Top 10 Alternative Starter Albums

Alternative music's first iconic touchstone, if not its year zero. In the smacked-out Factory haze, Lou Reed, Nico, Mo and co conjured up an opiate magic of downtowner lore, thematic weightiness, and musical sunshine. The Velvet Underground's debut gave birth to the cliche of the band that inspired more bands to form than they actually sold records.

The patron saints of indie-pop, The Smiths made their name on the back of Morrissey's lyrical witticisms and Johnny Marr's iconic guitar jangle. Never really an 'album' band, the English outfit often saved their best work for singles. Or b-sides, even. The World Won't Listen collates a killer collection of classic mid-'80s sides all blessed with Moz's trademark sneer.

Like The VU, Boston's iconic indie-rock troupe The Pixies are a rockband's rockband; their influence extending way beyond the records they sold in their day. Their exuberant, Steve Albini-produced debut riffed mightily on Black Francis's spaced-out surf guitar, pushing college-rock into the dynamic direction —quiet/loud— that'd define indie music's next decade. Though its successor, 1989's brilliant Doolittle, is the far more accomplished set, it's Surfer Rosa that captures the band at their most elemental, bristling with energy and startling in their melody. And, when an album counts Pavement, Nirvana, the Foo Fighters, The Strokes, Spoon, TV on the Radio, and Radiohead amongst its devotees, what else can it be but a classic?

Sonic Youth’s decade-long reign as the American rock underground’s Godheads of the ’80s came to an almighty culmination on this monolithic double-album. Marrying circuit-frying guitar wattage, modernist experimentalism, literary-minded lyricism, and almost jazz-like sense of ‘in the moment’ communal creation, Sonic Youth laid down two weighty slabs of black wax that served as foundation for a whole generation of irregularly-tuned guitar-rockers.

Kevin Shields' patented "fluff on the needle sound" —a droning, fuzzy, wall-of-noise built from guitars run through an array of effects pedals— reached such a frightening, vertiginous peak on Loveless that he never dared follow it up. The blueprint for shoegazers past and present, My Bloody Valentine's immortal opus could just as easily be called 'Timeless.'

So much more than the ship that launched a thousand sore-throat imitators, Nirvana’s second record is a transcendent set of trailblazing riffs, cloaked pop hooks, murderous self-loathing, and unhinged ambition. Making Kurt Cobain’s free-associative nonsense sound like the ravings of a mad genius, Nevermind’s slickly-recorded, anthemic, gear-shifting, deep-in-the-guts songs built a stadium-sized shrine out of suicidal angst. The musical world spent the next decade in recovery.

The debut disc from half-collapsing lo-fi smart-asses Pavement was, at essence, the world’s introduction to Stephen Malkmus. Handsome, affluent, and so sarcastic even his whole truths sounded like halves, the Crown Prince of slackerdom drawled his ironic, iconic way through a spiky, spirited set of ad-hoc lyrical gags and uncoiling, slinking guitar skree. Openly ripping licks from The Fall and Swell Maps, Pavement played a brand of noisy, funny indie-pop, in which songs of sparkling melody and lyrical oddity just happened to cloaked in an unfriendly exterior. Audiences saw right through it: Slanted and Enchanted kicking off a cult that'd follow Pavement through the rest of the '90s.

Though it took several years to bubble up from the underground, Belle and Sebastian’s trickle of pop-cultural influence would eventually become a flood. The first widely-available work from the fey, well-schooled Scots found them immediately acclaimed as a ‘new Smiths’; the dexterous, self-reflexive, sardonic lyricism of songsmith Stuart Murdoch speaking, on intimate terms, to the bookish, trainspotting, record-collecting meek.

Chan Marshall has been one of the most singular, inspirational figures in alternative music since she arose from New York in the mid-'90s. Recorded in Melbourne with members of Dirty Three, Marshall's fourth Cat Power album showcases her glorious voice and restless spirit. Moon Pix consists of songs that were 'beamed' to her on a single stormy night, giving it the feeling of a strange and beautiful séance.

Fresh off of making the chart-topping, Brit-pop-masses-pleasing, Classic Rock-esque OK Computer, Radiohead ushered in the new millennium with a radical reinvention that crystallised the unease of the era. Sequestering themselves in an experimental realm of their own making, Thom Yorke and crew fashioned tiniest worried symphonies from drum-machines and ancient analogue keyboards. Authored at the impulse of an intellectual curiosity, Radiohead’s reputation-razing experiment is alive with wondering, and blessed with wonder.