Best Indie and Alternative Songs of All Time
Jangle, shoegaze, post-punk and 2000s indie — 25 essential alternative songs, each from a catalogue album. Alternative started as a genuinely useful label — guitar music that existed outside major-label pop and mainstream rock radio — before the word eventually broadened to cover almost anything that wasn't chart pop. What ties this list together isn't a single sound so much as a shared instinct: melody and hooks delivered with more edge, more irony, or more emotional rawness than the mainstream was offering at the time. From The Smiths' literate melancholy through shoegaze's wall-of-guitar haze to the garage-rock revival of the early 2000s, these are the songs that defined each wave.
Reviewed by Callum Ashworth, 247 Album Verdict · Last updated · How we rank
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1SM
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2PI
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3RA
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4AF
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5ST
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6YY
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7IN
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8LS
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9VW
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10MB
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11CU
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12JD
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13PI
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14SY
Teen Age Riot
The feedback and the vision: the opening statement for a generation.
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15AF
Rebellion (Lies)
Win Butler's voice and the full-band catharsis that made indie rock epic.
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16ST
Last Nite
The guitar line borrowed from Tom Petty and the nonchalance that didn't care.
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17AM
Do I Wanna Know?
The riff and the swagger: the first truly global Arctic Monkeys moment.
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18VW
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19TI
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20CS
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21BT
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22MI
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What counts as "alternative" music, exactly?
The label started as a genuinely useful description — guitar music that existed outside major-label pop and mainstream rock radio — before broadening over the decades to cover almost anything not chart-pop. This list spans jangle-pop, post-punk, shoegaze and 2000s indie rock, since all of them were considered alternative at some point in their history.
Is this the same as indie rock?
Not quite — indie originally referred to a record's label (independent rather than major), while alternative described the sound and radio format. In practice the two labels overlap heavily today, and we use them together for this list rather than trying to draw an artificial line between them.
Why does this list lean so heavily on the 1980s and 2000s?
Those two decades mark alternative rock's two biggest creative surges — the 1980s post-punk and jangle-pop scenes that defined the term in the UK and US college radio circuit, and the mid-2000s indie rock boom that brought the genre back into mainstream conversation. We have decade-specific lists, including one for the 2000s specifically, if you want a narrower window.
How is this different from a "best rock songs" list?
Our rock list leans toward the genre's more mainstream, radio-dominant lineage — blues-rock, hard rock, arena rock. This list specifically covers the guitar music that positioned itself against that mainstream, whether through sound, label independence, or both.