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If frolicking on a warm beach in golden light with your best friends had a musical equivalent, it’s the debut album from Hinds. Listen to our Best Indie Rock Albums of the 2010s playlist on Spotify right here. But these are the indie rock albums we loved the most, as voted by the Paste staff. With so much change happening constantly in the music industry in the past 10 years, this list could’ve looked a thousand different ways. But it’s some of the music we love most here at Paste, the guitar music made by underdogs, the modern rock classics made by unlikely heroes. This is all to say that indie rock is a relative term that fluctuates from year to year.
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Meanwhile, Bon Iver collaborated with Kanye West in the 2010s, and Courtney Barnett landed on Barack Obama’s 2018 playlist. You can find other artists, like The Beths and Weyes Blood, still playing clubs. Some artists on this list, like Arcade Fire and Vampire Weekend, graduated long ago from independent labels, but they still-believe it or not-fly under the radar when it comes to the larger sphere of pop music.
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Here you’ll find everything from Madrid garage rock to pop-tinged dance rock to rollicking folk, but they’re all indie in spirit. Even so, the records on this list are far from uniform in style. But now “indie” is more widely used to signify a certain sound. “Indie” is a word that once simply implied independent music, aka music that was created by an artist who isn’t signed to a major label-or maybe any label at all. Indie rock isn’t a genre easily defined, especially in the context of the 2010s.