Best 2000s Alternative and Indie Songs
The best alternative songs of the 2000s (00s), ranked — each one links to the album it came from, on vinyl, CD or Amazon Music.
Reviewed by Callum Ashworth, 247 Album Verdict · Last updated · How we rank
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1RA
Everything in Its Right Place
The opening salvo — piano and electronics, utterly disorientating.
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2RA
How to Disappear Completely
Strings, Yorke's falsetto, the most beautiful Radiohead song.
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3ST
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4RA
Knives Out
The guitar pop song Thom Yorke buried in an experimental record, and the best on it.
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5SH
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6WI
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7IN
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8WS
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9YY
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10AF
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11AF
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12FF
Tap the artwork or "Listen" to find the track on Amazon Music; "Watch" opens a YouTube search; the song title or "Album" opens its album page. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases and sign-ups.
What made 2000s alternative different from 1990s alternative?
The 1990s were defined by grunge's raw, unpolished sound reacting against mainstream rock; the 2000s alternative scene split into several parallel revivals — garage-rock revivalists like The Strokes, dance-punk acts, and a wave of arena-scaled emo and post-hardcore — all loosely under the same umbrella but sonically quite different from each other.
Is this the same list as your indie/alternative list?
Our broader indie-alternative list spans the genre's full history across decades; this one narrows specifically to the 2000s, when garage-rock revival, dance-punk and blog-era indie all converged into one unusually dense stretch of guitar music.
Why does "blog rock" keep coming up around this era?
Music blogs became one of the decade's main tastemaking forces roughly from the mid-2000s onward, breaking bands well before radio or major labels caught on — it's a genuinely distinct discovery mechanism from prior decades and shaped which alternative acts of the era became critically canonised.
Does this list include post-punk revival bands?
Yes — the early-2000s post-punk revival (bands drawing directly on late-1970s/early-1980s post-punk's angular guitar sound) was one of the decade's defining alternative movements, running alongside garage rock and blog-rock indie as parallel scenes.