@Brent W. Walker

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Just as the rise of alternative and grunge helped rejuvenate rock through the last years of the previous century, new ideas and new blood kept the old beast roaring through the first decade of the 21st, too. Indeed, as different as buzzy new bands like The White Stripes, The Strokes, and The Killers may have sounded thanks to their soon-to-be influential takes on blues, post-punk, and ‘80s arena-rock respectively, they all demonstrated the same vitality. And though more mainstream acts such as Nickelback and Incubus had greater respect for the playbook, they too made songs with force, immediacy, and hooks galore. Meanwhile, ‘90s alt-rock faves like Green Day, Foo Fighters, and Weezer found ways to raise their own stakes, and in doing so completed their transitions from snarky youngsters to tried-and-true rock veterans who still liked it loud.

As the 2000s began, hard rock had a nu-metal hangover: Limp Bizkit’s rugged riffage still had teeth, while P.O.D.’s thundering anthems and Papa Roach’s slash-and-burn approach rose to prominence. The genre was given an electrifying creative jolt by Linkin Park, a California group whose hip-hop-tinted take on nu-metal—and frustration-filled lyrics that zeroed in on the pain of personal shortcomings—felt fresh and energetic, not to mention all too relatable to a generation paralysed by post-September 11 uncertainty and turmoil. In fact, although ’90s superstars such as Foo Fighters and Red Hot Chili Peppers continued to churn out comfort-food hits, a new breed of ambitious hard rockers captured the decade’s winds of change. Muse and My Chemical Romance unleashed heroic glam epics, Evanescence embraced an operatic vocal delivery and radio-ready acts like Shinedown merged unstoppable hooks with roiling emotional angst.

If you’re after just the hits, this is where you’ll find them: a handpicked selection of hard rock's biggest songs of the past few years. Our editors update this playlist regularly, so if you hear something you like, add it to your library.

The commercial resiliency of alt-metal and post-grunge really is astonishing. After all, many of the biggest hits of the 2010s came from veteran hard rockers (Disturbed, Three Days Grace, Breaking Benjamin) rooted in these ’90s subgenres. Exceptions emerged, of course. While Greta Van Fleet’s Led Zeppelin-inspired rave-ups and Ghost’s doom-metal nightmares may seem, at first blush, radically different from each other, the success of both reflected the growing number of young acts revisiting ’70s metal. Even Denmark’s Volbeat, around since the mid-2000s, finally broke in the United States thanks largely to their classic metal riffs. The mainstreaming of metalcore and hardcore also warrants mentioning: Bring Me the Horizon and A Day to Remember gradually attained stardom thanks to their knack for mixing furious breakdowns with sparkling pop productions. It represented a genuinely fresh twist and perhaps a sign of future developments for hard rock.