The 50 Best Rock Bands Right Now (#25-1)
The bands that we were chosen to deserve
Meet Me @ the Altar (Photo by Jonathan Weiner)
25. Meet Me @ the Altar
From: Florida/Georgia/New Jersey
Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2024: Early comparisons to Paramore weren’t completely off the mark but America’s best working pop-punk band has gotten so aerodynamic and pared down on 2023’s Past // Present // Future that they’re encroaching on Blink-182 territory. I mean, I wish Paramore would still blast out statements as compact as “Say It (To My Face).”
What Have They Done for You Lately: Few bands working this circuit are as generous with the big harmonies as MM@TA on “T.M.I.” And I can’t think of any others who could navigate that melisma.
24. Bacchae
From: Washington, D.C.
Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2024: Anyone who misses discovering new Kill Rock Stars nuggets in the riot grrrl years (or anyone — ok, me — who’s been waiting half a decade for Control Top’s next album) should proceed directly to these frantic D.C. punks and their impossibly catchy third full-length, which veers from DIY four-on-the-floor (“Just a Rat”) to biting “Boris the Spider” (“Drop Dead Gorgeous”) and going girl-group (“Dead Man”).
What Have They Done for You Lately: The bluesy “Try” instantly makes this year’s Next Time hit like an anvil before lightening up considerably.
23. Pest Control
(Photo by Joe Steven Hart)
From: Leeds, U.K.
Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2024: The only metal that electrifies me on a regular basis cosplays the Big Four Only Better, so let Vhöl and Vektor welcome these misfits to the canon — at 21 minutes, 2023’s basically perfect Don’t Test the Pest would go down even quicker than Reign in Blood even if it included their best tune (see below) and when they call it “crossover thrash” they don’t mean pop.
What Have They Done for You Lately: Another difference between Leah Massey and Tom Araya is that “Enjoy the Show” is a bit more her speed than “Dead Skin Mask.” (I’d say few things are Slayer’s speed if entire boarding schools’ worth of subterranean dwellers didn’t commit their whole artistic lives to being exactly that. And Massey does tear the shit out of “Wake in Hell.”)
22. Low Cut Connie
(Photo by Cortney Armitage via Blurred Culture)
From: Philadelphia, PA
Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2024: See our generation’s E Street successors live and then we’ll talk. Or catch the splendid concert doc Art Dealers in theaters near you October 1st.
What Have They Done for You Lately: Sing it with me now, “King of the Jews.” Let’s take it from “motherfuckers got to pay their dues.”
21. Shellac
(Photo by Jim Bennett via WireImage)
From: Chicago, IL
Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2024: I’m no connoisseur of Steve Albini’s last band but from my casual distance they never made a better, funnier, more purely enjoyable statement than unexpected swan song To All Trains, to be their first in a decade before the legendary producer/reformed edgelord philosopher died of a heart attack at just 61. If he couldn’t live longer, he deserved a rock’n’roll ending worth mythologizing.
What Have They Done for You Lately: …and that’s just the epitaph he got in the instant barroom classic “I Don’t Fear Hell.” Only a Chicago lifer would cite the underworld’s baseball team as why he’s cool with going to the bad place.
20. Sleater-Kinney
From: Olympia, WA
Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2024: No other hard rock band has ever been this incredible for this long, even though losing Janet Weiss was undoubtedly gutting for the future of one of the greatest oeuvres. This year’s Little Rope is one of those Return to Forms™ that ain’t gonna win over any newbs but it’s fresh meat for the faithful. More importantly, “Hell,” “Untidy Creature,” “Hunt You Down,” “Small Finds,” and “Say It Like You Mean It” prove they’ve still got titanic choruses and, uh, titanic rock in their post-Janet years.
What Have They Done for You Lately: “Six Mistakes” still executes what Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker do best: howling like hell over short-circuiting post-Woods distortion lured into a shockingly sweet chorus via Brownstein’s patented labyrinthine guitar lines.
19. Speedy Ortiz
(Photo by Shervin Lainez)
From: Northampton, MA
Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2024: Sadie Dupuis has been weaving her labyrinthine poesy and quixotic axe alchemy into the perfect stitch for more than a decade, growing knottier and complexer within the staunch verse/chorus/verse format than anyone since…Carl Newman? Except where the New Pornographers set up these Rube Goldberg machines to detonate a hook explosion, Dupuis’ wild harmonic sense and star-crossed leads reward themselves, even if you can occasionally sing along with broken phrasing like “you better buck me off.” Last year’s Rabbit Rabbit sounded too dense until I got the full picture at once; now it’s her best album but you already knew that.
What Have They Done for You Lately: Why not name the skittering single “You S02” after the second season of Penn Badgley’s goofy killer show?
18. Les Savy Fav
(Photo via P Squared)
From: New York, NY
Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2024: Because this impossibly high-energy troupe of dancepunks is at their peak when they’re on a comeback tear. They’ve never sounded better than on 2007’s reassuring Let’s Stay Friends, but OUI, LSF, their first album in 14 years comes closest, especially when they deploy horns. Opens by literally sounding the alarm (“I’m looking for some kind of savior but no one’s coming around”) and closes on a shocking note of hope (“I hope someday we can say we were there when the world got great”). Quotes LL Cool J in between. And their shows are a must; catch them on tour before Tim Harrington’s too old to knock you over.
What Have They Done for You Lately: In just over two cacophonous minutes, “What We Don’t Don’t Want” packs everything great about their anxious riffs and rhythms into squawking new-wave heaven.
17. The Beths
From: Auckland, New Zealand
Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2024: That dog. The Reputation. Allo’ Darlin. Standard Fare. The Beths. I thought it was happening again — another fully realized song band (usually fronted by someone named Elizabeth) making peace with cultdom or less, quietly going into the night after album two or three, after being too twee or too female or who knows for radio. Nope; the Beths are skyrocketing like Rilo Kiley instead, which makes sense since Jonathan Pearce is as major a guitarist as Blake Sennett and ringleader Elizabeth Stokes is quickly gaining on Jenny Lewis.
What Have They Done for You Lately: Topping the Beths’ three delightful albums are the two most astonishing rock songs of the 2020s thus far, one for sound (sparks fly off of “Silence Is Golden” like nothing I’ve ever heard from this lane, arena-twee?) and one where Stokes matches every invincible chord change with a perfect turn of phrase (“Expert in a Dying Field,” which is no doubt more poignant for the journalists and song bands among us).
16. Kvelertak
From: Stavanger, Norway
Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2024: Norwegian metal unit unveils “1985” in 2016, a full-on Care Bear stare of triple-harmonized guitar candy that screams one-off novelty, loses their singer, takes it off the setlist (darn), can only be going back to focusing on gray-black chug, right? Absolutely the fuck not. I stupidly missed 2023’s Endling, now one of the most consistently engaging throwback-rock albums I’ve ever heard in my entire life. Sure, new singer still barks and grunts but this is ‘70s and ‘80s Flying V memorabilia music of the highest order, colorful and dynamic without ever getting its wires too tangled in prog.
What Have They Done for You Lately: What kind of cheese-rock warriors swipe “Endling” from Hüsker Dü’s “Don’t Want to Know If You Are Lonely?”
15. The Smile
From: Oxfordshire/London, U.K.
Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2024: Because it’s Radiohead’s two virtuosos in a band that doesn’t actually make them miserable. Because, somehow, jazz-cut sticksman Tom Skinner actually often steals the show. Because Thom Yorke hangs back a bit to just adorn the lopsided grooves. Because Jonny Greenwood has never, ever played guitar like this. Because the people who’ve had you wondering if Radiohead’s ever gonna make another record for almost a decade now, much less crank up a guitar again, have now done both in this unit three times in three years.
What Have They Done for You Lately: “Zero Sum,” what the fuck even is that? “Born Under Punches” meets Mega Man III?
14. Pylon Reenactment Society
From: Athens, GA
Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2024: X aren’t the only grandmasters of 1983 punk come to play another day. Now 68, Vanessa Briscoe Hay picks up right where Gyrate and Chomp left off with the Reenactment Society, who cut their teeth on straight Pylon covers for a decade before generating the fierce new originals on Magnet Factory from the same onomatopoeic, angular spirit.
What Have They Done for You Lately: Original recipe Pylon would’ve killed for the wondrous Kate Pierson duet “Fix It.” Or, come to think of it, any of Magnet Factory’s bass-anchored stompers.
13. High on Fire
From: Oakland, CA
Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2024: Perhaps supplanting Mastodon (wouldn’t know, never gotten them) and Baroness (not sufficiently kvlt so I’ve heard) as metal’s all-purpose one-size-fits-all band of choice, HoF are not just heavier but have only gotten better over a quarter century, a rare thing to happen to anyone in any genre. I just call them our Motörhead, though even those demisatans didn’t expand into Turkish folk music like their ninth and greatest album does. If only it wasn’t titled Cometh the Storm and fronted by a conspiracy theorist, they could be proudly top-tenned.
What Have They Done for You Lately: It’ll be another 25 years before I hear fuzz tone as sizzling as “Burning Down” wedded to a riff that nasty.
12. The Tubs
From: Cardiff, Wales, U.K.
Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2024: The best twee-punk band you’ve heard since the last twee-punk band you heard, Joanna Gruesome, who shut down after 2015’s superb Peanut Butter and became… [checks notes] oh, the Tubs.
What Have They Done for You Lately: Their 2023 debut album Dead Meat kicks dicks for 26 minutes, but they do the whole Flying Nun jangle-scene (not to mention Joanna Gruesome) extra-proud on “I Don’t Know How It Works,” an ultra-catchy corker worthy of the Vaselines.
11. Pissed Jeans
(Photo by Ebru Yildiz)
From: Allentown, PA
Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2024: Take it from someone who didn’t like or get this sludge-punk band at all other than the optics of singing about ice cream and the male gaze. Half Divorced continues their thoughtful, downright woke misanthropies with a new focus on pleasurable riffsmanship and the occasional singsong hook if you think “TV Party.” Somehow it’s one of the best albums of the year before you even follow along with lyrics hating on helicopter parents, so-called sapiosexuals, and being “Sixty-Two Thousand Dollars in Debt.”
What Have They Done for You Lately: No aficionado of Greg Ginn’s shredding should go another minute and a half without hearing “Clinging to a Poisoned Dream,” and Ginn could learn something from their parenting, too.
10. Wussy
(Photo by Jon Calderas and Lisa Walker)
From: Cincinnati, OH
Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2024: We are friends, but I have not heard any of Wussy’s purported slew of comeback recordings. Still, if the lovely bits and pieces previewed at Chuck Cleaver and Lisa Walker’s duo shows and livestreams over their pandemic-era hiatus are any indication, we’re in for something much bigger and more grounding than where America’s best Neil/Lucinda/Stipe hybrid left off on 2018’s What Heaven Is Like.
What Have They Done for You Lately: This Walker demo of “Indiana Wants Me Too” spins that plaintive melody in circles ‘til it feels damn hymnal, and I have a feeling the upcoming Great Divide is going somewhere even more celestial.
9. Big Thief
(Photo by Sacha Lecca via Rolling Stone)
From: Brooklyn, NY
Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2024: Well, besides the fact they parted with the (prob) Zionist guy, their albums have only gotten better and better since the first bowed with 2017’s prophetically titled Masterpiece and their longest, most pretentious bid Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You won as big as it swung — it’ll be considered their real masterpiece until (gulp) their next one. And Adrianne Lenker tossed off a hell of a solo album (this year’s hushed beaut Bright Future) in between without breaking a sweat.
What Have They Done for You Lately: As fantastic as Dragon was, the tastes we’ve gotten of the Thief’s next LP are are as frighteningly powerful as any record they’ve already released, especially the volcanic “Vampire Empire.”
8. Alvvays
From: Charlottetown, Canada
Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2024: Put a pin in that stuff about the Beths, etc. being all-songs-no-frills for a moment. Alvvays took their time crafting spotless perfection in their songs a decade ago and especially on 2017’s underrated Antisocialites. But then they took five meticulous years to blow the sonics up widescreen for 2022’s critically beloved Blue Rev: Johnny Marr jangle, Kevin Shields glide, production galore. Molly Rankin’s songwriting and even her voice rose to the challenge of bigger crescendos (“Easy on Your Own?”) and wittier lyrics (“Pomeranian Spinster”). God, what a gorgeous record. Shouting out Tom Verlaine doesn’t hurt, either.
What Have They Done for You Lately: Almost every minute of Blue Rev is a stunner but the billion-tracked harmonies of “Many Mirrors” might be the purest ecstasy you can extract from a rock song in the first half of the 2020s.
7. The Chisel
From: London, U.K.
Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2024: Gutter punks proffering post-oi perfection for two great albums running, their credos are their choruses: “No Gimmicks,” “Fuck ‘Em” “Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet.” Their secret weapon is Chubby and the Gang’s Charles Manning-Walker on explosive anthemic constructions like “Cry Your Eyes Out” and “Cuts Like a Knife” that skew surprisingly poppy. I caught both the Chisel and Rancid live this year and Rancid better watch their backs.
What Have They Done for You Lately: Did I mention the fist-pumping “Cuts Like a Knife” winds down to a sparkling ‘80s keyboard coda? Just don’t tell Bryan Adams.
6. The Paranoid Style
From: Washington, D.C.
Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2024: For a decade, the smartest band on the block has been this hyper-referential D.C. unit carrying a torch for Stiff Records, Rosanne Cash, the dB’s (from which they recently kidnapped a lead guitarist), and whatever else you taped off college radio. Their albums have only gotten better and better, with this year’s The Interrogator winning them acclaim outside their cult; it’s only fitting that the Paranoids recently opened for the Hold Steady, the previous smartest hyper-referential band on the block to pass the baton. Print the legend.
What Have They Done for You Lately: We’re talking dozens of great, quotable songs here, including the one that prematurely lamented Pitchfork’s decisions over a Bo Diddley beat. But the Sir Douglas-channeling Tex-Mex glimmer of “Print the Legend” feels like one of the tallest triumphs in a competitive canon.
5. Militarie Gun
(Photo by James Richards IV)
From: Los Angeles, CA
Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2024: They’re signed to Roc Nation management. Post Malone, the man with the most Diamond-certified songs ever, is a megafan. And yet they sound like, to quote Tom Breihan, “Sugar if Bob Mould was an actual pro wrestler and not just a former WCW booker.” The best-case scenario yet from the hardcore-to-classic-alternative pipeline landed with nuclear impact on last year’s no-skips sugarbomb Life Under the Gun.
What Have They Done for You Lately: “Never Fucked Up Once” may be the classic singalong in disguise, but who can argue with “Do It Faster,” which the band has been playing several times in a row to close shows like they’re, well, the chairman of Roc Nation and the Kanye we actually miss?
4. Yo La Tengo
(Photo by Cheryl Dunn)
From: Hoboken, NJ
Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2024: Well, you should never bet against Yo La Tengo. Closing in on age 70, Ira Kaplan still strangles his instrument onstage when necessary, and his life partner Georgia Hubley still casts a spell of her drum parts with uncommon delicacy, while youngest blood James McNew at age 55 grounds their encyclopedic scope with brain-grabbing bass vamps like one in “Sinatra Drive Breakdown” that keynotes their best record in years. This Stupid World, which is every iota as soft and loud as you want it. Their shows are simply unmissable as mortality approaches, and their setlists are only getting more and more generous with the years. They all harmonize and phrase gently like pros not of this earth.
What Have They Done for You Lately: Not that they ever stopped, but “This Stupid World” is another swirling, feedback-laden, heart-pounding reminder that YLT are the calm inside an earth-swallowing vortex of their own design.
3. Gouge Away
(Photo by Rob Coons via Zero Cred)
From: Fort Lauderdale, FL
Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2024: At this point, it shouldn’t be a surprise that golden-age alternative rock and hardcore punk have been productive bedfellows in the 2020s, and despite a ton of adulation and scene fandom, even a band like Turnstile selling out their entire tour is still well behind, you know, next-Nirvana numbers in sales and ubiquity. But that doesn’t mean the floodgates aren’t gonna stay busted wide open for a long time. And my favorites are these Florida paint-peelers, who collapse disparate palettes like early Tool and late Unwound into a stunner like “Idealized” without a fleck of self-consciousness. Gouge Away’s addictive third effort Deep Sage dips its toes into everything from “Very Ape” (“The Sharpening”) to (you guessed it) a six-minute shoegaze sendoff (“Dallas”) and Christina Michelle sticks every landing.
What Have They Done for You Lately: Might as well spring for their catchiest song, “Maybe Blue,” whose bending swagger earns that Pixies hand-me-down moniker.
2. Wednesday
(Photo by Caroline Safran via Louder Than War)
From: Asheville, NC
Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2024: If Elizabeth Nelson is primed to take over for Craig Finn, then it’s a no-brainer that Karly Hartzman should be Patterson Hood. Not only does she literally name-check Drive-By Truckers in “Bath County” and honor the literary Southern rock tradition but her twang is coming in nicely, especially when framed by her ex MJ Lenderman’s chicken-fried Archers of Loaf guitar leads (“Bath County” also ends with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it Easter egg cribbed from “Wrong”). But Wussy aren’t necessarily ready to cede their grunge/country/shoegaze territory to these somewhat trickier youngins and I bet they can hold their own in a bloodbath. Me, I’m just glad to have the two of them. And Rat Saw God is a work of brilliance.
What Have They Done for You Lately: “Bull Believer” is a hell of an animal to capture, and Hartzman’s coughing up red by the end with every successive “finish him.” She has better melodies and much better lyrics, but those final four minutes are the heaviest rock and roll to be immortalized to tape in years. And she’ll reprise it in your city if you cheer loud enough.
1. Sheer Mag
(Photo by Natalie Piserchio)
From: Philadelphia, PA
Why You Should Give a Fuck in 2024: As classic rock without the misogyny, glam without the guilt, and punk without the antipathy towards virtuosity, Sheer Mag have been a progressive wet dream for Philadelphians, serious acolytes of riff-based rock, and others in the know since their introductory EPs kept topping themselves a decade ago. Their most leftist expressions (the anti-landlord “Fan the Flames,” the anti-oligarch “Expect the Bayonet”) are still their biggest movers live. But they’re simply Playing Favorites tonight. Sheer Mag’s finest record cements them as a world-class American jukebox, taking Slade to the roller disco and Chrissie Hynde to the country.
What Have They Done for You Lately: “Moonstruck?” “Mechanical Garden?” “All Lined Up?” You can start Playing Favorites from anywhere and get knocked out. Nostalgia moves are never, ever this good, and that’s because these brilliant songs have never been written before, not by the dozens of forebears who taught them these chops and moves. So they call dibs.