What is the best experimental indie album of all time?

At its most adventurous, indie music refuses easy categorization — these albums push sonic boundaries, defy genre, and reward patient, curious listeners. From art-pop experiments to noise-folk and chamber-pop deconstructions, which is the most daring and essential? Cast your vote!

1

Merriweather Post Pavilion

Animal Collective's 2009 psychedelic pop milestone, a densely layered and euphoric work of studio experimentation.

2

OK Computer

Radiohead's 1997 landmark blending rock, electronic, and art rock into an anxious, prescient, genre-defining statement.

3

Daydream Nation

Sonic Youth's 1988 double album, sprawling noise-rock art with tuned-down guitars and avant-garde structure.

4

Spiderland

Slint's 1991 post-rock/post-hardcore album, a quiet-loud blueprint of tension that invented a subgenre.

5

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Wilco's 2002 art-rock experiment that deconstructed Americana with electronic noise and studio abstraction.

6

Sound of Silver

LCD Soundsystem's 2007 dance-punk masterwork, emotionally rich and sonically expansive.

7

Ys

Joanna Newsom's 2006 five-song orchestral folk opus, Van Dyke Parks arrangements and harp-driven epic storytelling.

8

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

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

Grouper's 2008 ambient folk album, Liz Harris' voice submerged in reverb and tape hiss to otherworldly effect.

11

Wind's Poem

Mount Eerie's 2009 album, Phil Elverum channeling black metal textures and noise into ambient folk.

12

Halcyon Digest

Deerhunter's 2010 album of dreamy shoegaze-pop, layered in nostalgia and fragmented memory.

13

The Age of Adz

Sufjan Stevens' 2010 maximalist electronic pop departure, an overwhelming flood of production and raw emotion.

14

Strange Mercy

St. Vincent's 2011 album of coiled, technically virtuosic art-pop guitar pyrotechnics.