The 50 Best Indie Rock Albums of the Pacific Northwest

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Elliott Smith recorded most of his debut album, Roman Candle, in a dilapidated basement, pressing his guitar strings to a tape recorder. By 1995, he had graduated to his friend Leslie’s house; the resulting self-titled album sold zilch and got picked up by almost zero college radio stations–but Fugazi heard it, and so did John Doe, who brought this agonizingly shy kid on tour. There was something in the air.

On Either/Or, that something became the beginning of Elliott Smith’s Big Nothing, the flowering of his songwriting genius and the first real statement to his hometown of Portland and beyond that he might not just be good, but brilliant like few in his generation. His finger-picking was so delicate that his little Le Domino acoustic guitar became harp-like—try replicating even the first few chord changes of “Angeles,” and immediately grasp how deep and kaleidoscopic his understanding of the instrument was. Here, he raised his voice from a whisper to something just slightly braver: On “Ballad of Big Nothing,” the chord progression curdles from major to minor like a recurring stomach cramp while he sings about doing “whatever you want to, whenever you want to” with the quavery conviction of a punch thrown with a clammy fist.

On “Between the Bars,” Smith wrote one of his first real standards, a song so potent, bare, and tightly packed—a metaphor about love and addiction that never once tips its hand—that cover artists will be dipping into its well water for decades to come. “Say Yes” is a feeble, embarrassed sunbeam of an almost-love ballad, one he would bashfully play live amid many shouted requests. In these shows, by all accounts, you could hear a penny drop; Smith was at his most incandescent. –Jayson Greene

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After Sleater-Kinney released their excellent second album, Call the Doctor, it hardly seemed like any part of their sound needed work. Adding a virtuoso drummer to a band that already united the Olympia riot grrrl scene’s strongest singer, Corin Tucker, with its most accomplished guitarist, Carrie Brownstein, would’ve seemed like overkill. But when Janet Weiss joined the trio before they recorded their third album, Dig Me Out, she turned out to be the ingredient no one realized Sleater-Kinney was missing.

In her memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, Brownstein recalls that when she and Tucker wrote songs together, “Corin could make the mess and I could figure out what it meant and what significance it held.” Weiss’ percussion brought Tucker’s heart and Brownstein’s brain together in a single body flinging itself, at full force, against the limitations of our flawed world. Dig Me Out’s title track is a prayer for escape from precisely this prison: “Dig me out/Dig me in/Out of my body/Out of my skin,” Tucker pleads, her wail as strong as it is pliant. Alternating between the naked riff worship of “Words and Guitar,” the fiery longing of “Buy Her Candy,” and openly feminist statements like “Little Babies,” Sleater-Kinney conjure a rock‘n’roll universe where the roles of star and fan transcend gender. On Call the Doctor, they said they wanted to be our Joey Ramone. Dig Me Out made us want to be someone else’s Sleater-Kinney. –Judy Berman

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Phil Elverum’s music carries a powerful sense of place. The Microphones mastermind (born Phil Elvrum) has emphasized geography in the names he’s chosen for his projects, whether adding an “e” to his surname to match the spelling of a Norwegian town or adopting the musical alias Mount Eerie after a distinctively shaped mountain in his Anacortes, Washington hometown. When he was recording his 2001 tour de force The Glow Pt. 2, he was living in Olympia, Washington, close to the studios of K Record, which also released the double album.

In imaginativeness and unpredictability, both in the production’s expansive take on K Records-style intimacy and in the free-flowing yet hard-hitting lyrics, The Glow Pt. 2 certainly can be considered a force of nature. But ultimately, the style-shifting, lo-fi psych-pop here exists in its own world, by design; as Elverum told Pitchfork at the time of a 2008 reissue, “All of my recording projects have been with that intention of constructing an alternate reality.” In that sense, this idiosyncratic album is human most of all, like the heartbeat that’s the central image of the tumultuous title track and the last sound heard on the LP. The Glow Pt. 2 is the passionate work of an auteur, a voice in the wilderness. –Marc Hogan

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Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock is a true Pacific Northwesterner; he writes grimy, frank tales of blue collar lives housed in “trailers with no class” while wearing his cynicism on his plaid sleeve. On their second full-length, The Lonesome Crowded West, the Portland band fuses punk, indie rock, and twitchy disco grooves; producer Calvin Johnson gives ample attention to Brock’s lispy yelp, and pushes the band’s undersung rhythm section into the spotlight. As Brock howls his angsty agenda—”I’m trying to drink away the part of the day/That I cannot sleep away” (“Polar Opposites”)—drummer Jeremy Green and bassist Eric Judy’s rocksteady back line provides the perfect counterpoint for Brock’s snarl.

Better still is the album's centerpiece, the epic, 11-minute “Trucker’s Atlas,” an enrapturing meditation on travel, displacement, and the lonely roads of the American West. Driven by Green's loose, tribal drumming and a biting Brock guitar melody, it's not the record's most concise or perfect moment, but it’s a neat summation of The Lonesome Crowded West—wide open, spread out, and with an open-faced tone that speculates on possibility and pessimism in the same breath. His shout of “How far does your road go?” makes clear: He is uncertain if the promised land is near, or if is just another parking lot to cross. –Ben Scheim

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Built to Spill made the 500 or so miles between Boise and Seattle seem like nothing. With their breakthrough second album, Doug Martsch and co. helped usher in a new Pacific Northwest sound: indie rock. Though the genre term is something of a catch-all these days, Martsch’s signature (though certainly J Mascis-indebted) guitar tone on There’s Nothing Wrong With Love quickly became an ideal, and it remains one.

However, the album’s significance lies in more than just its wiry, distorted jangle. Rife with both childlike curiosity and casual small-town ennui, Martsch’s most personal work to date documents a cluster of little lives that leave deceptively detailed impressions. Recorded in Seattle for the then-new local label Up, the album also marked a breakthrough for producer Phil Ek, who’d assisted go-to grunge producer Jack Endino previously but would go on to guide a number of iconic rock records himself. –Jillian Mapes

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The title would later be ridiculed as a symbol of emo’s inward focus, but Sunny Day Real Estate’s Diary, their 1994 debut on Sub Pop, can be read in various ways: in the form of punk rock evolving away from its original designs into more dynamic and insecure space, or as a display of spiralling interplay between four talented musicians from Seattle: singer/guitarist Jeremy Enigk, guitarist Dan Hoerner, bassist Nate Mendel, and drummer William Goldsmith.

That Sunny Day Real Estate broke up while putting together their second record, and never recorded in this exact lineup again, gives Diary the character of a happy accident. Enigk blew out his voice just before recording the album; on successive efforts, he gradually regenerated his range, but on Diary it’s reduced to a burned whine. “Running behind/Which one will I face?” he sings painfully in “Song About an Angel” as the band builds a vortex around him. His struggle to access notes and the half-mutated scream it produces is a fluke, one that helped spur on the many second-wave emo acts to follow. –Brad Nelson

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Released five months after his hushed, hunched performance at the 1998 Oscars, XO saw Elliott Smith running with his unlikely new fame. It marked his solo major-label debut and, unlike previous DIY efforts, the album delivers famous recording studios and sidemen, string sections, and psychedelic tangents. Then in his late 20s, Smith was trying to make his own one-man White Album, filled with McCartney pianos, Harrison guitars, Lennon bloodletting, and even some playful Ringo oom-pah.

The record was largely written in New York City and made in Los Angeles—though two songs were recorded in his longtime home of Portland—and it’s got the vaulted ambition to match. But his Oregonian heart is still on full display: he’s fragile but strong, bitter but alive. The emotional core of these songs still have that third-rail intensity—dangerous, mysterious, angry, hurt. The frolicking juke joint piano on “Baby Britain” makes its searing takedown sneakily effective: “For someone half as smart/You’d be a work of art.” And there’s a strange sort of hope embedded in these sad songs’ layered intricacies, their tragedies given lift by the loving attention to detail. Smith himself sums this feeling up best in yet another notebook-ready couplet: “You only live a day/But it’s brilliant anyway” (“Independence Day”). The record’s sonic embellishments don’t weaken Smith’s whispering intimacy as much as they hold up his studied songwriting; there is no mistaking the man behind XO for just another white dude with an acoustic guitar. –Ryan Dombal

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Modest Mouse’s earliest albums were made for road trips—the songs take place in parking lots, cars, trains, and trucks, spinning their wheels for minutes at a time, only capable of horizontal motion. In Isaac Brock’s neck of the woods, you got left behind, got stuck, or just kept pushing forward, anywhere.

Conversely, The Moon and Antarctica is a head-trip album in which Modest Mouse upgraded from 2D to interactive. Abetted by Brian Deck’s richly layered, percussive production, Modest Mouse conjured a Dark Side of the Moonshine, an endlessly explorable multiverse of backwoods psychedelia with Brock's lyrics serving as a tome of Metaphysical Spirituality for the Cynic: “The universe is shaped exactly like the earth/If you go straight long enough/You’ll end up where you were” (“Third Planet”); “The one thing you taught me about human beings was this/They ain’t made of nothing but water and shit” (“What People Are Made Of”). Their ensuing popularity led to a motor vehicle pitchmen gig and the most subversive ad campaign of the 21st century: a family piles into a minivan as “Gravity Rides Everything” frames the purchase as a grim admission of impending mortality. In a rare moment of positivity, Brock proclaims that he’s not the dark center of the universe, but we’re still the butt of a pitch-black cosmic joke. –Ian Cohen

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Aspiring producers should study as gospel every knob twirl of “Tiny Vessels”—except, perhaps, the kind Ben Gibbard is singing about with flimsy bravado, followed shortly with the world’s least romantic description of a hickey: “Then tiny vessels oozed into your neck/And formed the bruises/That you said you didn’t want to fade.” It’s a testament to Chris Walla, Transatlanticism’s producer (and Death Cab for Cutie’s then-guitarist), that this fairly grotesque narrative is rendered gorgeous by the plush wall of guitars and reverb behind it—a small ache, singularly glamorous to the young, transformed into halting first steps toward intimacy.

The rest of Transatlanticism follows suit; the Bellingham, Washington group’s fourth and best album savors the scant moments of closeness inside a long-distance relationship, from the detritus inside a glove compartment to lurid, overdue peeks of skin through a ripped dress. As Gibbard grows increasingly withdrawn, flailing across the emotional and physical divide for which the album is named, Walla pushed the band into broader pop palettes, deftly expanding on the sentimental multitudes with a sonic loyalty that verges on literal; firework-like bursts of guitars dissipate under Gibbard’s high, choral keen of “So this is the new year/And I don’t feel any different” (“The New Year”), and delicate, refracted strums of guitar bolster Gibbard as he whispers, “And when I see you/I really see you upside down” (“A Lack of Color”). The autumnal angst was universal enough to be exported to the telegenic malcontents of “The O.C.,” and shortly thereafter to any listener whose own turmoil felt equally, irrepressibly grandiose. –Stacey Anderson

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There’s only one track on Pussy Whipped that exceeds three minutes, the album closer “For Tammy Rae.” For the rest of the record’s 11 songs, Bikini Kill fling swooping shrieks and howls, blistering guitar riffs, and chugging rhythm sections at warp speed. Kathleen Hanna’s lyrics are fantastically blunt, wasting no time in telling the world her terms; “Lil’ Red” launches with, “These are my tits, yeah/And this is my ass/And these are my legs/Watch them walk fucking away.”

Later, Bikini Kill deliver the unimpeachable riot grrrl anthem that is “Rebel Girl,” which taps into the power of friendship between women over fuzzy but furious power chords. “That girl thinks she's the queen of the neighborhood,” Hanna hollers. "I got news for you/She is!" Pussy Whipped revels in the frustrations of being female, flipping internal seething into aggressive catharsis, all the while propelling the riot grrrl movement into the public eye with a ferocity that could not be ignored. –Allison Hussey

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Beat Happening is the ground zero of Pacific Northwest indie rock, the first band who followed the rock lineage of the Kingsmen and the Sonics and turned their idiosyncratic sensibility into an ethos. Calvin Johnson, Heather Lewis, and Bret Lunsford first released the group’s self-titled album in 1985, but 1988’s Jamboree is where their primitive fuzz and winking asides coalesce into a defiant rallying call.

Beat Happening’s willful naïveté led to the group being tagged “twee”—and it’s true, the legions of groups who followed Beat Happening cribbed their childlike imagery—but Jamboree doesn't feel cutesy in the slightest. Stark and visceral, the album moves at a rapid clip, so three-minute songs—like “Indian Summer,” a melancholy sketch that’s the album's best-known song and emotional epicenter—play as considered epics. As raw as Jamboree sounds—and it’s a record that celebrates its cacophony in how the beats plod, the guitars flare and the vocals veer toward a flatline—all this amateurism is a deliberate affect, the work of a band creating their own dreamy, nervy world fueled by innocence and cynicism. These are the very elements that came to define the indie rock of the Pacific Northwest as a whole. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine

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By 2001, indie had stopped signifying “independent,” a DIY sensibility that existed outside of the mainstream. Instead, “indie” came to define an aesthetic somewhere just left of center—an idea with ugly, misshapen roots sculpted into something refined and tasteful, something that proudly belonged to a tradition. No other album represents this shift better than the Shins’ 2001 debut. Subsequent albums would prove guitarist/vocalist James Mercer was the band’s undisputed leader but, at the time of its release, Oh, Inverted World seemed like the work of a collective, a group that excelled in delicately woven interplay.

R.E.M. is clearly the band’s lodestar—all the Shins' guitars jangle, their melodies wind—but where the Athens, Georgia quartet luxuriated in Southern murk, Oh, Inverted World is defined by its clean lines: You don’t get lost in atmosphere, you follow the contours. With its clarion guitars and intertwined hooks, “Know Your Onion!” harkens back to the pioneering power pop of the Flamin’ Groovies—a candied rush countered by “New Slang,” which finds gentle comfort within its lonely acoustic strums. “Caring Is Creepy” splits the difference between two, offering ringing melodies colored by warm melancholy—a combination that suggests a lingering nostalgia tempered by an unspoken realization that things are better in the present. These exquisitely mixed emotions that help define Oh, Inverted World as the moment when indie became gentrified. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine

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Going into their fourth album, Keep It Like a Secret, Built to Spill already had two masterpieces under their belt: the candy-sweet There’s Nothing Wrong With Love and the spaced-out, major-label curveball Perfect From Now On. But rather than reinvent themselves again, for their second Warner Bros. outing, the Boise rockers split the difference between Nothing Wrong’s puppy-dog pop and Perfect’s compositional gymnastics, limiting their jamming to mostly swift, controlled bursts. (The closing track “Broken Chairs” is the walloping exemption.)

Lyrically, frontman Doug Martsch let his Charlie Brown pessimism run rampant, yet he offsets his downbeat quips with genuinely comforting reassurances that we all feel overwhelmed and off-balance sometimes, finding solace in shared misery on the gorgeously somber “Else.” And although Martsch has often written about how the insecurities of youth trail us into adulthood, he’s never done so more movingly than on “Carry the Zero,” six minutes of tough love packaged in a hug. “Count your blemishes,” Martsch sings, in his most tearjerking line. “You can’t—they’re all gone.” In other words, all jokes aside, it really does get better. –Evan Rytlewski

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Fleet Foxes spawned dozens of folk-pop imitators in their wake, but none of the band’s knockoffs ever matched the refined, lush decadence of their self-titled debut LP. The Seattle group marries thick, rootsy instrumental layers and howling harmonies, with mandolin and banjo licks embellishing, creating backdrops as green and gorgeous as the forestry that covers their home. With Robin Pecknold’s gentle voice and poetic lyricism, Fleet Foxes blooms as a warm, inviting record that’s cozy without being cloying: “White Winter Hymnal” and “Tiger Mountain Peasant Song” offer enchanting folk-pop melodies, and “Blue Ridge Mountains” and “Your Protector” offer fascinating, simmering tension. –Allison Hussey

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To be an independent musician in the Pacific Northwest is to resist: Sure, there might be more opportunities in New York or Los Angeles or Toronto, but if you’re in it for “opportunities,” why not just get a real job? The area’s relative isolation can breed brilliance along with resentment, cynicism, and the occasional self-defeating streak. Destroyer’s Dan Bejar, who has lived in Vancouver for most of his adult life, knows all these well, and they’re on full display on Streethawk: A Seduction. It’s a quasi-concept album about an aging rock star; a haunted tribute to the life, death, and desires of Ian Curtis; a meta-narrative about the pitfalls of bad art and selling out; and why it is part of any artist’s job to stay vigilant in the face of a commercial society built to champion bloat and affected sorrow.

Through all this, Streethawk takes the side of creative virtue; “stay critical or die” is one of its many mottos. But Bejar isn’t preaching some kind of stonefaced indie doctrine here—he understands the temptations of popular culture, and much of the album’s drama comes from him doing battle with his own ethics. Musically, Streethawk’s piano-heavy odes to early ’70s rock—with some Pavement shamble replacing that era’s bluesy swagger—are anything but obscure, and the whole thing crests when he yelps, “There’s a rumor going around even Destroyers have a price!” right before a distorted guitar splashes down, satisfying our basest rock’n’roll instincts. These are anthems for those who are wary of anthems. –Ryan Dombal

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“We yell like hell to the heavens!” Japandroids’ singer/guitarist Brian King and drummer David Prowse do just that at the end of “The Nights of Wine and Roses,” the first track from their second album, Celebration Rock. The Vancouver duo’s 2009 debut, Post-Nothing, had already set a winning template through its fervently simple, Replacements-by-way-of-Constantines anthems exploding with youth, plural pronouns, and whoa-oh-ohs built for crowd scream-alongs.

Still, it was a shock how Celebration Rock refined those basic elements into something grandiose enough to support the quasi-religious imagery, whether in the victory gallop of “Fire’s Highway” or the lighters-aloft tenderness of the finale “Continuous Thunder.” It all peaks in the moment when the band that almost quit before its first album lives up to their windswept rockstar theatrics, the camaraderie-clinching “The House That Heaven Built,” which headbangs again toward the abyss: “If they try to slow you down/Tell them all to go to hell!” Japandroids used to worry about dying, but here, they sound immortal. –Marc Hogan

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All Hands on the Bad One was Sleater-Kinney’s most broadly accessible album to date, the knife handed handle-first to an unsuspecting populace. Capping an intense run of five albums released in six years, and riding a wave of critical acclaim and regularly sexist astonishment at their watertight punk musicianship and empowered lyricism, the Olympia trio had been encouraged by music industry experts to sand down their rough edges to cross over to the mainstream.

The trio's response was on wax and succinct–“Was I born to accommodate?/I’m so good at playing dead” (“Youth Decay”)—and serves one highlight of an album rife with passionate social criticism and dry humor, from their jabbing at expat fetishism (“Male Model”) to lamenting society’s notion of death as spectacle (“Was It a Lie?”), all atop their most melodic and nuanced rock hooks yet. On the tour de force “#1 Must Have,” singer Corin Tucker decries rape at concerts with a soul-shattering wail, riding Janet Weiss’ crashing drum rolls and Carrie Brownstein’s anchoring, beseeching guitar. “Culture is what we make it/Yes it is,” Tucker howls. “Now is the time/To invent!” Hearing Sleater-Kinney refuse to acquiesce still feels like being on the right side of history. –Stacey Anderson

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Power-pop reemerged in the ’90s, and the term was an oxymoron 99.9% of the time. Real-deal pop is seven-figure warfare, juggernaut vocalists and their highly skilled songwriters formulating foolproof, shock-and-awe media domination—and you’re gonna argue that Fountains of Wayne and Semisonic have more juice than Max Martin just because they play guitars? The New Pornographers had done well by the genre on their two previous albums, but they redefined it in 2005, once they started acting less like a trio of cerebral Vancouver singer-songwriters and more like a Swedish brain trust.

On Twin Cinema, Dan Bejar, A.C. Newman, and Neko Case engage in melodic brinkmanship, maxing out everything. “Sing Me Spanish Techno” is their brassiest anthem and none-too-subtle pop culture critique; “Three or Four” is actually funky. Bejar has never been more straightforward and earnest than on “Streets of Fire,” and Case’s country weepers reveal themselves as Vegas-ready power ballads (“These Are Fables”). Meanwhile, Kurt Dahle contributes tremendous drumming, pushed obscenely high in the mix. The megawatt exuberance of Twin Cinema didn’t just make good on the premise of power-pop, it earned the titles of Mass Romantic and Electric Version more than those records did. –Ian Cohen

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“The thing that gave me the confidence to do [another tour] was knowing that in the time since we last played, hundreds of thousands of people—dare I say millions—bought the record,” Ben Gibbard said after the Postal Service’s 2013 reunion tour. “Doing those shows, I realized people were in the palm of our hands.” It’s not the kind of boasting one would expect from the mild-mannered guy who dreamed only of being “The winter coat/Buttoned and zipped straight to the throat/With the collar up/So you won't catch a cold” (“Brand New Colony”). But he wasn’t wrong about his group’s impact.

Released on Sub Pop in 2003, a few months before Death Cab for Cutie’s commercial breakthrough, Give Up touched a nerve. Gibbard’s lone collaborative album with Jimmy Tamborello (aka Dntel) was hardly the first merging of indie rock and electronic music, but it was the one that spread like fire. Emotive, stripped-down covers followed, from Sub Pop labelmates the Shins and Iron & Wine, and later, Bright Eyes recruited Tamborello to help him essentially remake the record whole on Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. Throughout Give Up, it’s easy to facepalm at some of Gibbard’s sappier lyrics; “I want life in every word,” he admits in “Clark Gable,” “To the extent that it’s absurd.” But his shameless romanticism is part of what makes Give Up so undeniable: It’s an album of simple dreams, a rainy day collection of love songs, written like no one was listening. –Sam Sodomsky

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Youth of America is one of the greatest records ever made about feeling displaced and disillusioned—as illustrated on the highlight track, “When It’s Over,” which opens with a long, massive build of dystopic urgency. Frontman Greg Sage weaves a narrative about life on the road, and not the romantic “anything’s possible” sort of bohemia; he’s alone, unsure, and uneasy about what waits for him at each pit stop. The songs are longer, which means sturdy melodies like the one in “When It’s Over” can find added power in repetition—a tactic seemingly borrowed from psychedelic and krautrock records. It also gives Sage an opportunity to press his point home on “Youth of America”—he urges kids not to ignore what’s happening around them, but to “Feel it now...now...now...WOO.” That can’t be condensed in a 2.5-minute pop song; Wipers revisit that idea, in a variety of ways, for a full 10 minutes.

Structurally and thematically, Youth of America is an album that challenges one of the biggest tropes in punk. Forget “no future”—what about the present? Things are fucked, actively, right now, and nothing’s changing. “The rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” utters a quiet, sullen Sage during the simmering middle stretch of the album’s rowdy title track. Somehow, we’re still there 35 years later. Wipers’ call to action—to “rectify this now!”—seems to become more necessary with each passing day. –Evan Minsker

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How do you invent space? In 2000, the Olympia post-hardcore band Unwound literally built it—as a recording studio called MagRecOne—in order to record their final album, Leaves Turn Inside You. Today, it still feels less like hearing a collection of songs, more like inhaling their smoke and sifting through their wreckage. The album opens with a two-minute synth drone, and ends with a sample of Dixieland jazz; in between, the songs swell and contract like jellyfish, their structures similarly transparent and porous.

On previous Unwound records, the guitars offered the dimension and melodic range of sheet metal. Here they glow and echo, lending shape and depth to the space around them, like objects accenting a room; “Terminus,” a standout track, starts as a knotted punk song, melts into a river of strings, and then abruptly shifts into a nervous, unrelated instrumental. Voices on Leaves sound as if they’re testing the limits of the compositions instead of carrying melodic ideas, as if they’re wandering through dark and trying to feel for a wall. On their swan song, Unwound discovered that the way to invent space was to create a room and then make it feel haunted. –Brad Nelson

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This is a scorched rock‘n’roll record that sounded like the South, came from Portland, and was only popular in Europe. Dead Moon were the devotedly D.I.Y. and lovably eccentric husband-and-wife duo of Fred and Toody Cole, plus their late drummer, Andrew Loomis, and they were always understood better abroad.

Their country-punk records have become spiritual music for freaks the world over, starting with the blistering night music of their self-released debut and its wailing classic rock melodies ripped from the 1970s. In the Graveyard flies in many directions, from the sinister ripper “Out on a Wire” to their not-slightly-absurdist cover of “Can’t Help Falling in Love”—and throughout, they cast a spell remarkably similar to the latter. –Jenn Pelly

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Violence pulses through Furnace Room Lullaby, something Neko Case accentuates with a still, lifeless pose on the album’s cover. Despite these dark undertones, the album doesn’t feel bleak, partially due to the vitality of her interplay with her Boyfriends, a loose collective who jam like a roadhouse band and give the album an earthy kick absent on her other albums. Many of those musicians are Seattle transplants like Case herself, attracted to the vibrant scene left there in the wake of grunge, and Furnace Room Lullaby is so compelling because it exists at a crossroads of styles and eras.

Case clearly loves creepy old murder ballads and jukejoint waltzes, but this is hardly traditional: There’s a wry remove to her storytelling and a nerviness to the arrangements that owe an allegiance to punk, from the hyperactive rockabilly rave-up “Mood to Burn Bridges” to the manic barnburner “Whip the Blankets.” But what’s striking about Furnace Room Lullaby is how the slower numbers showcase her finesse with country customs. On “Porchlight,” Case sways between a dreamy falsetto and an earthy lower register, creating a bittersweet reverie; the spell is matched in “South Tacoma Way,” a southern lament transplanted to the Northwest in which the cadence of Case’s delivery says as much as her sad words. Furnace Room Lullaby is a record that feels out of time, in the best possible sense: It exists in a netherworld, a place where the past and present blur, where only deeply bruised emotions matter. –Stephen Thomas Erlewine

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At the Guitar Romantic release show in Portland, the room was pretty much empty—just the opening bands and their significant others showed up. No records got sold. According to guitarist Terry Six, this was typical of an Exploding Hearts show in their hometown, where they weren’t exactly loved. Still, Guitar Romantic is a Stumptown album through-and-through: It was recorded in one of its basements, and frontman Adam Cox met the garage-rock journeyman King Louie Bankston on its streets. The song “Jailbird” is partially inspired by Oaks Amusement Park—the park where two members of the band worked and hit on girls, not in that order.

Guitar Romantic remains a power-pop classic. It packs howl-along melodies that beg to be blasted—upbeat tracks about heartbreak, agony, and sniffing glue. (Loosely, this was also the Ramones’ formula—gleeful songs about fucked-up situations.) The band’s greatest weapon was Terry Six, who murdered the guitar parts of Guitar Romantic; then 20 years old, he knocked out the album’s biggest moments, from the fill that follows the bridge of “Sleeping Aides & Razor Blades” to the massive outro of “Rumours in Town." Unlike so many rock bands that surfaced in the early 2000s, Exploding Hearts sounded like they were having fun. A 2003 car accident stopped everything—a devastating end to a band in their prime. Still, over a decade later, Guitar Romantic’s appeal endures. –Evan Minsker

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The Portland pop-punks’ third album rapidly unpacks the most famous imagery of the Old Testament, stacking Sunday school tropes like Babel only to kick them back into the dust. Plagues of locusts descend, wives crumble into pillars of salt, animals march in mated pairs onto a big-ass boat that will sail over flooded plains. It’s the true miracle that the Thermals’ derision is never sanctimonious, never cloying or snotty; rather, The Body, the Blood, the Machine is an insurgent kind of spirituality in itself, an inclusive rally against the thin solace of conformity and incuriosity.

Singer Hutch Harris had yelped grave, politicized observations before this—on the group’s more brash preceding album, Fuckin A, he demanded “Pray for a new state/Pray for assassination”—but his cynicism was newly anthemic on The Body, freshly singalong as it scavenged dystopian new worlds. “So give us what we’re asking for/Cause either way we’re gonna take it/Our power doesn’t run on nothing/We need the land you’re standing on,” he sneers on “Power Doesn’t Run on Nothing,” over discordantly plucky bass from Kathy Foster, nodding darkly to manifest destiny and intellectual enslavement alike. There were a few moments of levity—in “Here’s Your Future,” God’s advice to Noah is the hilariously reductive “It’s gonna rain”—but the album scarcely lets up as a jarring, breakneck prophecy. By the time the rapture descends, a full 38 minutes later (“I Hold the Sound”), the Thermals drip off into squalling feedback and distortion, utterly spent—and fully deserving a day of rest. –Stacey Anderson

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When Princess Amidala told the guy from “Scrubs” about the life-changing power of the Shins, it’s safe to assume no one’s life changed more than James Mercer’s. Formerly, he was the bandleader of an introverted group of indie-pop hobbits bred in Albuquerque and based in Portland; post-Garden State, he became the unlikely mascot for an indie-rock cottage industry.

Chutes Too Narrow was made while Mercer attempted to shield himself from the glare, and each of his 10 songs treats immaculate hooks like the next one might provide an escape hatch from the limelight. “Kissing the Lipless” is a coasting thrill ride that seems to terrify the mousey architect who built it, and the verses of “Saint Simon” lead you gently by the wrist down stairstep minor chord progressions before disintegrating into a wordless major-key chorale, a kind of card-trick harmonic flourish that never loses its power. The Shins aren’t an outwardly spectacular band; they don’t have blinding charisma or a dramatic back story. But Chutes Too Narrow remains paean to the amount of joy you can wring from something as simple and unsexy as craft. –Jayson Greene

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In Greg Kot’s Ripped, Death Cab for Cutie attribute their slow-build success to (paraphrasing here) being allowed to suck privately in the beginning. While they were expressing relief over not having to undergo the kind of white-hot internet scrutiny that meets developing bands these days, they also had the good fortune to emerge out of the sleepy college town of Bellingham, Washington, rather than Seattle or Olympia.

In the same manner that the burgeoning group faintly touched on the sound of their more sizable peers (Built to Spill, Modest Mouse), the songs on their second album, We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes, are always adjacent to something, verging on catharsis they never reach. Its narrator remains close enough to know how far he is from the action: searching for a job, driving an hour to see a girlfriend in the big city, getting invited to the wedding and being seated at the “What the hell is he doing here?” table. As these deceptively intricate, deeply relatable slices of urban young adulthood steadily found an audience, the word-of-mouth buzz grew around Death Cab while they lived in a place so tiny, the neighbors asked these guys to turn it down. “It’s so appropriate, the way we amplify the sound,” Ben Gibbard sings on “The Employment Pages.” It’s very appropriate. –Ian Cohen

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Bratmobile’s debut album is a master class on mixing righteous messages with riotous spirit, and it’s indelibly associated with the riot grrrl scene it helped lead. Though the trio was based in both Olympia and Washington, D.C., their Pacific Northwest cred is undeniable: Lead vocalist Allison Wolfe and drummer Molly Neuman both attended the University of Oregon and, with guitarist Erin Smith, played at Olympia’s landmark International Pop Underground Convention.

Pottymouth, the only album the trio recorded before their first breakup in 1994, doesn’t just cuss out the disproportionately male hipsterati; it’s also too much fun to ignore. Whether scrambling genders on a Runaways cover (“Cherry Bomb”), telling off lusty creeps with red eyes (“Love Thing”), or, yes, disavowing dudebro one-up-manship (“Cool Schmool”), their surfy post-B-52’s blitzkriegs drew attention to huge, inequitable messes while dancing straight through them. Their influence as pioneering indie-rock women is broad, from the Coathangers to Potty Mouth, and just as Wolfe prophesied: “Hip kids know just where to go/I’m the one who tells them so,” Wolfe deadpans on the deliciously ramshackle closer, “Queenie.” It’s still wise to heed her. –Marc Hogan

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Beck is as L.A. an artist as they come, but 1994’s One Foot in the Grave is 100% Pacific Northwest. Not only was it cut in Olympia by K Records kingpin Calvin Johnson and released on his label, but its performers were a who’s-who of local scenesters from the era: Johnson, James Bertram of 764-Hero, Scott Plouf of Built to Spill, Sam Jayne of Love is Laughter, and Chris Ballew of the Presidents of the United States of America.

The tunes are connected to the anti-folk Beck was making at the time, but the production style and performances lean heavily to K’s aesthetic and the vibe of Olympia: dull, thudding kickdrums (“I Get Lonesome”), sweetly off-key vocals (“See Water”), and just plain shitty-sounding guitars (“Girl Dreams”). It all adds up to a ramshackle, charming product befitting its origins. As Beck’s last independently released record before he found wider fame, there’s a gentle, naive sweetness to One Foot in the Grave that the musician has rarely channeled since. –Ben Scheim

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By 1996, the breakup of Heatmiser was looming. Elliott Smith and Neil Gust’s rock band, founded in 1992 at Hampshire College and now based in Portland, was straining under the weight of Smith’s burgeoning solo career; he had just released Roman Candle and his self-titled album, and would soon assume his rightful place in indie history with Either/Or. So Heatmiser’s third and final record, Mic City Sons, marks a special place in Smith’s timeline.

It was a grand exit for Heatmiser: The quartet was fueled by Virgin Records money, which allowed them to rent a home and record with producers Rob Schnapf and Tom Rothrock, who worked with Smith on his solo records. Smith wanted to move away from Heatmiser’s rock sound and towards the lighter pop of his solo fare. The band was split over this change, but the surrounding tension did not make its way into Mic City Sons. Instead, there is an obvious, visionary tug-of-war between Smith’s guitar melancholy and Gust’s upbeat melodies. It’s a glorious, complicated swan song. –Quinn Moreland