What is the best experimental indie album of all time?

By YPB Team

These records challenged conventions, blurred genre lines, and pushed the limits of what indie music could sound like. Vote for the most adventurous indie album ever made.

  1. Merriweather Post Pavilion — ranked #11
    Merriweather Post Pavilion
    Animal Collective's 2009 psychedelic pop milestone, a densely layered and euphoric work of studio experimentation.
  2. OK Computer — ranked #22
    OK Computer
    Radiohead's 1997 landmark blending rock, electronic, and art rock into an anxious, prescient, genre-defining statement.
  3. Daydream Nation — ranked #33
    Daydream Nation
    Sonic Youth's 1988 double album, sprawling noise-rock art with tuned-down guitars and avant-garde structure.
  4. Spiderland — ranked #44
    Spiderland
    Slint's 1991 post-rock/post-hardcore album, a quiet-loud blueprint of tension that invented a subgenre.
  5. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot — ranked #55
    Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
    Wilco's 2002 art-rock experiment that deconstructed Americana with electronic noise and studio abstraction.
  6. Sound of Silver — ranked #66
    Sound of Silver
    LCD Soundsystem's 2007 dance-punk masterwork, emotionally rich and sonically expansive.
  7. Ys — ranked #77
    Ys
    Joanna Newsom's 2006 five-song orchestral folk opus, Van Dyke Parks arrangements and harp-driven epic storytelling.
  8. Bitte Orca — ranked #88
    Bitte Orca
    Dirty Projectors' 2009 album of fractured indie art-pop, challenging and rewarding with interlocking guitar lines and complex vocal harmonies.
  9. Person Pitch — ranked #99
    Person Pitch
    Panda Bear's 2007 solo album, mixing sample-based loops with soaring vocals in a hypnotic psychedelic pop experiment.
  10. Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill — ranked #1010
    Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill
    Grouper's 2008 ambient folk album, Liz Harris' voice submerged in reverb and tape hiss to otherworldly effect.
  11. Wind's Poem — ranked #1111
    Wind's Poem
    Mount Eerie's 2009 album, Phil Elverum channeling black metal textures and noise into ambient folk.
  12. Halcyon Digest — ranked #1212
    Halcyon Digest
    Deerhunter's 2010 album of dreamy shoegaze-pop, layered in nostalgia and fragmented memory.
  13. The Age of Adz — ranked #1313
    The Age of Adz
    Sufjan Stevens' 2010 maximalist electronic pop departure, an overwhelming flood of production and raw emotion.
  14. Strange Mercy — ranked #1414
    Strange Mercy
    St. Vincent's 2011 album of coiled, technically virtuosic art-pop guitar pyrotechnics.

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