You read that right: This is 90s "alt-pop," not "alt-rock." If alt-rock represented the commercialization of 80s indie-rock, then these artists represented the commercialization of alt-rock. These are the diluted descendants of Nirvana, Green Day, Beck, and other legit underground-to-mainstream crossovers, artists who didnt have to worry about selling out, because, with few exceptions, they had no indie cred to begin with. They were "alternative" only by virtue of existing in the 90s, when any rock act that wasnt Aerosmith was ostensibly "alternative." Theyre the artists who made Kurt Cobain roll over in his grave more vigorously than most.But if each of these songs represented a nail in the coffin of the freak-scene utopia that Neverminds success briefly promised, today they function as a portal to an equally distant and inaccessible realm: i.e., a more innocent pre-9/11 era, before our hearts were perpetually filled with despair over the state of the world, before social media was clogging our brains with a 24/7 dose of aggravation. Lets go back to a world where our sunshine never got stolen.

This post is part of our Psych 101 program, an in-depth, 14-part series that looks at the impact of psychedelia on modern music. Want to sign up to receive the other installments in your inbox? Go here. Already signed up and enjoying it? Help us get the word out by sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or just sending your friends this link. Theyll thank you. We thank you.Since its release on June 1, 1967, The Beatles Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band has been so overrated, its practically underrated. The albums reputation doesnt so much precede it as supersede it: Like the monoloth that periodically appears in 2001: A Space Odyssey to mark the crucial turning points in the evolution of human civilization, Sgt. Pepper has come to represent this massive, immovable talisman that looms untouchably over the course of modern pop history. Its emblematic of so many Big Events—the Summer of Love, the elevation of rock n roll into art, the embrace of the studio-as-instrument, Chris Martins more dubious wardrobe choices—that its easy to forget its a relatively compact, 39-minute record comprising 13 pop songs, only two of which go beyond four minutes, and some of which are pretty goofy.Sgt. Peppers oft-cited standing as rocks first concept album is somewhat overstated—its more like the blueprint for one, establishing the template (the opening vignettes, the scene-setting sound effects, the character role-play, the reprises, the grandest of finales) that contemporaries like The Pretty Things and The Who would later flesh out with proper narratives on S.F. Sorrow and Tommy, respectively. And for an album thats considered a watershed moment in psychedelic rock, Sgt. Pepper can be a stridently buttoned-up, old-fashioned record—for one, if its opening lyric is to be believed, its an album pining for the glory days of 1947. Many of its signature sounds—from the orchestral crescendos and harpsichord flourishes to the sitar drones and tabla grooves—were produced by instruments that have existed for hundreds of years. It’s an album full of loving odes to police officers, the eldery, and circus sideshows. Its most pointed examination of teenage rebellion—“She’s Leaving Home”—is sung from the perspective of the weeping parents who’ve suddenly turned into empty nesters.But Sgt. Peppers great achievement is how it made such quaint sources and subject matter sound utterly surreal. It’s a postcard portrait of a bygone England as rendered by Dali. And thanks to its cinematic 360-degree sound design, it was the closest you could get in 1967 to strapping on a VR headset. While Sgt. Pepper may have presented The Beatles as a surrogate band—granting successors like David Bowie and Elton John the license to create their ownalter-egos—the album didn’t so much teach other artists how to step into character as how to step outside their prescribed roles and processes. It showed rock bands they could still exist as rock bands even after they got bored of making rock music.And yet, for all the fundamental sea changes that Sgt. Pepper’s represents, it’s an album that has been perpetually plundered for simple musical ideas as much as grand philosophical ones. It’s actually the rare record that was already influential before it was even completed: While making their debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, down the hall at Abbey Road, the members of Pink Floyd listened in as The Beatles recorded “Lovely Rita” and imported some of its sonic techniques to “Pow R. Toc H,” which plays like an abstract instrumental remix. Following Sgt. Peppers release, pretty much every ’60s rock band of note was hiring an orchestra, polishing off a trumpet, or learning the sitar to embellish their own magnum opus. Soul singers like Otis Redding and Stevie Wonder were inspired to leave traditional R&B behind to explore more musically expansive and emotionally introspective songwriting. And outsider acts like The United States of America were pushing Sgt. Pepper’s sound-collage ethos into more avant-garde terrain.By the early ‘70s, Sgt. Pepper’s ornamental essence could be felt in the theatrical prog of Genesis, the avant-glam of Brian Eno and Sparks, and the chamber-pop detours of iconoclasts like John Cale and Big Star’s Alex Chilton. And though punk momentarily put a moratorium on lavish rock records, Sgt. Pepper’s ideas would be imported into the alternative-rock arena through art-pop eccentrics like the Soft Boys and XTC. In the ’90s, Sgt. Pepper spawned the most bloated of Britpop anthems, gave lo-fi dreamers like The Olivia Tremor Control the confidence to go widescreen on a Super-8 budget, and led grunge stalwarts like Soundgarden and Stone Temple Pilots on a yellow-bricked path to the pop charts. And around the turn of the millennium, Sgt. Pepper’s heady textures and lockstep Ringo rhythms began seeping into the dance tent thanks to artists like the Chemical Brothers, The Avalanches, and Caribou.At this point, it’s hard to even think of Sgt. Pepper as a Beatles album. It’s a readymade toolkit for any band that’s attempting to go “serious,” whether it’s the New Kids on the Block hot-stepping around trilling trumpets on “Tonight” or Panic! At the Disco outfitting their arena-sized emo with bouncing-ball piano lines on “Nine in the Afternoon.” But Sgt. Pepper is so overflowing with ear candy that its tiniest details have been spun into songs by artists who aren’t even attempting to make their own Sgt. Pepper. While the lift-off section of Bowie’s “Space Oddity” is clearly modeled after the symphonic tornado of “A Day in the Life,” Elliott Smith’s “Colorbars” keyed in on the windswept, shuffling piano chords that The Beatles used to lure us into the storm. The clipped one-note guitar stabs of “Getting Better” power Sloan’s “Everything You’ve Done Wrong” and Ween’s “Even If You Don’t,” while the same song’s droning fuzz-chord finale reverberates through both the pristine power pop of Badfinger’s “No Matter What” and the mouldy-basement murk of Guided by Voices’ “2nd Moves to Twin.” Even songs coming from completely different worlds gradually reveal their debt—Nine Inch Nails’ “Disappointed” may begin as tense minimal techno, but it eventually opens up to accommodate wondrous string-section sweeps that harken back to George Harrison’s sitar-spun Sgt. Pepper centerpiece “Within You, Without You.”Fifty years on from Sgt. Peppers release, its nigh impossible to imagine another rock album ever being so central to the pop-cultural conversation again. And in the 21st century, the standard for masterpiece records has shifted away from Sgt. Peppers studio-sculpted perfection to sonically chaotic, emotionally fraught albums—be it Kid A or To Pimp a Butterfly—that grapple with the anxieties of modern life rather than provide a fantastical escape from them. But while the impact of Sgt. Peppers glorious collision of rock n roll, classical, psychedelia, Indian music, barnyard sounds, and proto-Pro Tools tape-splice construction is felt less acutely today, it nonetheless continues to reverberate out into distant realms. This playlist reveals at least 50 ways that Sgt. Pepper taught bands to play, riding the ebb and flow of its influence from the late-60s to today.

As was the case with most 60s-rock survivors, the 1980s were not kind to Paul McCartney. Despite ushering in the decade with a pair of blockbusterduets, by 1986s Press to Play, hed hit a commercial and critical nadir, and an artist who once set the pace for rock n roll innovation was stalled in the middle of road. But McCartney eventually wiggled his way out by reminding himself of a lesson that served him well during his Beatles years: He always does his most inspired work with a foil.For 1989s Flowers in the Dirt, he tapped the songwriting smarts of Elvis Costello. Alas, Costello proved not to be Maccas new Lennon—plans for a full-album collaboration were eventually whittled down to a handful of co-writes. (The trove of stripped-down, Elvis-assisted demos featured on Flowers 2017 reissue reveals the album that couldve been.) But the Costello experiment seemed to open McCartney up to more collaborations that would push him outside his usual comfort zone. The most surprising of these was The Fireman, a union with ex-Killing Joke bassist Youth that began in the early 90s as an anonymous ambient-techno project, but reemerged on 2008s Electric Arguments as a cinematically scaled pop group that imagined an alternate 80s where McCartney started taking notes from U2. But The Fireman wasnt even his most outré detour—that honor belongs to Liverpool Sound Collage, a beat-spliced, found-sound curio created with members of Super Furry Animals. And then theres "Cut Me Slack," a 2012 one-off with the surviving members of Nirvana that pushed McCartney toward his "Helter Skelter" heaviest.Alas, these diversions may have been too sporadic to bolster McCartneys long-standing campaign to reclaim the "cool Beatle" status that has long been conferred to John Lennon. After all, in between these side projects, McCartney continued to release solo records of varying quality that captured him in his familiar modes: the piano balladeer, the farmhouse folkie, the Little Richard-schooled rocker. But even his most forgettable albums from the past three decades—like 1993s Off the Ground—feature displays of his melodic mastery (in that case, the golden, slumberous serenade "Winedark Open Sea"). And occasionally, hes let his eccentric streak bleed into his proper albums, like on the epic Driving Rain blowout "Rinse the Raindrops," or the art-pop oddity "Mr. Bellamy" from Memory Almost Full.It says a lot about McCartneys enduring songcraft and capacity for curveballs that his most popular single ever—judging by the nine-digit Spotify streaming numbers, at least—came more than 50 years into his incomparable career. Sure, having both Rihanna and Kanye West sing on it will help boost the stats. And yet, that unlikely but carefree collaboration perfectly crystallizes the latter-day work of an artist whos still pulling from a bottomless well of pretty tunes, but is always four, five seconds from wilding.

Back in the mid-‘80s, Geffen Records sued Neil Young for not sounding like himself, because they couldn’t handle the fact he was just being himself. Ever since he followed up his biggest album (1972’s Harvest) with his bleakest (1974’s On the Beach), Neil has endured as the world’s most reluctant rock star: unpredictable, contrarian, always zagging when everyone—his label, his fans, even his bandmates—would prefer to zig. And though he answered his infamously eclectic ‘80s discography by more eagerly embracing an elder-statesman role in the ‘90s—whether producing sequels to his ‘70s classics or coronating his godfather-of-grunge status—his post-2000s work has struck a wobbly balance between crowd-pleasing classicism and unfettered eccentricity.Sure, there’s nothing in Neil’s recent canon as stylistically outré as 1982’s synth-pop experiment Trans, or as self-consciously cheeky as 1983’s Everybody’s Rockin’. But he has reframed his traditional acoustic/electric modes with high-concept hijinks, be it the eco-themed concept album Greendale or the sepia-toned recording-booth crackle of A Letter Home. Even as his work has turned more impulsively political—see: 2006’s Dubya-dissing Living With War—the rage has been tempered with a healthy dose of whimsy (which, in that album’s case, took the form of amateur choirs and cavalry horns). And often, his post-2000 output has toed the line between audacious and ridiculous: The previous four decades of epic guitar jams feel like mere warm-ups for 2012’s “Driftin’ Back,” which churns and drones for over 27 minutes. Next to that, the 18-minute grunge-blues grind “Ordinary People” feels like a pop single.As that latter song exemplifies, a playlist of 21st-century Neil Young songs needs to come with some asterisks—“Ordinary People” was actually recorded with his brassy bar band The Bluenotes in 1988, but didn’t see the light of day until 2006’s Chrome Dreams II (with the carbon-dating Lee Iacocca reference intact). Neil has regularly dipped into his fabled stash of unreleased ‘70s and ‘80s-era songs on his post-millennial records, at times strategically deploying them like a game-saving immunity idol on Survivor. The otherwise slight 2000 album Silver and Gold climaxes with the stunning mid-‘70s holdover “Razor Love,” which mediates between his gentle Harvest hits and his hazy-headed Ditch Trilogy. And Neil’s best album of this century—the Daniel Lanois-produced solo-electric opus Le Noise—centers around the chilling travelogue “Hitchhiker,” another mid-‘70s obscurity that resurfaced in its original acoustic form when Neil released his “lost” 1976 album of the same name in the summer of 2017. In typically inscrutable Youngian psychology, navigating the 21st-century sometimes requires taking a journey through the past.

Released in August 1997, Be Here Now was Oasis very own Titanic—a too-big-to-fail colossus that ultimately turned Britpops leading light into a sinking ship (one that was no doubt weighed down by nine laborious minutes of "All Around the World"). Granted, eight million copies sold worldwide hardly constitutes a disaster, and the band would continue to fill arenas and headline festivals worldwide until their 2009 dissolution. But after the world-beating triumphalism of 1994s Definitely Maybe and 1995s Whats the Story Morning Glory?, the infamously coke-bloated Be Here Now marked the moment when Oasis ceased to be a dominant pop-cultural force, precipitating a decade-long slide through a series of increasingly formulaic, interchangeable albums. Seemingly bereft of any inspiration beyond Abbey Road, the band spent their last decade cloning their old warhorses into inbred offspring ("Stop Crying Your Heart Out" is essentially "Slide Away" given the "Wonderwall" treatment), and at a certain point, it seemed like they couldnt even be arsed to come up with fresh song titles (Ill see your "Roll With It" and raise you a "Roll It Over"). Unlike their one-time peers in Radiohead and Blur, there was never a concerted attempt at reinvention, never an embrace of outré influences that could steer them into a new creative phase. Oasis were arguably the first massive, generation-defining rock band to become an oldies act by their third record.But while songwriter Noel Gallagher effectively played all his chips on the bands first two albums (and their equally top-notch B-sides) like a Vegas gambler who thought his luck would never run out, the bands post-Morning Glory catalog still yielded a handful of keepers in between all the lugubrious power ballads, bloozy filler, and Beatles Rock Band karaoke tracks. And rarely were these songs the lead singles—for all its overwrought, helicopter-powered bombast, "DYou Know What I Mean?" coasts on a repetitious, undercooked chorus that wouldnt passed muster on their first two albums, while on perfunctory would-be anthems like "Go Let It Out," "The Hindu Times" and "Lyla," Oasis sound like theyre content to just hit the first 30 rows of Wembley rather than the bleachers. Instead, this playlist focusses on those rare tracks where Oasis still exuded the hunger and swagger of a band that anointed themselves rock n roll stars on the first song on their first record ("I Hope I Think I Know," "The Shock of the Lightning"); the simple acoustic sing-alongs that stripped away all the ego and excess ("Songbird," "She Is Love"); and the tentative toe-dips into experimental psychedelia ("The Turning," "To Be Where Theres Life") that they sadly didnt pursue any further.On one of Be Here Nows superior tracks, Liam Gallagher declares, "Its getting better, man!"—and, unfortunately, as their post-1997 discography proves, it really didnt. But even if Oasis last five albums didnt yield nearly as many classics as their first two, there are definitely, maybe enough quality choons here to inspire a spritzer supernova.

To say Grant Hart lived a hard life is a gross understatement. With 80s noise-pop pioneers Husker Dü, he played the misfit McCartney to Bob Moulds lacerating Lennon, providing the honey chaser to his partners hoarse-throat howls. But just when the band seemed on the verge of following R.E.M. out of the college-radio fringes and into the mainstream, Hart was waylaid by a heroin addiction, not to mention an HIV diagnosis (which ultimately proved to be false). Following the bands extremely acrimonious break-up, Hart gradually faded into obscurity, releasing a small handful of under-the-radar records while Mould enjoyed a steady, successful career as an alt-rock elder statesman. Recent years had been especially trying: Hart lost both parents in quick succession, and he was injured in a fire that destroyed his longtime family home in South St. Paul. And then 2017 brought the diagnosis of the kidney cancer that ultimately claimed him on September 14 at the age of 56.But throughout Harts many trials and tribulations, he never lost the gifts for swooning melody and psychedelized experimentation that made Hüsker Dü the most adventurous band in 80s indie rock. Just when you had counted him out—or even completely forgotten about him—hed blindside you with the dizzying fuzz-pop of 1999s Good News for the Modern Man, the frayed-nerve garage-rock of 2009s Hot Wax (recorded with members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor), or the cinematic grandeur of 2013s Milton-inspired concept album, The Argument, a record that deserves to go down as his career-capping masterpiece.With this playlist, we pay tribute to the man who forged the Dave Grohl prototype of the shit-hot drummer who also a tender tunesmith, beginning with Harts greatest Hüsker Dü hits (including the peak-era duet with Mould on "Flip Your Wig"), and then on through his short-lived early 90s combo Nova Mob*, and his increasingly sporadic, exceedingly underrated solo work.* Note: Nova Mobs 1994 self-titled second album isnt available on Spotify.

Over the past few years, 1990s nostalgia has assumed many forms: Twin Peaks reboots, Trainspotting sequels, Tupac holograms, the ubiquity of A Tribe Called Quest and The Pharcyde on hipster-taco-joint playlists. But while we’ve grown accustomed to 20-year retro cycles reviving the sounds and iconography of our youth, there’s one seemingly outmoded 1990s phenomenon that’s made a surprising comeback: All your favorite indie-rock bands are signing to major labels again.The great promise of the internet was it rendered the traditional music industry unnecessary and irrelevant. Independent bands could mobilize their audiences online, while small labels could get music out to wider audiences than before. Certainly, the early-2000s ascent of bands like Arcade Fire and Spoon seemed to reinforce the idea that ambitious artists no longer had to trade up to a major record label in order to connect with a mass audience. The internet—and all the alternative media and new distribution channels it introduced—could provide a back road to stardom that allowed bands to bypass the usual soul-destroying music-industry machinations.Fast forward to 2017 and it seems that line of thinking has gone the way of the mp3 blog. Arcade Fire’s latest album, Everything Now, was released through Columbia Records, whose roster also now includes ex-indie darlings LCD Soundsystem, Vampire Weekend, and Amber Coffman (formerly of Dirty Projectors). The War on Drugs’ A Deeper Understanding bears the Atlantic Records logo. Death From Above 1979 just released Outrage Is Now!, their second record for Warner Bros. Grizzly Bear left Warp Records for RCA. So why are established indie acts more willing to make the leap these days? The most plausible explanation is these artists need major-label resources to retain visibility in the streaming era, just as their 90s forbears needed them to land rack placement at Walmart. But if the end goal—greater exposure and, ideally, revenue—is the same as it ever was, one aspect has changed: These days, when a beloved indie-rock band signs to a major label, no one bats an eye—if they even notice at all.Thirty years ago, signing to a major label wasn’t a mere gamble; it was an ideological purity test. By its very definition, indie rock drew a line in the sand between those who were committed to a self-sustaining musical ecosystem free of corporate interference, and those who were willing to ingratiate themselves to the marketplace. In courting a wider audience through a major-label deal, an aspiring band would effectively have to say goodbye to a chunk of their core fanbase, who would reflexively write them off on principle. Tellingly, writer Michael Azerrad’s ’80s indie-rock-history bible Our Band Could Be Your Life concludes the chapters on its major-label-bound subjects once they trade up, reinforcing the widely held belief those artists made their best music while on indies.However, Sonic Youth’s 1990 signing to DGC effectively heralded a new era where upgrading to a major came to be seen as a savvy, insurrectionary career move (and Steve Albini will never forgive them for it). Among the bands to follow their lead was, of course, Nirvana, and after their 1991 DGC debut, Nevermind, became the biggest rock album in the world, the hand-wringing over corporations co-opting the underground only turned more intense, as more and more major-label A&R reps infiltrated clubs to hand out business cards—and more and more indie bands actually called them back. To read the alternative-music press in the 1990s was essentially to be subjected to an endless series of articles featuring artists mulling over the choice between selling out or staying put. Before long, holdouts like Fugazi, and Superchunk were vastly outnumbered by the peers who signed on the dotted line. And if the majors couldn’t sign Pavement, they’d just scoop up a band that sounded exactly like them (hello, Sammy!).Sure enough, none of these ‘90s major-label hopefuls came close to putting up Nirvana numbers. And predictably, many of their stories proved to be cautionary tales—following their one ‘n’ done stints on a major, bands like The Jesus Lizard and Archers of Loaf unceremoniously returned to indie-land and never regained their footing, before eventually petering out. For the likes of Superdrag or Hum, the best they could hope for was to score their 15 minutes on 120 Minutes (or 30 in the case of Urge Overkill). Others, like Texan psych-rockers Sixteen Deluxe, simply went from obscurity to, well, even more obscurity.But in hindsight, there’s as much reason to celebrate the ‘90s major-label feeding frenzy as bemoan it. The moment yielded generational touchstones (Hole’s Live Through This) and cult classics (Drive Like Jehu’s Yank Crime) alike. It saw bands acquiring the means to boldly embrace their true calling—see: Cornershop’s evolution from Merge Records noise merchants to the sitar-psych visionaries of Woman’s Gotta Have It, or Shudder to Think stepping out as a math-rock Queen on Pony Express Record. For the likes of The Posies and The Melvins, it provided just enough over-ground exposure to nurture loyal fanbases that have stayed with them for decades. Or in the exceptional case of The Flaming Lips, it led to a long, wildly unpredictable evolution that continues on Warner Bros. to this day.This playlist is a chronological collection of 50-plus major-label dice-rolls from ‘90s, perhaps the last moment in music history when A&R reps gazed upon artists as inherently strange as Ween and Daniel Johnston with dollar signs in their eyes. (Alas, some of the more curious artefacts of the era—like Boredoms’ Pop Tatari, or Royal Trux’s Thank You, or The Geraldine Fibbers’ Lost Somewhere Between the Earth and My Home—aren’t available on Spotify.) The songs here span Sonic Youth’s Goo to Modest Mouse’s Sony debut The Moon and Antarctica—which technically came out in 2000, but feels like a perfect capper to the ’90s era that birthed them (and a prelude to the early-2000s web-abetted indie uprising that spurred their biggest success). So now, with all due respect to Sebadoh: gimme corporate rock!

After the 1980 death of John Bonham brought Led Zeppelin to a crashing halt, Robert Plant honored his band’s legacy by letting go of it. After all, the ultimate way to respect what Zeppelin accomplished—and Bonham’s crucial, inimitable contributions to it—was to lay the band to rest, and make no attempts to recapture their uncommon alchemy and ungodly roar with some ringer. (And when you consider The Who’s middling post-Keith Moon albums from the early ‘80s, who could blame him.) So on his first couple of solo records, Plant remodeled himself for the ‘80s, the shirtless golden god of old reborn as a suave, tidily coiffed, synth-pop sophisticate, leaving the blooze-metal regurgitation to the Whitesnakes and Kingdom Comes of the world. But by 1987’s Now and Zen, the specter of Plant’s former band had become unavoidable—not only did Jimmy Page guest on the hot-rod-revving single “Tall Cool One,” the song climaxed with a barrage of Zeppelin samples. And through 1990’s Manic Nirvana and 1993’s Fate of Nations, Plant tried to put a modernist spin on Zeppelinesque bombast, before just saying “fuck it” and hooking up with Page for a reunion that yielded an MTV Unplugged special and an album of new originals, 1998’s Steve Albini-produced Walking Into Clarksdale.But while he spent the first two decades of his solo career running away from his musical legacy and then gradually inching back toward it, Plant has spent the 21st century establishing a new one. Starting with 2002’s Dreamland, Plant has seemed less like a solo artist fronting hired guns who are not Led Zeppelin, and more like a co-pilot taking direction from an amorphous cast of intriguing collaborators, including bluegrass queen Alison Krauss (his partner on 2007’s Grammy Award-winning Raising Sand) and folk-rock veteran Patti Griffin (with whom he communed—professionally and, for a time, romantically—on 2010’s Cajun-cooked Band of Joy). And then there’s his recurring backing band the Sensational Space Shifters (formerly Strange Sensation), an exploratory, stylistically dextrous ensemble centered around guitarists Justin Adams (who’s played with Jah Wobble and Brian Eno) and Liam Tyson (formerly of Britpop chancers Cast), bassist Bill Fuller (also of Geoff Barrow’s Krautrockin’ trio Beak), and a pair of Portishead associates, John Baggot (synths) and Clive Deamer (drums).Collectively, these musicians have encouraged Plant to dig deeper into Zeppelin’s roots—American blues, British folk, Middle Eastern textures—but instead of blowing them up to into a proto-metal pomp, they throw them into a frying pan and melt them down into a mercurial elixir that’s reformulated in fascinating ways. That’s not to say he doesn’t occasionally get the Led out—the 2005 track “Tin Pan Alley” may be steeped in eerie Radiohead-esque atmospherics, but it eventually explodes into a Viking wail that echoes back to “Immigrant Song.” However, for the most part, Plant is entirely at home in his lower register, turning in some of the most graceful, beautifully understated performances of his career on the piano ballad “A Stolen Kiss” and the jangle-pop gem “House of Love.” And we’ve seen greater evidence of the ravenous record collector who’s fond of chatting up his current musical obsessions in interviews. Plant’s post-millennial catalog is loaded with exceptional covers, from an apocalyptic interpretation of the traditional gospel spiritual “Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down” to the dreamy drift through Low’s “Silver Rider” to a reverential reading of Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren” that suggests Plant is well familiar with This Mortal Coil’s definitive version.The shadow of Led Zeppelin will forever loom large over Plant’s career, and so long as Plant, Page, and John Paul Jones are all still alive, murmurs of a reunion will refuse to die. But as Plant sets out for another voyage with the Sensational Space Shifters on his new album Carry Fire, let’s celebrate the 21st-century renaissance of an artist who should be regarded alongside Bowie, Peter Gabriel, and Neil Young as one of the most restlessly adventurous artists of his generation.

On October 18, 2017, Canadian rock band The Tragically Hip received more American-media attention in a single day than they had in their entire 30-year career. There was the front-page placement in The New York Times’ Arts section, an extended feature at Rolling Stone, and an essay on Vulture, to name a few. Sadly, the newsfeed blitz wasnt spurred by a new album release or some reissue that triggered an overdue reappraisal of the Hip’s back catalog—the band’s lead singer, Gord Downie, had passed away at age 53 from brain cancer, unleashing a tsunami-sized outpouring of tears across Canada that couldnt help but seep into newsrooms south of border.Of course, posthumous appreciation for unsung artists is a storied rock n roll tradition. But the sight of Downie’s photo in major U.S. publications was especially bittersweet, given that so much of the Hip’s history was tied up in their inability to translate their decades-long domination of Canadian rock radio into widespread stateside success. North of the border, the band are unimpeachable icons, with nine No. 1 albums, 16 Juno Awards, and six million records sold (in a country of 30 million people where sales of just 100,000 earns you a platinum disc). They’re the sort of band whose songs you know verbatim even if you’ve never owned one of their records—because when you grow up in Canada, an encyclopedic knowledge of The Tragically Hip catalog is just something you naturally acquire, like a regional accent, or an inferiority complex.Sure, their fist-pumped riffs made them the go-to band for backward-baseball-capped bros across the land, yet as Downie’s latent eccentricities came to the fore, he became a magnet for misfits as well. The Hips songs have been covered by pop stars and punk bands and name-checked in rap tracks; even the 6 God bows before the Gord. When Downie publicly revealed his cancer diagnosis in the spring of 2016, the Hip embarked on a final cross-Canada arena tour that summer, the final show of which—on August 20, in the band’s hometown of Kingston, Ontario—was broadcast live by national broadcaster the CBC, was attended by Prime Minister/super-fan Justin Trudeau, and sparked massive public-viewing tailgate parties from coast to coast. I half expect that date to eventually become a new statutory holiday up here.Trying to explain the Hip to Americans is something of a parlor game for Canadians, one whose goalposts have shifted over the years. Initially, they were sort of like Crazy Horse fronted by an extra-spastic Michael Stipe, or a Rolling Stones greased by Midnight Oil. Then they became more like a hoser Pearl Jam, and in their later years, a Canuck cousin to Wilco. (Lately, I’ve come to think of them as a proto-National.) And in terms of celebrity stature, Downie was effectively our Springsteen, but with the jean jacket and bandana replaced by a hockey jersey and toque. He was a rock star with blue-collar blood, whose intimate portraits of Canadian life could stir a patriotic fervor with a simple small-town namedrop.But Downie’s hyper-specific local references and invocations of obscure Canadian history were probably as impenetrable to casual American listeners as, say, Mike Skinner’s bloke-speak. The closest the Hip came to breaching the border was in 1995, when, at the insistence of host/fellow Ontarian Dan Aykroyd, the band appeared as the musical guests on Saturday Night Live—a performance watched with bated breath across the nation like parents at a child’s first piano recital. Alas, the Monday-morning sales spike wasn’t to be. Never quite angry and abrasive enough for the post-Nirvana age, but too cerebral for the Black Crowes blues-rock/jam-band set, the Hip would resign themselves to being the biggest band in Canada, and Canada only.It certainly didnt help that The Tragically Hip came up in a pre-internet age when being a Canadian musician made you tragically unhip, long before the web-boosted likes of Arcade Fire, Drake, Grimes, et al. cemented the countrys international cachet. But where that lack of American recognition always seemed to append the Hip’s considerable legacy with an asterisk, over the years, it’s become more a point of pride. In a country whose pop-cultural identity has historically been caught in a tug-of-war between our patronizing parents in the U.K. and our boorish big brother south of the border, the Hip’s contained domestic success affirmed that there is, in fact, an ineffable Canadian sensibility that exists independently of our superpower relations. And in Downie, we had a uniquely Canadian rock star—which is to say, someone too humble and self-effacing and peculiar to ever fully embrace the job.Downie always seemed uncomfortable with the flag-waving hysteria the Hip’s music inspired, and seemed eager to steer their music beyond the beer can–crushing bruisers of their early records. While his band epitomized mainstream Canadian rock, Downie had long sought solace among the country’s indie cognoscenti. He collaborated with Eric’s Trip alumnus Julie Doiron (among other Canadian avant-indie veterans) for a string of solo albums through the 2000s; cut an entire record with Toronto roots-rock rebels The Sadies; guested on hardcore dynamos Fucked Up’s 2014 album, Glass Boys; and tapped Broken Social Scene’s Kevin Drew and The Stills’ Dave Hamelin to apply their sound-collage aesthetic to the album that would become his Tragically Hip swan song, Man Machine Poem.But his desire to challenge audiences went beyond mere music. After spending the past three decades making his fans proud to be Canadian, Downie spent his last year forcing them to grapple with what that really means, and confront the fact that the romanticized version of Canada that people like to associate with The Tragically Hip is a construct built on shaky—read: stolen—ground. Mere days after the Hip’s final show last August, with Canada still abuzz in a national love-in, Downie forcefully redirected the spotlight that had been fixed upon him onto the country’s heinous historical mistreatment of its Indigenous people. He announced a new solo album/graphic-novel project, Secret Path (also produced by Drew and Hamelin), based on the true story of Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old First Nations boy who escaped the notoriously abusive residential-school system only to die trying to find his way home.The conception and recording of Secret Path actually predated Downie’s cancer diagnosis by a couple of years, but when the album finally surfaced last fall, it felt like a suitably elegiac send-off for an artist long defined by his sense of compassion and generosity. Amazingly, as his condition worsened over the past year, Downie threw himself into the most ambitious recording project of his career. Just a week after his death, we saw the release of his Drew-produced double-LP Introduce Yerself, and like David Bowie’s Blackstar and Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker, it’s an album that will be inextricably intertwined with its creator’s passing. But its not the typically grim meditation on mortality we’ve come to expect from an ailing artist: Each of the record’s 23 songs were written about a specific person in his life. Its a suitably selfless final gesture from Downie, providing a portal into a personal life he had closely guarded.In the same spirit, here’s a playlist of 23 songs to introduce non-Canadian newcomers to Downies deep discography. While it includes some Hip hits, these aren’t necessarily the band’s most popular songs. Rather, they’re ones that mostly venture beyond the band’s bar-rock roots and don’t require an Encyclopedia Canadiana to decode. And they’re the ones that most directly communicate Downie’s singular combination of outsized passion, white-knuckled intensity, sly humor, absurdity… and grace, too.

Note: This playlist follows a loose chronological structure reflecting when these songs were released during 2017—which I like to think provides a more accurate snapshot of the year as it was lived, as opposed to a ranked list based on totally unquantifiable criteria. The cruel irony of being a music critic in 2017 is that the very thing that makes the gig easier—i.e., plentiful, push-button access to practically the entire history of recorded sound—is also the very thing that threatens one’s sense of expertise. The truth is, the two cornerstones of the job description—a) being an authority in your field and b) staying current—are becoming mutually exclusive ideals, as your listening queue perpetually extends like an unchecked email account. Spending quality time with a given record means missing out on another 50 probably-amazing albums that came out this week. I’m at the point now where artists whose work I’ve loved for years, or even decades, will release a new record, and it takes me months to get around to giving it a cursory listen, if I don’t outright forget that it even exists. (Sorry, Liars!) These days, music writers essentially play the role of sommelier, giving records a momentary swish before spewing ’em out and moving onto the next one.It’s an especially pervasive condition in the perennially over-populated field we call indie rock—a term that now encompasses everyone from aspiring Bandcamp chancers to Grammy-winning arena acts. And in between those goalposts you have annual bumper crops of hotly tipped breakout artists, modestly successful mid-career acts still slogging it out, solo albums, side projects, and ‘90s veterans who decide to take a crack at the reunion circuit. And this is to say nothing of the stylistic variation that field covers. Forty years ago, you wouldnt deign to lump Bruce Springsteen, The Fall, William Onyeabor, Joni Mitchell, Marvin Gaye, and Hawkwind into the same genre category. Yet when you consider those artists contemporary spiritual offspring—Japandroids, Sleaford Mods, Pierre Kwenders, The Weather Station, Moses Sumney, and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard—theyre all huddled under the umbrella of indie.As such, there is no narrative through-line or overarching theme that could possibly connect the songs on this collection of my favorite indie-rock songs of 2017. (Well, other than it was an exceptionally good year for Australia!) Certainly, in this never-ending shit-show of a year, there was a need for music that could help us navigate these tumultuous times, be it Priests emotionally fraught dream-punk (“Nothing Feels Natural”), Algiers palace-storming soul stomps (“The Underside of Power”), or Weaves freak-flag rallying cries (“Scream”). But then, 2017 was so fucked up and draining on so many levels, you could forgive America’s fiercest rabble-rousers—Philly DIY heroes Sheer Mag, pictured above—for wanting to take a momentary break from the brick-tossing and seek solace in the discotheque (“Need to Feel Your Love”).At a time when the very fate of humanity felt more perilous and unknowable than at any point in our lifetime, you take comfort in the little things. Sometimes all I wanted was to escape into a fully realized fantasy of Stevie Nicks making a Cure album (Louise Burns’ “Storms”) or King Krule going Krautrock (via Mount Kimbie’s “Blue Train Lines”) or The Go-Betweens being brought back to life (Rolling Blackouts C.F.’s “The French Press”). In some instances, it was an especially outrageous lyric that provided levity (from Alex Cameron and Angel Olsen’s misfit-romance anthem “Stranger’s Kiss”: “I got shat on by an eagle, baby/ now I’m king of the neighbourhod/ and I guess that I could/ just tear the gym pants off a single mother”); in others, I was transfixed by an extended instrumental build-up (Thurston Moore’s gong-crashing “Exalted”) or a perfectly messy guitar solo (The National’s “The System Only Dreams in Total Darkness,” The War on Drugs’ “Up All Night”). It was a year of being taken by surprise by bands I had taken for granted (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s “Ambulance Chaser,” Guided by Voices’ “Nothing Gets You Real”), awestruck by long-dormant artists who seemingly reemerged from out of nowhere (be it Land of Talk with the intensely aching “Heartcore” or former Only Ones frontman Peter Perrett’s winsome “Troika”), and blindsided by artists I had never heard before (noise-punk powerhouse Dasher’s “Go Rambo,” Montreal sound collagist Joni Void’s “Cinema Without People,” art-pop phenom Jay Som’s magisterial “For Light”).Of course, there is also a regional bias at play here. Even as it’s become the province of national late-night talk shows and destination mega-festivals, indie rock is still nothing without its local scenes, and this playlist inevitably reflects my roots in the Southern Ontario corridor. This year, several under-the-radar acts I’ve been fortunate enough to see come into their own over the past few years—stoner-prog titans Biblical, avant-pop activist Petra Glynt, the Slim Twig/U.S. Girls-led fuzz-boogie supergroup Darlene Shrugg, industrial-electro trio Odonis Odonis—all released excellent albums that effectively bottled up their onstage energy for the world to see.But mostly what you get on this playlist is a lot of great, seasoned, chronically under-appreciated artists doing what they do and continuing to do it very well, from Chain and the Gang’s anti-capitalist garage-punk manifesto “Devitalize” to British Sea Power’s crestfallen “Don’t Let the Sun Get in the Way” to The Dears’ triumphant “1998” to Pavement co-founder Spiral Stairs’ sweetly slack “Angel Eyes” (a touching tribute to his late drummer, Darius Minwalla). There are few rewards for consistency in life, and especially not in the incessant, feed-refreshing world of indie rock. But in a time of insatiable suck-it-up-and-spit-it-out musical consumption, these songs handily passed the swish test, and demanded to be savored.P.S.: Ty Segall’s Drag City catalog isn’t available on Spotify, otherwise I would’ve included his gonzo 10-minute "Cant You Hear Me Knocking"-scaled tour de force, “Freedom (Warm Hands).” Ditto for Boss Hog’s ace comeback album, Brood X, which just goes to show that getting featured in Baby Driver wasn’t the only great thing to happen to Jon Spencer this year.