# What is the best experimental indie album of all time?

> 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.

*By YPB Team · Published April 20, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-best-experimental-indie-album-of-all-time*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

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.

Tags: music, rock, indie, experimental, art-rock