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!

Merriweather Post Pavilion

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

1/14

OK Computer

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

2/14

Daydream Nation

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

3/14

Spiderland

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

4/14

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

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

5/14

Sound of Silver

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

6/14

Ys

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

7/14

Bitte Orca

Dirty Projectors' 2009 album of fractured indie art-pop, challenging and rewarding with interlocking guitar lines and complex vocal harmonies.

8/14

Person Pitch

Panda Bear's 2007 solo album, mixing sample-based loops with soaring vocals in a hypnotic psychedelic pop experiment.

9/14

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.

10/14

Wind's Poem

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

11/14

Halcyon Digest

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

12/14

The Age of Adz

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

13/14

Strange Mercy

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

14/14