75 Best Indie Rock Songs Ranked

Brandon Flowers wrote Mr. Brightside at about three in the morning after finding his girlfriend with someone else. He has described it as writing directly from the experience without any distance or craft between the emotion and the page, which is why the lyric has an almost uncomfortable specificity: the details of jealousy, the obsessive imagining of what you haven't witnessed, the inability to stop. It was the first song the Killers ever recorded properly and it became one of the most durable songs in British chart history.

Mr. Brightside has been on the UK Singles Chart for over 500 weeks since its release in 2003. It has never been a number one; it has never needed to be. It reappears periodically, climbs back into the top forty, and then retreats, which is a pattern that makes no statistical sense and which no music industry analyst has convincingly explained. The most plausible explanation is simple: a generation of people who were teenagers when it came out have never stopped needing it, and new teenagers keep discovering it and feeling the same way.

The song is built on a guitar riff that Dave Keuning brought to the band, and the production, handled by Flood and Alan Moulder, gives it a scale that the demo version doesn't have. The opening, that descending guitar line before the verse kicks in, is one of the most immediately recognisable sounds in 21st-century rock music. Flowers' vocal builds from the almost conversational verse into a chorus that is genuinely cathartic, which is the right emotional arc for a song about jealousy: the verse is trapped and obsessive, the chorus is the release of admitting it.

Is This It arrived in August 2001 and was immediately described as the record that would save rock music, which is the kind of claim that usually ages terribly. In this case it aged fine, because the album actually is that good and Last Nite actually is that song. Julian Casablancas wrote it about a relationship ending, delivered it in a vocal that sits somewhere between boredom and devastation, and the band recorded it with a fidelity that sounds deliberately cheap, guitar tones pushed through small practice amps, drums with the room bleeding in, everything slightly compressed and slightly wrong in a way that sounds exactly right.

The Strokes were five private school kids from Manhattan who had absorbed the Velvet Underground and Television and Tom Petty in roughly equal measure and produced something that sounded like all three and none of them. Last Nite is the most straightforward distillation of that: the chord sequence is three chords, the guitar melody is simple enough to learn in an afternoon, the vocal is half-sung and half-spoken, and the whole thing runs for three minutes and thirteen seconds without a wasted note. It influenced an enormous number of bands in the years that followed, which is the clearest evidence that it did something genuinely new.

AM was Arctic Monkeys' fifth album and the one that completed their transformation from the fastest-talking guitar band in Britain into something more globally scaled and sonically ambitious. Do I Wanna Know? opens the record with a riff that Alex Turner apparently wrote during a soundcheck, a slow, circling thing in a lower register than anything they'd previously built a song around, and the whole track moves at a pace that their earlier records would never have sustained.

The production, handled by James Ford and Ross Orton, gives the song a weight that comes partly from the tempo and partly from how far down in the mix everything sits except for that riff. Turner's vocal is more controlled than on the Sheffield records, which suits the lyric: this is a song about not being able to ask the question you need to ask, about circling around something without approaching it, and the music mirrors that in the way it keeps returning to the same riff without resolving it. The bass line from Nick O'Malley locks in underneath and gives the song its physical presence. It became their highest-charting UK single to that point and introduced a substantial new audience to a band who had already been huge for seven years.

Jarvis Cocker wrote Common People about a student he met at Saint Martin's College in London who told him she wanted to live like common people, to slum it, to experience working-class life as a kind of aesthetic exercise. He was from Sheffield. He'd been genuinely poor. The anger in the lyric is real, and the fact that it's directed at someone who romanticises poverty while having an escape route makes it one of the most precise pieces of class satire in British pop music.

The song spent two weeks at number two in the UK in 1995, kept off the top by a Robson and Jerome cover that nobody remembers. It should have been number one. The structure builds with unusual patience for a Britpop single: the keyboards accumulate gradually, the tempo stays steady, and then the final chorus arrives with Cocker shouting rather than singing and the whole band following him into something that sounds genuinely furious rather than performed. It went to Glastonbury that summer and became one of the defining festival moments of the decade. William Shatner covered it in 2004, which Cocker apparently found funny.

Thom Yorke has had a complicated relationship with Creep for thirty years. It was a hit in 1993 and then faded, was rereleased in 1992, became a much bigger hit, and Radiohead spent the next decade being asked about it at every interview while making increasingly experimental records that had nothing in common with it. For a period they refused to play it live. They brought it back eventually, and now it closes sets in stadiums, which is where it belongs.

The lyric is about feeling unworthy of someone, written with a self-lacerating directness that Yorke would later move away from into more abstract territory. The chord sequence is a textbook I-III-IV-iv with the famous Jonny Greenwood crunch on the minor chord, a deliberate act of sabotage that Greenwood has said he played because he thought the song was getting too soft and needed disrupting. That disruption is what makes the song. Without those two guitar crashes the quiet-loud dynamic is ordinary; with them it's genuinely startling. Pablo Honey is the least interesting Radiohead album by some distance, but Creep is better than anything on the records that followed it because it has the kind of emotional nakedness that their later work, by design, avoids.

R U Mine? was released as a standalone single in 2012 before AM existed as an album, which meant it arrived without context and still became one of the most immediately recognised Arctic Monkeys songs in their catalogue. The riff is the heaviest thing they'd recorded to that point, a slow garage rock stomp that owes something to The Black Keys and something to Josh Homme, whose production influence on AM is audible throughout. Turner has cited Homme as a significant presence during the making of the record, and R U Mine? is where that influence is most direct.

The lyric has the compressed, image-heavy quality that Turner had been developing since the Humbug period, lines that don't explain themselves but accumulate into an emotional state. "I'm a puppet on a string / Tracy I'm in love with your ghost" is not a conventional love lyric and it doesn't try to be. Matt Helders' drumming is the song's backbone, a rhythm that locks in with the riff and doesn't budge, giving the track a physical intensity that the slower, more atmospheric tracks on AM don't have. It opens their live sets regularly and it still works in arenas at full volume, which is the real test of any rock song.

Take Me Out is two songs spliced together. The first forty-five seconds are a slow, staccato guitar figure that sounds like it's winding up, and then the tempo doubles and the whole track shifts into something that barely resembles what preceded it. Alex Kapranos has described the song as a deliberate attempt to write a dancefloor moment using guitar band tools, which is exactly what it is: a song that makes people move in a way that indie rock rarely managed before it.

Franz Ferdinand came out of the Glasgow art school scene and brought a visual and conceptual self-awareness to what they were doing that most of their contemporaries lacked. The songs on the debut album are all built around the idea of making guitar music that functions physically, that you can dance to without irony, which was a slightly radical position in 2004 when post-punk revival was starting to take itself seriously. Take Me Out reached number three in the UK, won the Mercury Prize as part of the album, and introduced the band to an audience that extended well beyond the usual indie rock demographic. It is still one of the most played songs at club nights anywhere that has a guitar music section.

Noel Gallagher has said Wonderwall is about an imaginary friend who is going to come and save you when you feel like everything is falling apart. He has also said it's about his then-girlfriend Meg Matthews. Both things are probably true. The lyric is vague enough to accommodate multiple readings, which is one of the reasons it became the song that every teenager with a guitar learned first throughout the late 90s and 2000s. It is, by some measures, the most covered song of the last thirty years.

The production on Morning Glory is Oasis at their most polished, Owen Morris compressing everything to the point where the guitars sound enormous and the drums sit back in the mix. Wonderwall is the exception: it's relatively sparse compared to the album's other singles, built around an acoustic guitar with a slightly unusual capo position that gives it those distinctive sus chords, and Liam Gallagher's vocal is one of the most imitated in British music. The song was number two in the UK on release, never number one, which Noel has been publicly irritated about for thirty years. It didn't need to be number one. It was everywhere anyway.

Arctic Monkeys' debut single went to number one in the UK in January 2006 without any radio play prior to release, without a major label marketing campaign, distributed initially through demo CDs the band handed out at gigs. The record label infrastructure that usually moves a song up the chart was entirely absent. It sold on word of mouth and downloads at a moment when the industry was still working out what downloads meant, and the speed of it caught everyone off guard.

The song itself is two minutes and fifty-two seconds of Sheffield garage rock written about a girl Turner saw in a club and didn't speak to. The lyric captures that specific social paralysis of being nineteen in a northern city, wanting something and not knowing how to reach for it, and the delivery has a wiry, nervous energy that the arrangements on later Arctic Monkeys records don't attempt. Andy Nicholson's bass runs under the verse with a looseness that tightens on the chorus, and Nick O'Malley, who replaced him shortly after the debut, has said it's one of the hardest songs in the catalogue to play live because of that shifting tension. It remains the song that defines what Arctic Monkeys were before they became what they are now, and that version is worth preserving.

Damon Albarn wrote Girls & Boys on a Club 18-30 holiday in Greece, watching British tourists behave badly in the sun. The lyric is part satire, part affectionate portrait, written with the observational precision that Albarn had been developing across Blur's first two albums and which reached its peak on Parklife. The song is about sex tourism and the specific British holiday culture of the early 90s, and it is also a genuinely excellent dance record, which is an unusual combination.

The production, by Stephen Street, gives the song a glam rock stomp that Albarn has said was influenced by Duran Duran, which explains the synthesiser bass line that runs throughout and gives it a dancefloor quality unusual in Britpop. Alex James plays no guitar on the track, which was deliberate: the bass is doing the rhythmic and harmonic work that a guitar would normally do, and the freedom that gives the arrangement is audible. Girls & Boys reached number five in the UK in 1994 and introduced Blur to an audience outside the indie press that had been following them since their debut. Parklife sold over a million copies in the UK on the back of it.