The 50 Best Indie Rock Albums of the 2010s

A decade-by-decade countdown of the bedroom records that became festival headliners.

The 2010s were the decade indie rock stopped being a genre and became a whole production model — bedroom records that scaled to festival headliners, four-tracks that turned into arena tours, and a generation of bands that proved you could make a world-shaking record in a apartment with a laptop and a single condenser mic. We ranked the 50 that mattered most, and the brief was the decade, not the genre — the records that defined what indie rock became in the 2010s, not the records that would have been called indie in any other decade.

The method was brutal. We counted only full-length studio albums released between January 2010 and December 2019, weighted influence on subsequent artists, cultural impact at the time of release and in the years since, and the question of whether the record still sounds vital when you put it on today. We excluded EPs, compilations, and live records. We considered the production model — the bedroom records, the four-tracks, the laptop albums — as a feature of the decade, not a bug, and we weighted records that used the new tools to do something the old tools couldn't. The 2010s were the decade the studio came into the bedroom, and the best records of the decade were the ones that understood what that meant.

The decade breaks into three phases. The first, 2010-2013, is the chillwave and beach-rock phase — the records that responded to the recession with a warm, hazy, tape-saturated sound that turned out to be the bridge between the 2000s blog-rock era and the 2010s bedroom-pop era. The second, 2014-2016, is the bedroom-pop and dream-pop phase — the records that took the chillwave sound and turned it inward, trading the beach for the bedroom and the haziness for intimacy. The third, 2017-2019, is the genre-blend phase — the records that took the bedroom-pop model and fused it with everything from R&B to hardcore to electronic, and the records that proved indie rock had become a production model rather than a genre.

The top of the list is the record that defined the decade: the 2013 album that took the bedroom-pop model, turned it into a stadium-scale production, and proved that a single songwriter with a laptop could outsell the entire major-label system. The record is here because it changed what an indie record could be — it's the record that taught the 2010s that the bedroom and the arena were not opposites. The rest of the top ten is the records that followed it — the records that took the model and pushed it into the genres the originators never touched, and the records that proved the model was not a fluke.

Expect fights. Expect deep cuts. Expect the record your friend put on at every party for five straight years. The 2010s were the decade indie rock became a production model, and the 50 records on this list are the ones that did it. We weighted the bedroom records, the four-tracks, and the laptop albums as the defining feature of the decade, and we weighted the records that used the new tools to do something the old tools couldn't. The list is the decade as we lived it, and the decade as the records made it.

From the chillwave originators to the bedroom-pop headliners to the genre-blenders, the 50 records on this list are the ones that defined what indie rock became in the 2010s. Play them loud, play them in a bedroom, and let the decade play out one more time. This is the decade as we lived it.