@Piper Norwood

Jazz-infused art-rock that's been catching ears since the ‘70s.

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With the assured murmur of a best friend in your headphones, Dodie Clark came straight out of YouTube with a hard-won fandom and a clutch of sharply worded folk-pop confessions. She got her start in the early 2010s by performing widely shared covers on social media before releasing a series of highly regarded singles and EPs that developed her distinctively mournful voice. Her perky melodies and caustic observations of love-gone-weird are built up in quiet layers of guitar, cello, percussion, and cooing walls of massed harmonies (“Sick of Losing Soulmates”).

How do you follow-up a stint in the most influential and impactful rock band of your generation? Start the most consistent and long-lasting one. Suddenly relieved of his drummer duties in Nirvana following Kurt Cobain’s 1994 suicide, Dave Grohl dropped his sticks and grabbed his pick, assuming the role of singer/guitarist for a new solo project he dubbed Foo Fighters (named after a World War II-era military term for UFOs). His scrappy 1995 debut under the alias—performed and recorded almost entirely on his own—revealed a Cobain-like gift for folding insidious hooks into raw, grungy riffs. But on the more polished 1997 follow-up, <i>The Colour and the Shape</i>, Grohl revealed a commercial ambition and crowd-pleasing congeniality that his former group never would’ve entertained. On that record, the Foos became a proper band, with Grohl flanked by former Germs and Nirvana touring guitarist Pat Smear, Sunny Day Real Estate bassist Nate Mendel, and the hard-hitting but ever-affable drummer Taylor Hawkins. From the late ‘90s into the 2020s, the Foos have reigned as alt-rock’s most reliable hit machine and—thanks to their comedic, heavily costumed videos—most eager court jesters, cranking out mosh-pit ragers (“All My Life”), jugular-seizing power ballads (“Best of You”), and steady-as-Petty sing-alongs (“Learn to Fly”) with equal aplomb. And as one of the few ‘90s-era rock bands to maintain their festival-headliner status well into the 21st century, the Foos have become the genre’s most committed keepers of the flame. Whether building their 2014 album <i>Sonic Highways</i> around an HBO music-history series or collaborating with legends like Paul McCartney, Foo Fighters are the sturdy connective tissue between the classic-rock era and the modern age.

In 1986, New York rappers Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz, Adam “MCA” Yauch, and Michael “Mike D” Diamond did a naked cannonball (metaphorically speaking) into the climate-controlled pool of pop music. With the guitar-laced “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)” as their calling card, the Beasties were out for shock value, and it worked: <i>Licensed to Ill</i> had become the fastest-selling album in the history of Columbia Records. They terrified grownups because their gift for writing hilarious, over-the-top lyrics about middle-class urban antics made their music feel contagious. <i>Paul’s Boutique</i>, an album with unprecedented layers of samples that dip in and out, capped an unregulated era when rappers could use samples without legal restriction, and it’s still studied like the Talmud of sampling. By the late 1980s, a lot of pop culture had turned cartoonish, and the Beasties started to regret their jokes about violence and misogyny. On the eclectic <i>Check Your Head</i>, they transformed into a tight three-piece funk band in the mold of Ohio Players or the Meters, and rhymed over their own beats, while <i>Ill Communication</i>, which was highly influenced by Miles Davis, added jazz and hardcore punk to the mix and spun off “Sabotage.” Beastie Boys aged gracefully into parenthood and responsibility without losing any of their humor, even rapping about their gray hairs, not to mention advocating for gun control and tossing gibes at SUVs, George W. Bush, and the KKK.