 | | Despite its summery name, Beach House creates music that is dark, dreamy, and alluringly hypnotic. Baltimore residents Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand (the niece of French composer Michel Legrand) formed the duo in 2005, with Legrand's hushed, Nico-like vocals and Scally's delicate instrumentation paving the way for their first batch of songs. |
 | | Kevin Parker (vocals/guitar) and Dominic Simper (bass) formed Tame Impala as 13 year olds in Perth in 1999, sticking to bedroom recordings until 2007, when Jay Watson joined them on drums and backing vocals. |
 | | Singer/songwriter J. Tillman's music paints languid, sadly beautiful portraits of love and life on the margins with the moody depth of Nick Drake and the country-influenced textures of Ryan Adams. |
 | | Jack Tatum, formerly of Jack and the Whale and Facepaint, began making his shimmery, synth-washed indie pop recordings under the name Wild Nothing in the summer of 2009. |
 | | An indie supergroup featuring Spoon's Britt Daniel, New Bomb Turks drummer Sam Brown, and Wolf Parade and Handsome Furs member Dan Boeckner, Divine Fits announced their existence in May 2012 with a 45-second teaser trailer and the news that a full-length album produced by Nick Launay would arrive later that year. |
 | | With a swooping, baby-voiced singing style, Grimes (the alias of Vancouver native Claire Boucher) crafts a haunting brand of lo-fi dance music that fits stylistically within the goth-electronic umbrella coined "witch house" or "grave wave. |
 | | Atmospheric English indie pop group the xx formed in London in 2008 around the talents of Romy Madley Croft, Oliver Sim, Baria Qureshi, and Jamie Smith, when the bandmembers were still in high school. |
 | | Disclosure are Guy and Howard Lawrence, siblings from Surrey, England who debuted in 2010, when they uploaded early material to MySpace. |
 | | The chilly electro-pop project of Corin Roddick and Megan James, Purity Ring began when the two were in Canadian indie rock act Gobble Gobble (which later became Born Gold). |
 | | Japandroids are an indie garage rock duo from Vancouver comprised of Brian King (guitar) and David Prowse (drums), who share singing duties. |
 | | Another example of how influential blogs can be in a band's career, sharp-edged Australian indie rockers Atlas Genius experienced a massive surge in their popularity when their song "Trojans" was featured by the site Neon Gold, resulting in offers from record labels and over 45,000 downloads in the U. |
 | | Chaz Bundick started making bedroom recordings under the name Toro y Moi in his native Columbia, South Carolina in 2001. |
 | | English indie rockers Alt-J, named for the triangle that appears when pressing "Alt" and "J" on a Mac, formed in 2008 under the moniker FILMS. |
 | | Brother-and-sister duo Wild Belle make folk-, dance-, reggae-, and psychedelic rock-tinged indie pop. |
 | | Formed in 2008, Local Natives craft their dramatic and eclectic brand of indie rock from their home base in Los Angeles, California. |
 | | Grizzly Bear began as a home recording project for Boston-bred experimentalist Edward Droste, the son of an elementary school teacher, who laid the groundwork for the band's otherworldly debut album on a small hand-held tape recorder while holed up for 15 months in his Greenpoint, Brooklyn, apartment. |
 | | Charleston, South Carolina-based indie folk duo Shovels & Rope consists of married singer/songwriters Michael Trent and Cary Ann Hearst. |
 | | The Boston, Massachusetts-based Passion Pit began as a one-man project of singer and songwriter Michael Angelakos to produce a Valentine's Day gift for his girlfriend. |
 | | The Lumineers, a folk-rock trio out of Denver, Colorado, deliver an acoustic-based Americana sound that touches a lot of stylistic bases, from folk to gospel to heartland rock and the narrative end of country, all with interesting rhythmic twists and turns. |
 | | A diverse handful of guest appearances and solo singles across 2010 and 2011 situated Jessie Ware in a line of remarkable soul-inspired U. |
 | | Born in the Dominican Republic, raised in Florida, and boasting an expansive musical background that includes composing for a touring dance company and fronting a Boston punk group, George Lewis, Jr. |
 | | Ernest Greene had been involved in a number of musical endeavors by the time he started putting together a series of recordings as Washed Out. |
 | | The music of Brooklyn's Yeasayer is an eclectic, genre-bending journey into pop, rock, Middle Eastern and African musics, folk, and dub. |
 | | Mixing electronic polish with guitar-driven hooks à la Phoenix and the Postal Service, Bangor and Donaghadee, Northern Ireland's Two Door Cinema Club feature singer/guitarist/programmer Alex Trimble, guitarist/singer Sam Halliday, and bassist/singer Kevin Baird. |
 | | Since they emerged at a time when C-86-inspired acts like Vivian Girls and the Pains of Being Pure at Heart were in vogue, it’s little wonder that California’s Dum Dum Girls -- a group whose '60s-inflected lo-fi pop brings to mind acts like Black Tambourine and Dolly Mixture -- became something of a sensation on the indie circuit soon after the release of their first single. |
 | | Los Angeles-based electronic musician Robert DeLong mixes dance music with his own singer/songwriter style of craftsmanship. |
 | | Cloud Nothings' prolific lo-fi pop is the brainchild of Dylan Baldi, a Cleveland, Ohio native who was still in his teens when the buzz about his music started. |
 | | Named for his fear of the ocean, Wavves, the skuzzy project of San Diego slacker Nathan Williams, is a blend of distorted no-fi and refined sunshiny melodies. |
 | | Formed in Oxford, England, by longtime friends Yannis Philippakis (guitar) and Jack Bevan (drums), along with Andrew Mears on vocals, guitarist Jimmy Smith, and bassist Walter Gervers, Foals -- whose name is a play on the etymology of Philippakis' name -- began as a way to protest against the proggier sounds that were both popular in Oxford and in Philippakis and Bevan's former band, the Edmund Fitzgerald. |
 | | Los Angeles indie electro unit Capital Cities first came together as a duo of composer/songwriters Ryan Merchant and Sebu Simonian. |
 | | Fusing low-res electronic noise and pop hooks so effortlessly that it can seem accidental, Crystal Castles began as producer/multi-instrumentalist Ethan Kath's solo project in late 2003. |
 | | In 2003, Frenchmen Anthony Gonzalez and Nicolas Fromageau enjoyed international acclaim for the album Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, a luscious blend of shoegaze aesthetics, ambient pop, and progressive textures. |
 | | The blurry electronic pop project of an initially anonymous composer from Brooklyn and video artist from Austin, Texas, Neon Indian was conceived as a multimedia experience combining their music and video into short films, teasers, and straight-up pop songs. |
 | | Metric are a band with an eclectic, adventurous outlook, whose music encompasses elements of synth pop, new wave, dance-rock, and electronica and whose hometown has vacillated between Toronto, Montreal, New York, Los Angeles, and London over the course of the group's existence. |
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 | | Italian-born singer/songwriter Mauro Remiddi makes dreamy indie pop with his solo project Porcelain Raft. |
 | | Raised on a steady diet of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and the brothers Gallagher, English singer/songwriter Jake Bugg blends the melodious, working-class swagger of the La's and the primal, bluesy simplicity of the White Stripes with the wry, weathered romanticism of Jens Lekman. |
 | | Brighton, England's Bat for Lashes is the brainchild of singer/songwriter Natasha Khan. The Pakistan-born Khan pulls from her art school education and her experience producing multimedia installations when it comes to writing songs. |
 | | Playing clever but purposefully naïve pop in the manner of the Vaselines, the Twilight Sad, and the Clean, Frightened Rabbit sound a good bit bolder than their moniker would suggest, though it suits their lively but nervous musical personality. |
 | | After spending several years with the post-punk outfit Sidecar Kisses, vocalist/guitarist Ritzy Bryan and bassist Rhydian Dafydd left the lineup and launched the Joy Formidable, drawing heavily from shoegaze and noisy alt-rock to create their new group's sound. |
 | | Cut from the same colorful cloth as upbeat indie pop contemporaries like Fun., Jukebox the Ghost, Walk the Moon, and Imagine Dragons, Youngblood Hawke, named after a 1961 Herman Wouk novel based on the life of Thomas Wolfe, was formed in 2011 by former members of new wave revivalists Iglu and Hartly. |
 | | New Jersey's hazy indie rockers Real Estate feature Titus Andronicus' Martin Courtney, Etienne Duguay (who also records as Predator Vision), Alex Bleeker, and Matthew Mondanile, also of Ducktails. |
 | | Portland, Oregon-based experimental rock outfit Menomena originally consisted of multi-instrumentalists Justin Harris, Brent Knopf, and Danny Seim. |
 | | Youth Lagoon is the outlet of Boise, Idaho's Trevor Powers' most personal hopes and fears, which he sets to dreamy yet tenacious lo-fi pop. |
 | | Genre-crossing outfit the Neighbourhood mix atmospheric indie rock, electronica, and hip-hop beats with melodic R&B-inflected vocals. |
 | | Lord Huron began as a solo project by Michigan-born/Los Angeles-based musician Ben Schneider in the spring of 2010. |
 | | Deerhunter are an experimental noise rock band from Atlanta, fronted by the compellingly odd singer Bradford Cox. |
 | | Folk-rock duo Tegan and Sara first burst onto the Canadian music scene in 1998, when they earned the highest score in history at Calgary's "Garage Warz" competition; their quick rise didn't stop, for their melodic acoustics and charming stage personas led to a slew of dates with Sarah McLachlan's Lilith Fair that same year and a record deal with Neil Young's Vapor Records in April 2000. |
 | | Named in part after a sister of one of the bandmembers, Reykjavik, Iceland's Sigur Rós (Victory Rose) was formed by guitarist and vocalist Jon Thor Birgisson (who later went by the name Jónsi), bassist Georg Holm, and drummer Agust. |
 | | Montezumas frontman Kristian Matsson started recording a set of rustic, gravelly-voiced tunes, ones that nodded to fellow Swedes Homesick Hank and Thomas Denver Jonsson, under the nom de solo act the Tallest Man on Earth in the early 2000s. |
