refers to late-'70s/early-'80s UK guitar-bands who drew from dub and disco, and utilized the studio's full possibilities.
Defining Acts: Public Image Ltd., Gang of Four, Joy Division
Post-Rock
After initially existing more as idea, post-rock soon become a specific style: instrumental, with grand shifts from quiet to loud, and a standard 'jazzy drumming' style.
Defining Acts: Tortoise, Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Power-Pop
As its name suggests, power-pop is a form of intense, amplified, harmony-driven music seemingly written in pursuit of the 'perfect' pop-song.
Defining Acts: Big Star, Redd Kross, The Posies
Punk-Funk
Drawing from post-punk marriages of angular guitars and disco beats, the recent rise of punk-funk was less pure revivalism, and more a chance to get up and dance. The only genre to take the request 'more cowbell!' literally.
Defining Acts: The Rapture, !!!, Out Hud
Riot Grrrl
Riot grrrl grew out of a grassroots fanzine scene, with angry women addressing social causes in print, then on stage. Musically, it played like feminist punk, with attitude, anger, and ideas foregrounded, and a lack of musical chops something to be proud of.
Defining Acts: Bikini Kill, Bratmobile, Sleater-Kinney
Shoegaze
Shoegazers specialized in opaque, opiate walls of effects-driven guitar and washed-out vocals. Though its initial movement was insular and brief, shoegaze's legacy —thanks largely to My Bloody Valentine's legend— has been broad and long-reaching.
Defining Acts: My Bloody Valentine, Ride, Slowdive
Slowcore
Rebelling against the loud, distorted, sarcastic tendencies of grunge, slowcore artists confronted audiences by playing as slow, quietly, and beautifully as possible.
Defining Acts: Low, Codeine, Red House Painters
Space-Rock
Drawing eternal inspiration from Hawkwind's double live LP Space Ritual, space-rock is a form of psychedelia making heavy use of guitar effects and synthesizers, and often exploring interstellar themes.
Defining Acts: Hawkwind, Spacemen 3, Flying Saucer Attack
Twee
NME's infamous C86 cassette —a celebration of an insular English scene of clumsy, fey, out-of-time pop-bands— spawned twee, a movement that, like shoegaze or emo, embraced its own putdown. The cutesy, sugary, trebly songs might seem ineffectual, but twee has grown into a huge cultural force.
Defining Acts: The Field Mice, Tiger Trap, Belle and Sebastian
Top 10 Twee Albums
