Listen to a YouTube playlist featuring a track from every album here. From stone-cold classics to unsung obscurities, here are the 30 you need to hear.
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Whether you accept the term or not, this thing called post-rock encompasses some of the most exciting albums of the last 25 years. Guitars became texture factories instead of riff machines, and electronics were adopted for the same task. The band members themselves became anonymous, practically invisible (would you really recognise a member of Tortoise if they passed you on the street?) and the studio nerds, previously relegated to the job of “producer” or “engineer”, became de facto frontmen, pushing and pulling their groups’ sounds into glorious new places. Flamboyant frontmen were replaced with mumbled made-up languages, or simply removed altogether. The performative emotion of the live performance, for so long the beating heart of rock, was rejected in favour of studio experimentation. It’s no coincidence that the genre and the term emerged just as four decades of relative stability were overturned by the abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war. Just as some scholars were declaring “the end of history”, a seam of would-be rock musicians sensed that it was time to step back from the crash site of American post-war culture and survey the damage. Like the term postmodern, post-rock doesn’t just mean after rock – it’s also against rock, a rejection of an outmoded narrative. Post-rock embraced uncertainty and indecision, and shied away from rallying statements, wary that any aesthetic rebellion can easily be co-opted and commercialised. Post-rock is certainly sincere, often to the point of being embarrassingly earnest post-rock wears its heart on its sleeve, but then scribbles over the evidence and mumbles an excuse not to tell you what it’s really thinking.
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We can’t go back, even if we wanted to, and pretending otherwise would be insincere.
![top metal albums of all time top metal albums of all time](http://www.progarchives.com/progressive_rock_discography_covers/670/cover_2736122582020_r.jpg)
Looking back, it seems more fitting now than it ever did then, heralding a shift in both mindset and technique as bands increasingly headed to the studio for inspiration as the digital age took hold.Īs its prefix makes clear, post-rock contains a sense of an ending, a feeling that rock as we know it is over. Slipping into use in 1994 after Simon Reynolds coined it in Mojo, the term was almost as universally reviled as “IDM”, polarizing bands, fans and critics alike, who saw it as disparaging. The first rule of post-rock is that you definitely don’t call it post-rock.