 | | Formed after the 1997 breakup of singer/songwriter Joe Pernice's alt-country group the Scud Mountain Boys, the Pernice Brothers did an about-face from the lush '70s country sound of their final album, Massachusetts, and came up with the lush orchestrated pop of 1998's Overcome By Happiness. |
 | | Formed in 1999 around the talents of Nick Krgovich and Larissa Loyva, eclectic Canadian indie rock collective P:ano utilize their multi-instrumental prowess to create lo-fi orchestral pop. |
 | | Dan Bejar started Destroyer as a solo project in Vancouver in 1995. His first album, We'll Build Them a Golden Bridge, was an electric folk record, setting the stage for the early Bowie comparisons that were certain to follow his particular vocal style. |
 | | Athens, GA, indie pop outfit the Mendoza Line were formed during the summer of 1995 by singer/guitarists Timothy Bracy and Peter Hoffman (longtime friends born and raised in McLean, VA) along with Paul Deppler and Margaret Maurice. |
 | | Swedish indie pop band David & the Citizens was begun by vocalist/guitarist David Fridlund in 1999, who by 2000 recruited Conny Fridh (bass), Alexander Madsen (guitar), Mikael Carlsson (drums), and Magnus Bjerkert (trumpet). |
 | | A moniker lifted out of the Old Testament by performance artist/multi-instrumentalist John Ringhofer, Half-Handed Cloud specializes in creating economically complex pop. |
 | | Chicago indie pop outfit the 1900s officially formed in the spring of 2004, but the group's roots date back more than a decade. |
 | | Mälmo's Billie the Vision & the Dancers are a seven-member ensemble who play tuneful, chipper, folksy pop music with idiosyncratic, sometimes mawkishly sentimental lyrics. |
 | | Formed in 1996 in the college town of Missoula, MT, Tarkio, named for a small city in the western part of the state, featured the talents of guitarist Gibson Hartwell, bass player Louis Stein, drummer Brian Collins, pedal steel player Kevin Suggs, and singer/songwriter and future Decemberist Colin Meloy. |
 | | Formed by two high-school friends, Tim Regan and Brad Postlethwaite, Snowglobe's music traverses the psychedelic folk pathways first cleared by the likes of Gram Parsons and the Byrds and later explored by the likes of Neutral Milk Hotel and their Elephant 6 brethren. |
 | | A veteran of the Australian music scene, having completed stints as a supporting guitarist and keyboard player for the Lucksmiths, the Simpletons, the Deerhunters, and Mick Thomas, singer/songwriter Darren Hanlon officially stepped out on his own in 1999. |
 | | Born in Helena, MT, Colin Meloy has fronted three bands, Happy Cactus, Tarkio, and the Decemberists. |
 | | Folk-rock ensemble the Dreamscapes Project were formed in Reston, VA, after Keith Center and Jeremy Rodgers met at George Mason University in 1997. |
 | | Beulah's Miles Kurosky and Bill Swan first started off as officemates, working the mail room at a security firm in their native San Francisco in 1994. |
 | | Led by vocalist/guitarist Gary Olson, a onetime string stretcher and key inspector at his family's piano factory, indie pop unit the Ladybug Transistor debuted in 1996 with the LP Marlborough Farms, titled after Olson's Brooklyn-area home recording studio. |
 | | Although Toronto novelist Chris Eaton performed as a solo artist in the late '90s and early 2000s under the name Rock Plaza Central (sometimes with any number of backing musicians), it wasn't until 2003 that Rock Plaza Central became a real band, recruiting Rob Carson (guitar, banjo, trombone), John Whytock (accordion, trumpet, percussion), Donald Murray (mandolin, trumpet), Scott Maynard (bass), and Blake Howard (drums) -- with Fiona Stewart (violin) joining in 2004 -- before releasing The World Was Hell to Us. |
 | | By the time Sondre Lerche had released his major-label debut (2002's critically acclaimed Faces Down), the 19-year-old Norwegian wunderkind was already a veteran of the music industry. |
 | | When Matt Suggs (who was in the '90s indie rock duo Butterglory) wanted a touring band for his 2003 solo album, Amigo Row, he looked no further than former Higher Burning Fire members and fellow Kansans John Anderson, Dustin Than Kinsey, and Zach Holland for help, with whom he had been playing on and off since 2000. |
 | | When he's not contributing to St. Vincent, the Polyphonic Spree, or John Vanderslice's band, multi-instrumentalist Daniel Hart serves as the leader and chief songwriter for the Physics of Meaning. |
 | | Led by Montana native Colin Meloy, the Decemberists craft theatrical, hyper-literate pop songs that draw heavily from late-'60s British folk acts like Fairport Convention and Pentangle and the early-'80s college rock grandeur of the Waterboys and R. |
 | | Ezra Furman & the Harpoons are a Chicago-based combo built around the songs of leader Furman, whose tunes combine an idiosyncratic wit and edgy, confessional lyrics with clever pop melodies. |
 | | Chicago popster Kevin Tihista was born in Walnut Creek, CA, picking up the guitar in the seventh grade after drawing his initial musical inspiration from childhood heroes Kiss. |
 | | Antlerand formed in 2003 when Chris Larson(vocals, guitar, programming) flew from Portland, OR to Tempe, AZ to visit friend Zach Okun(guitar, bass, vibraphone, piano) and recorded an EP under the name Invisible. |
 | | Brooklyn, NY-based Proud Simon has been, at times, a solo project; a small folk-rock band; a large ensemble with horns, woodwinds, and strings; and, in its most recent incarnation, a five-piece rock band. |
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 | | A singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, Detroit-born Sufjan Stevens started venturing into the music world while attending Hope College as a member of Marzuki, a folk-rock band based in Holland, Michigan. |
 | | Motor City natives Mark Owen, Chad Stocker, Josh Malerman, and Derek Berk comprise the founding lineup of the High Strung, whose music borrows equally from melodic power-pop and psychedelic garage rock. |
 | | Australian-born singer-songwriter Richard Davies formed the chamber-pop unit the Moles in Sydney in the late 1980s after growing disenchanted with studying law; concluding that he preferred composing poetry to writing essays for his class assignments, he soon began crafting his first songs. |
 | | Noah and the Whale became a leading light in the British folk scene with the release of 2008's Peaceful, the World Lays Me Down, their popular debut that cracked the U. |
 | | A warm combination of folk-inspired songwriting and indie rock instrumentation characterizes the music of Brooklyn's Takka Takka, who formed in 2004 after bandleader Gabe Levine (vocals, keyboard, guitar) relocated to New York from Texas. |
 | | The self-described "fuzz-folk" project Neutral Milk Hotel was one of the primary outgrowths of the Elephant 6 Recording Company collective, a coterie of like-minded lo-fi indie groups -- including the Apples in Stereo, the Olivia Tremor Control, and Secret Square -- who shared musicians, ideas, and sensibilities. |
 | | Originally conceived as a one-off collaboration between Okkervil River's Will Sheff and Kingfisher's Jonathan Meiburg, Shearwater continues the tradition of detailed, reflective songwriting set by classic artists like Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen and contemporary indie rock songwriters such as Bill Callahan and Will Oldham. |
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 | | Embracing a wildly eclectic variety of melodic influences, Saturday Looks Good to Me is the brainchild of indie pop wunderkind Fred Thomas, who has been the only constant member of the group since its inception in 2000. |
 | | The post-punk duo AM/FM was formed by inspiring musician perfectionist Brian Sokel. Having played in bands such as Franklin, he joined forces with the Science Of's Michael Parsell (Frail, Goodbye Blue Monday) so Sokel's lush acoustics could fully take life with added guitars, keyboards, and percussion. |
 | | The Little Ones are comprised of Ian Moreno, Edward Nolan Reyes, Brian Reyes, Lee Ladouceur, and Greg Meyer. |
 | | The dreamy, bittersweet music of Margot & the Nuclear So and So's is primarily the work of singer/songwriter Richard Edwards, who formed the indie rock collective in his native Indianapolis. |
 | | The work of Eric Matthews was a direct reaction to the lo-fi recording practices so prevalent throughout the alternative music scene of the 1990s; while many of the decade's artists trafficked in a defiantly ragged, do-it-yourself aesthetic, Matthews' records grew out of orchestral theories and practices, and revelled in the stately elegance of warm harmonies and lush arrangements. |
 | | The Bees (known as "A Band of Bees" in America, owing to a rights conflict over their name) started out as the duo of Paul Butler and Aaron Fletcher, both of whom hailed from the Isle of Wight. |
 | | Like their West Coast contemporaries in Death Cab for Cutie, Rilo Kiley steadily gained traction in indie pop circles throughout the late '90s and early 2000s before the record industry (and public at large) officially took note. |
 | | A band that takes its name from a French children's television series about a boy and his dog would almost have to be precious, and to be certain, Belle & Sebastian are precious. |
 | | The folk delight that is Lavender Diamond originally came to life in Bird Songs of the Bauharoque, a punk operetta inspired by the work of American painter/architect Paul Laffoley. |
 | | Combining indie rock with chamber pop flourishes (courtesy of a small string section), Ra Ra Riot formed while the band's six members were attending college in Syracuse, New York. |
 | | The music of Brooklyn's Yeasayer is an eclectic, genre-bending journey into pop, rock, Middle Eastern and African musics, folk, and dub. |
 | | The brainchild of singer/guitarist Kevin Barnes, Of Montreal was among the second wave of bands to emerge from the sprawling Elephant 6 collective. |
 | | Rogue Wave formed in 2002 when a newly unemployed Zach Rogue left his San Francisco home, visited friends in New York City, and returned to California with nearly a full album's worth of textured, cerebral indie pop. |
 | | Broken Social Scene materialized in 1999 when K.C. Accidental's Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning, formerly of By Divine Right, bonded their friendship into a band. |
 | | With their heady blend of precision punk and serpentine classic rock (the band has drawn comparisons to everyone from the Pixies and Sonic Youth to Elvis Costello and Tom Petty), enigmatic, Texas-based indie pop outfit Spoon went from underground press darlings to one of the genre’s premier commercially and critically acclaimed alternative rock acts. |
 | | Toronto's quirky, high-energy indie rock outfit Tokyo Police Club features vocalist/bassist Dave Monks, keyboardist/vocalist Graham Wright, guitarist/percussionist Josh Hook, and drummer/percussionist Greg Alsop. |
