Top 10 Alternative Breakout Acts of 2009

When Passion Pit played at this year's Lollapalooza, the organizers had shown little foresight, scheduling this hyped act on a tiny side-stage. There, thousands too many tried to cram into a space no longer big enough for this band; blog buzz made manifest in the sea of sweaty bodies dancing away. After arriving on the hipster radar late last year, with the sugary-sweet “Sleepyhead,” in May Passion Pit delivered their debut LP, Manners. It matches candy-colored swirls of Avalanches-styled samples to the throat-straining, Wayne Coyne-aping wails of frontman Michael Angelakos, whose keening voice is akin to a heart-on-sleeve. On disc —and, of course, on stage— exuberance is Passion Pit's chosen musical weapon.

The fresh-faced kids in New Yorker combo The Pains of Being Pure at Heart became pin-ups of the twee movement in 2009, on the backs of an incredibly charming self-titled LP. Released by the revitalized, iconic indie imprint Slumberland, TPOBPAH's first album was filled with countless catchy pop-songs espousing heartbroken sentiments over impossibly upbeat jangle. And, for twee devotees, there was the joy of trainspotting in every tune; taking note of every lick nicked from Black Tambourine and every lyric inspired by The Field Mice. After winning the hearts of the underground, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart started crossing over to the overground; playing scores of summer festivals and jangling up your TV on Last Call with Carson Daly.

Riding a wave of hipster surf-guitar revivalism, New-York-via-Florida outfit The Drums happily summon the summer, in all its explosions of joy and sneaky feelings of sadness. Their debut EP, Summertime!, does deliver surfer-pop pastiche: the chorus of “Let's Go Surfing” finding Drums frontman Jonathan Pierce crooning: “Oh momma, I wanna go surfin'!” But, musically, they're more twee than beachy; the jangling guitars of Jacob Graham owing an aesthetic debt to Johnny Marr, not Dick Dale. And, like any self-respecting, Smiths-loving twee kids, Pierce and Graham play with melancholy sown into even the happiest-sounding notes. No matter how eternal the joys of summer are, The Drums realize, no season lasts forever.

The breakout song that turned Girls into a breakout band was called “Lust for Life.” You have to have some serious sand to name a jam after Iggy Pop's eternal young-and-carefree anthem, and that goes double when you're doing so without irony. Girls —the San Franciscan duo of drummer/producer Chet White and singer/guitarist Christopher Owens— manage to pull it off, too. Mostly because their “Lust for Life” is just a killer pop-song, but, also, in part because they are working without irony. Their stripped-down rock'n'roll is blessed with a refreshing lack of snark: earnest, hopeful, and flirtatiously silly, where so many other records are steeped in posing, pessimism, and irony.

Wavves has spent most of 2009 ricocheting between hype and backlash. The fuzzy, buzzing, two-minute-long lo-fi songs bashed out straight onto the computer of 21-year-old Californian wiz Nathan Williams —as heard on 2008's Wavves and 2009's Wavvves— have found many an exuberant review. Yet, those who see Wavves as some musical emperor's new clothes have had plenty of ammunition. First, in May, on stage at Primavera, Williams infamously self-destructed under the influence of alcohol, ecstasy, and valium. Then, in September, he got in a bar fight with Jared Swilley of Black Lips. Of course, all publicity is good publicity, and, so, by the end of 2009, Wavves' star was, it seemed, still on the rise.

• Interview: Wavves

When guitarist/vocalist Brian King and drummer/vocalist David Prowse formed Japandroids in 2006 at the University of Victoria, their goal was to make their two-piece sound like a five-piece band. Three years later, the Canuck duo's debut album, Post-Nothing, accomplishes this ambition. Crammed with amp-rattling anthems, the 35-minute set throttles along with a serious streak of joie de vivre; King screaming, on the colossal “Young Hearts Spark Fire”: “We used to dream!/But now we worry about dying!” like he's making every moment count. Given such sucking-out-all-the-marrow-of-life spirit, it's no surprise that Japandroid's irrepressible, suitably loud racket struck a power chord with so many listeners this year.

Pity the poor women who've ended up in the bed of Robbie Furze. The frontman figure of London's The Big Pink, Furze writes songs about the dames he dumps; A Brief History of Love, Furze reckons, could just as easily be called Songs About Girls. One of these songs is “Dominos,” a novelty number whose lowbrow singalong has taken The Big Pink from hipster UK obscurity to incipient popularity; it forever seeming as if it's one beer commercial away from mass-cultural ubiquity. Musically, producer/instrumentalist Milo Cordell builds songs bombastic enough to shill domestic brew; all pummeling walls of industrial beats and shoegaze guitars. They're self-consciously early-'90s sounding, which make The Big Pink the perfect band for 2009.

You know that when Björk's calling you a “prankster,” you have to be up to some sort of mischief. And 21-year-old Mica Levy, the London lass behind Micachu, has a most mischievous, inquisitive, experimental way about her. Cobbling together junk-shop compositions from self-built instruments, found objects, and miniature guitars, Levy bashes them into short, sharp, snappy songs. The tunes on her stupendously-good debut disc, Jewellery routinely clock in at two minutes, and their odd angularities and impish spikiness seems at once terrifying and familiar, like everyday objects bent into shocking new shapes. Fashioning a sound all her own, Levy has kicked off the beginning of what promises to be a long, strange, beautiful career.

You have to be doing something right to be compared to Young Marble Giants, those post-punk minimalists whose magical music was like a series of Rothko canvasses. And, sure enough, South London teenagers The XX are doing something so very, very right. Their debut LP, XX, arrived this year unexpectedly; fully formed and without precedent. Evoking both the '80s dream-pop dabblings of the This Mortal Coil and the hyper-minimalist production of R&B heavyweight Timbaland, The XX carve out a unique sound in which silence is the central element. Around such, they daub individual parts —a soft bass line, a guitar dangling deep in reverb, a lonesome drumbeat, a shyly soulful vocal— with a restraint that seems at odds with their age.

The Antlers have been hailed by many as 2009's answer to Bon Iver: sensitive dude makes heartbroken, thematically-tight, falsetto-warbling album; self-releases it; is swamped by overwhelming critical acclaim; insular solo project becomes grandiose band; album is re-released to a chorus of plaudits; ends up topping countless year-end polls. Hospice, the second album New Jersey's Peter Silberman has made under the name The Antlers, will land on many a best-of-2009 countdown. A sombre death-poem on caring for a terminally-ill patient, this breakout LP mixes lyrical tenderness (and some bitterness) with genuine musical grandeur; its cresting swells and tidal shifts owing a great debt to oceanic splendor of post-rock.