Listen to Touche Amore’s new song “I’ll Be Your Host”

When Crazy For You came out, it was part of the trendy, surfy lo-fi boom and not really connected at all to the pop punk bands of the time, but it was clear from the songwriting that Bethany Cosentino -- whose pre-Best Coast solo project had a PureVolume page -- was a pop punk fan and they went on to cover blink-182 and tour with Green Day and Paramore, so I think we can just admit they've always sort of been a pop punk band at heart. More important than any of that, though, is how influential this album has become and how well it's held up. Obviously there were tons of women who played punk and indie rock before Best Coast, but Crazy For You tapped into coming-of-age female anxiety with the same deceptive simplicity that blink-182 and Green Day did for coming-of-age male anxiety in the '90s, and helped open the doors for an era where critics could declare rock isn't dead, it's ruled by women. The melodies and chord progressions were in the Ramones-style tradition of recalling '50s/'60s rock n' roll and girl groups, but the album also treated things like waiting for a call from a partner or not being as attractive as the person your crush is dating as these monumental things, and that's pretty fucking emo. And on top of it all, it had these ridiculously catchy hooks that you probably still can't get out of your head a decade later. Every song on the album feels like it could've been a hit, and even if the production makes this album much more indie rock than a lot of the decade's indie/punk crossover, I'd be willing to bet Billie Joe Armstrong and Mark Hoppus wish they wrote choruses this perfect this decade.

It doesn't always work out this neatly, but with Converge, each decade of their career has been a separate chapter. In the '90s, they were going through lineup changes and still figuring out their sound (and striking gold a few times in the process). In the 2000s, they cemented the lineup of Jacob Bannon, Kurt Ballou, Nate Newton, and Ben Koller, and released classic after classic, from 2001's generation-defining Jane Doe up through 2009's wildly ambitious Axe to Fall. This decade, they've slowed their output down a bit (but members have also been very prolific with a number of side projects), and the two albums they put out will probably always be known as the "after the classics" albums. That doesn't mean they're of lesser quality though; Converge just sound a little more settled-in. They're at a similar point in their career to, say, The National. For both bands, it seems like they're less concerned with topping their last album and writing a new classic, and more concerned with just operating in their own world, doing what they do best. It's made Converge seem a little more relaxed, but that doesn't necessarily mean the music itself is slower or less aggressive. Sometimes it is, like on "Coral Blue," which might be the most pure pop moment in the band's career -- but All We Love We Leave Behind is still an intense, extremely heavy album. From the math-punk of fiery album opener "Aimless Arrow," to the tech-y, riff-forward standout "Sadness Comes Home," to the heavy-as-bricks closer "Predatory Glow," All We Love only strengthens Converge's reputation as one of punk and metal's most powerful bands. They're elder statesmen at this point, but they're still as creative and forward-thinking as the younger bands who are hungry to prove themselves.

With these decade lists, it's always hard to try to put albums that came out just a few months ago against ten-year-old albums that already feel like classics, but sometimes you get an album as instant-classic as Morbid Stuff and you just know it already measures up. PUP had already been one of the leading voices in 2010s indie-pop-punk thanks to their first two albums, but Morbid Stuff came out in April 2019 and blew both of its predecessors out of the water upon arrival. It delivers pretty much the same kind of fist-raising punk anthems as those two albums, just in a way that's bigger, better, tighter, and smarter. PUP don't really try to be the most startlingly original band in the world, but they put enough of their own spin on tried-and-true pop punk formulas that they end up sounding like no one else. And they're one of those bands who create a sound and keep honing it from album to album, getting exponentially better each time. If they keep going at this rate, they'll top Morbid Stuff eventually too, but right now, they're about as close to the top as it gets. The 2010s have given us a lot of good punk records, and Morbid Stuff can already go power chord for power chord with the best of them.

Charmer could've ended up as Tigers Jaw's last album, but instead it proved to be a new beginning. It was the last album recorded with the classic lineup of Ben Walsh, Brianna Collins, Adam McIlwee, Dennis Mishko, and Pat Brier -- the latter three of which left the band before its release -- but it opened the doors for Tigers Jaw to reach a bigger audience than ever before. After Charmer came out, Tigers Jaw were no longer the niche indie-punk band that they were during the era that birthed their first three albums. They started to get widespread critical acclaim, play bigger venues than ever before, and eventually they signed to an imprint of a major label. (All the while, former co-frontman Adam McIlwee started to gain traction for his emo-rap project Wicca Phase Springs Eternal.) And the reason it all happened, is because Charmer contains the best songs Tigers Jaw ever wrote. Their 2008 self-titled sophomore album is already a classic in certain circles, but it's a scrappy, flawed classic that's probably destined to remain as niche as it was the day it came out. Charmer saw Tigers Jaw sounding like pros. They were writing melodies and lyrics that earned them a spot in the same lineage of morose pop music as bands like The Cure and The Smiths. They're the kind of instant-classic songs that would silence a room if they were performed on nothing but an acoustic guitar (as Tigers Jaw have done), but which sounded even better when they were arranged and produced (by Will Yip) the way they were on Charmer. Tigers Jaw took a similar approach with 2017's very good Spin, but with Adam, Ben, Brianna, and Pat all singing on Charmer, it remains the definitive document of this band's career (so far, at least). Their voices never sounded better than they did on this record, and their songs never felt more powerful. It's hard to believe more than half the band already knew they'd be on their way out when they were making it.

For an album with a mouthful of a title like Parting the Sea Between Brightness and Me, you might be surprised how much these songs rely on brevity. The first half ("~" through "Method Act") qualifies as a song cycle, with each under-two-minute song segueing directly into the next with hardly a moment for lead shouter Jeremy Bolm to take a breath. Some of these songs are so short that they don't even bother with verses and choruses; they just move from point A to point B and then it's on to the next one. But don't mistake "short" with "simple." As these mini epics come together, they create a whole that covers a shockingly huge amount of ground. Atmospheric, slow-burning post-rock and high-speed punk both have a place on this album, sometimes in the same song. And though Parting the Sea sometimes threatens to become too ambitious for its own good, it never does. Since releasing this album, Touche have never stopped pushing forward and covering more and more ground, but even if Parting the Sea isn't their absolute best, it may always remain their most classic. Every line Jeremy screams on this album feels like it belongs to him as much it belongs to the thousands of kids who yell these songs back in his face at shows. Parting the Sea is relentless in the way it offers up classic song after classic song; on one hand, it feels like just yesterday that this album dropped, on the other, I can't believe it's only been eight years. These songs feel embedded into post-hardcore's DNA as much as songs that are twice or three times as old. Like all Touche Amore albums, Parting the Sea is overwhelmingly personal, but more so on this one than any other, Jeremy tapped into feelings of desperation that feel near-universally relatable.

What do you do after you've written the best true-blue pop punk record of the last ten years? Write an even better record that entirely defies the genre without abandoning what people already love about your band. That's what The Wonder Years did with No Closer To Heaven, the followup to The Greatest Generation, which pretty much closed the book on the whole "defend pop punk" thing two years prior. No Closer To Heaven hits all those same pleasure points that The Greatest Generation (and any good pop punk album) does. It's still got an adrenaline-fueled rhythm section and crisp power chords that feel like a shot to the heart, it's still got Dan Campbell straining his voice to the point of cracking while still sounding crystal clear, but it's got more than that too. It's more dynamic, more atmospheric, and more musically diverse than its predecessor, and it's a much grander sounding album. It's the album where The Wonder Years seem like they're taking the most amount of risks, and for that reason, it has its flaws too. But after a perfect record like The Greatest Generation, sometimes you want flaws. In a way, the flaws make The Wonder Years better. It makes them sound more raw, more real, and more human, and, on an emotional level, this album is nothing but. When Dan mourns his dead friend on "Cigarettes & Saints," it'll tug at the heartstrings of even the most cynical music listener.

Because emo is often a youth-oriented genre, a lot of these bands get attention when they're very young, and we end up seeing the good ones drastically evolve before our eyes. (Emo 101: Just because a band's debut album is whiny pop punk, doesn't mean they won't release some tremendous art rock record in like five years.) And The Hotelier are one of those bands; each album was a gigantic leap from the past. Their debut was the generic emo-ish pop punk of 2011's It Never Goes Out, which was followed by the much stronger and much more unique Home, Like Noplace Is There in 2014. And their masterpiece thus far is 2016's Goodness, an album that transcends any specific subgenre and feels like a monumental album for underground rock overall. It's a warm, atmospheric record with folk/post-rock interludes, vivid imagery, and the best songwriting and production of the band's career. They already learned how to write soaring hooks on their debut, but on Goodness, they wove those hooks in with intricate arrangements and inventive song structures. It's the age-old approach that's been winning music nerds over since Pet Sounds -- experimentalism with an underlying pop song, making for something that's too weird for the radio to ever touch but as catchy as anything they do play. The Hotelier figured out how to take that art pop mindset, and apply it to the driving catharsis of punk and emo, and it resulted in a record that hits you in the mind, heart, and gut all at once.

When the beloved indie-pop-punk band P.S. Eliot reunited and released a discography compilation in 2016, Don Giovanni Records' Joe Steinhardt called them "this generation's Cap'n Jazz." If they are, then that would probably make Waxahatchee some combination of our Owen and our American Football. P.S. Eliot singer Katie Crutchfield started Waxhatchee as a solo project just as P.S. Eliot were breaking up (and her twin sister/P.S. Eliot bandmate Allison started Swearin'), and after releasing her bedroom-folk debut American Weekend in 2012, she put out the slightly-more-band-oriented Cerulean Salt, which remains the most unique and most heart-wrenching album she has ever made. Katie made it with three members of Swearin' (Allison, Kyle Gilbride, and former member Keith Spencer) and Radiator Hospital's Sam Cook-Parrott, but it was still much more bare-bones than the two fleshed-out albums Waxahatchee would release next. It wasn't "full band" so much as it was "sort of band," with songs like "Brother Bryan" that was fueled by a simple bassline, a kick drum, and a snare, and yet was more impactful than tons of other fuller-sounding records. Waxahatchee went into more musically ambitious territory later on, but the feelings on this record remain the most powerful. It's the kind of record you bury yourself in when you're going through a rough patch and you need to feel like someone else understands (like Owen records were for a previous generation). Both sonically and lyrically it is about as honest and imperfect as finding a page ripped out of someone's diary. And I think it's already safe to say it inspired a lot of people throughout the last seven years to make raw, honest, DIY-minded records of their own.

When American Football broke up in 2000, their 1999 debut album had hardly left any kind of noticeable dent at all, but today it is maybe the single most influential album on 2010s emo. Hundreds of bands copied it, though none could truly capture its charm... until American Football themselves. Their cult status grew until they finally reunited for live shows in 2014, polished the rust off with 2016's LP2, and then made the best album of their career with 2019's LP3. American Football helped pioneer a blend of math rock, post-rock, and emo that was a huge feat instrumentation-wise, but it wasn't until starting his solo project Owen that frontman Mike Kinsella really learned how to sing and write lyrics and choruses that left the same impact on the heart that his noodly guitar playing left on the brain. When American Football reunited, he and the rest of the band (including new bassist Nate Kinsella, Mike's cousin and longtime collaborator) began putting those two things together and they perfected it on LP3. The album still has the math rock signifiers that made American Football so unique and so influential, but LP3 succeeds because it isn't trying to recreate any previous American Football album. American Football have now been a band in the 2010s for longer than they were in the '90s, and they've really figured out who they are now; they're not just living off the nostalgia for who they were 20 years ago. LP3 is just as much a dream pop album as it is a post-rock/math rock/emo album. It's the best-produced and most gorgeous sounding album the band ever made, and it sets no limits for what it means to be an "American Football album." It brings in glockenspiel, a children's choir, and high-profile guest vocalists from members of Paramore, Slowdive, and Land of Talk, whose voices are as essential to these songs as Mike Kinsella's. LP3 may never hold the same cultural significance as LP1, but, artistically speaking, it's a massive leap forward.

Whenever a hardcore band stops screaming, they risk saying goodbye to a large chunk of their fans, but the risk was worth it for Pianos Become the Teeth, who left their screamo roots behind on 2014's Keep You and came out with the best album of their career. As revealed a year earlier on "Hiding" from PBTT's essential 2013 split 7" with Touche Amore, lead screamer Kyle Durfey had been, uh, hiding a great singing voice all along. And when the cleaner vocals put Kyle's lyrics more in the forefront than ever, it also made it even more clear how strong a lyricist he had become. Much of the album is about the death of Kyle's father, and he conveyed that emotional weight through the tiniest, everyday details. "I got your picture sitting on the sink / You were so young, so skinny, so quick to laugh," he sings, and it manages to hit even harder than a more direct rumination on grief. Kyle had written some of the best hooks and the best lyricism of his life, and the rest of PBTT had perfected the style of heavy post-rock that they had begun honing on their first two albums (aided by not-so-secret weapon David Haik, one of the most gifted drummers in modern-day post-hardcore). The instrumentation is as dramatic as the songs' content, but not overly so. It's impassioned, cathartic, and flawless in its execution. It captures true human emotion in its purest form, and it's really not everyday that an album successfully bares it all the way this one does.

"There’s actually very few people who do what War on Women do, to be honest," said Kathleen Hanna, who sings guest vocals on "YDTMHTL" off War On Women's sophomore album Capture the Flag, and if that kind of praise from a true feminist punk legend isn't enough to sell you on this band, I don't know what will. Members of War On Women had been in a handful of noteworthy bands in the past, but since forming this one, they emerged as one of the strongest feminist punk bands that the 2010s had to offer. Their politics are uncompromising, both in their lyrics and in the activist work they do, and it's hard not to get chills as Shawna Potter scream-sings about injustices that date all the way back to the 1800s up through ones we still experience today. And War On Women back up their very strong messages with very strong writing. They've got a rock-solid rhythm section, searing guitar solos, and radio-ready hooks that might've made War On Women famous if the radio actually played punk bands. As far as loud, in-your-face, middle-fingers-up punk in the 2010s went, it rarely got better than Capture The Flag.

History repeats itself, and just like hardcore bands in the early '90s started experimenting with slower tempos, flashes of metal, and pop choruses, hardcore bands about two and a half decades later started doing the same thing. Turnstile emerged on the hardcore scene with a 2010 demo, and by their 2018 sophomore album Time & Space, they'd written their best songs yet by doing all of the aforementioned things and more. Time & Space often sounds like those '90s bands who made similar creative decisions, but Turnstile figured out how to do it while sounding entirely fresh. They kept their hardcore roots intact while writing songs you could sing along to, shredding guitar solos you could play air guitar along to, and pummeling riffs you could bang your head to. They also worked in bits of psychedelia, R&B, and more, and somehow even got Diplo on the record in a way that totally worked. They are still hardcore through and through, but when they put this genre-defying record in February 2018 they sounded like the genre's future. Now, almost two years later, they still do.

Before becoming one of the decade's most beloved indie rock bands, Hop Along grinded their way through the punk and DIY scene, playing tons of tiny rooms and opening for seemingly any band who asked. They aren't openers anymore -- now they headline decent sized venues on the regular -- but back in the first half of this decade, Hop Along were a well-kept secret. They hadn't really gotten much indie hype machine buzz yet, but they spread like wildfire thanks to good old word of mouth. Even when they'd be on first of three at a big venue, there'd always be a group of people near the front yelling every word. It was always obvious this band was destined for a breakthrough, and that was because of how damn near perfect the songs on Get Disowned were. The opposite of an overnight success, Hop Along had been around as Frances Quinlan's solo project since the mid 2000s (initially known as Hop Along, Queen Ansleis), and though she released the 2005 solo album Freshman Year as a teenager and some EPs, 2012's Get Disowned was their full-band debut album and the album that truly started it all. They'd eventually sign to Saddle Creek, have their long-overdue breakthrough, and earn a great amount of acclaim for Get Disowned when the label reissued it in 2016. But initially, Get Disowned came out on Algernon Cadwallader's tiny, seemingly now-defunct label Hot Green Records, and it was the kind of album that was just too good to stay underground forever. When you hear Frances yell "nobody deserves you the way that I do" on album standout "Tibetan Pop Stars," you're reminded why this band was once considered emo, but Get Disowned also has a Neutral Milk Hotel-esque folk side that gives it more of a shambolic, earthy edge than their later albums. They tightened up their sound on 2015's Painted Shut and successfully navigated more ambitious territory than ever on 2018's Bark Your Head Off, Dog, but the raw, humble charm of Get Disowned makes this album remain just as much a gem as it was the day it was quietly released.

Polished, super mainstream pop punk in the mid to late 2000s did not get a very good reputation, but Paramore were always a cut above the rest. And with their fifth album After Laughter, which dipped its toes into synthpop and new wave while still sounding like no other band in the world, they hit such a creative peak that even the most pop punk-averse music fans and critics had to admit they did something great. The album's more "hip" signifiers made it more easily digestible for people who wince at the mention of "pop punk," but After Laughter isn't Paramore's best record yet just because it's quote-unquote "cooler." Hayley Williams became a more compelling vocalist than ever on this record, and it's got the band's strongest songwriting yet. Hayley's depressing lyrics were masked with bright, sugary melodies and infectious rhythms, which is often a trick that helps secure longevity, as it did for this album. The songs hook you on first listen, and the lyrical depth keeps you hanging around to further explore the emotional weight that they carry. Especially when you come out of nowhere and get super popular with your debut, as Paramore did back in 2005, the cliché is that you're likely to fall off quick. But Paramore made their best album (so far!) 12 years later. It feels like they're only beginning.

Transgender Dysphoria Blues wasn't so much a comeback, as it was the beginning of Against Me!'s second life. After starting out in the early 2000s as a beloved underground folk punk band, they went through a divisive major-label period in the late '00s and early '10s, and then took a bit of a hiatus from music as singer Laura Jane Grace became one of the most high-profile rock singers to come out as transgender. Around the same time, the major label deal ended, lineup changes ensued (and Against Me! secured drum wiz Atom Willard), and then the new-and-improved Against Me! wrote the best album they ever made, Transgender Dysphoria Blues. It often tackles Laura's coming-out and gender transition head on, while also working in an ode to a dead friend ("Dead Friend") and one of the greatest punk rock fuck-yous of the decade ("Black Me Out"). It can't be easy to write about this kind of stuff, but Laura did so incisively, and came out with a handful of definitive trans punk anthems in the process. Its subject matter is of course a large part of what makes it so significant, but it's not the only reason; the message is matched by the best songwriting and production of Against Me!'s career.

Not unlike The Gaslight Anthem before them, The Menzingers' formula was simple: take the melodic punk of bands like The Bouncing Souls and Rancid, throw in a dash of Springsteen's blue collar heartland rock, and tell the stories you know. And with On the Impossible Past, The Menzingers wrote a record so instantly classic that it rivaled all of those aforementioned forebears, and it still does. On the Impossible Past takes place in diners, parking lots, muscle cars, rooftops in Brooklyn that were covered in bad graffiti, and at parties thrown by some guy named Chris. It's steeped in nostalgia, and full of highly specific stories, like an old photograph. Like with any memories, some of those details are probably a little romanticized -- especially when you're singing about the kinds of nights you'll never remember -- but On the Impossible Past doesn't feel fake or dishonest. Even if you can't relate to the depictions of small town American life, the feelings are nearly universal. From self-doubt to self-medication, from young love to broken hearts, On the Impossible Past taps into life experiences than can happen just about anywhere, and it does so in such a way where your brain starts to blend your own fuzzy past with the vivid settings in The Menzingers' songs. These are the kinds of songs that can really mean a lot if they find you at a rough point in your life. But even if they don't, they'll likely linger in the back of your head anyway, just because they're so damn catchy.

Title Fight emerged as a melodic hardcore band indebted to Lifetime, Kid Dynamite, etc, and they ended up as leaders of the punk/shoegaze crossover movement that a lot of fellow punk bands latched onto in the mid-to-late 2010s. And right in between came their magnum opus, Floral Green, which hinted at the shoegaze and alternative rock influences that would eventually define latter Title Fight but which still fully embraced the band's hard-hitting punk roots. Not to mention they wrote the best batch of songs of their career. Experimenting with slower tempos and a greater interest in atmosphere also gave Title Fight the ability to let some of the most powerful songwriting of their career shine. When Ned Russin sings "I never wanted sympathy / Just wanted to be something," somehow gutturally screaming and sighing at the same time, he tugs at the heartstrings about as hard as the best emo bands ever did. And when Title Fight diverged from their punk past for arty songs like "Numb, But I Still Feel It," "Lefty," and the album's Hum-like centerpiece "Head in the Ceiling Fan," it became overwhelmingly clear that this was a band who had already transcended the boundaries of punk and emo. They essentially made what was one of the best indie rock albums in recent memory, and helped create a sea change within the entire world of punk and emo. Whether the influence was direct or not, when punk/emo bands in the 2010s started making indie, art rock, post-rock, and shoegaze records, they owed at least some of it to Floral Green.

It took Joyce Manor a little while to catch on outside of niche punk and emo circles, but quality wise, they came out of the gate swinging on their 2011 self-titled debut. They'd go on to become of the most consistently rewarding rock bands of the '10s, and they continued to hone and expand their sound in interesting ways on each album, but the main idea was already there on their debut, an 18-minute-and-48-second barrage of near-perfect punk. Borrowing the melodies and quotable lyricism of '90s pop punk and emo and the lo-fi brevity of Guided by Voices, Joyce Manor's debut helped write the blueprint for the entire past decade of indie/punk crossover. Blurring the lines between pop punk, emo, and indie rock is now commonplace, but when Joyce Manor did it on their debut album, it felt revolutionary. I'm still not entirely sure which of those genres most accurately describes Joyce Manor, but it doesn't really matter and that's kind of the point. Like other casually groundbreaking bands before them, Joyce Manor were just channelling all the music they loved at once and the results ended up being something entirely fresh. Their style has already been replicated hundreds of times, but their substance has not. Underneath the genre-blurring exterior was a natural knack for songwriting that tons of bands only dream of. The fast-paced Joyce Manor is just one fan fave after another; if Joyce Manor ever release a best-of, they could probably include every song on this LP without turning any heads. And it all leads up to "Constant Headache," the first stone-cold classic they ever wrote and possibly still their finest moment as a band. At 3 minutes, it's about twice as long as most other songs on this album. It's a little slower, really giving Barry Johnson's words room to breathe, and it peaks with a stripped-back bridge, where everything drops out except bass and vocals, as Barry delivers one of the best one-liners ever sung about the emptiness of a one night stand. As long as kids are getting drunk and breaking each other's hearts, there will be a need for songs like this one, and "Constant Headache" remains one of the best.

Before Harmlessness, The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die had released some promising EPs, a great but very imperfect full-length, a not-so-enjoyable spoken word EP, and underwent a few lineup changes including the departure of lead vocalist Tom Diaz. They were not exactly a band who seemed on the verge of releasing an all-time classic record, which is why it's so interesting that that's exactly what they did. Harmlessness was TWIABP's first album for the larger Epitaph Records, but TWIABP took the same DIY approach as they took for everything else they did (with their own Chris Teti producing, mixing, and engineering), and still they came out with better songs and a greater sense of ambition than ever before. New lead vocalist David Bello fit in with the band's sound perfectly, and he successfully tackled heavy topics like struggles with physical and mental health, while keyboardist/vocalist Katie Dvorak duetted with him on one of the emo revival's greatest anti-sexual assault anthems, "January 10th, 2014." Matching the emotional complexity was a musical backdrop that pulled from folk, post-rock, metal, indie rock, punk, emo, post-hardcore, and more, and made it look effortless as they bounced between all these different sounds. The album never really lulls, but like its predecessor, it peaks at the end. Whenever, If Ever had one long post-rocky song at the end; Harmlessness has two. Both are majorly affecting, though the best is "I Can Be Afraid of Anything." When the music brightens up, and TWIABP yell "I really did dig my own hole / I'm climbing out," we felt that.

Parting the Sea Between Brightness and Me remains the favorite Touche Amore album of many fans, probably in part because it's one of their most personal. It's the kind of album you write when you're going through a rough patch, and the kind of album that thousands of fans will connect to when they're going through their own rough patches. But what do you do when you've already written that record, and now you're happy, and you're worried about hurting your legacy? In Touche Amore's case, you write a record about how hard it is to write when you're happy, and about worrying what your legacy will be in the future. And, in Touche Amore's case, you end up making an album that cements your legacy in the process. It's a little reductive to say the album is only about those things -- there are also more personal songs like "DNA" where Jeremy Bolm sings about the fear of becoming his father -- but it is definitely a dominant theme. And it turns out his writing can be just as powerful when he breaks the fourth wall as when he's caught up in his own inner turmoil. And musically, Is Survived By was a clear maturation from Parting the Sea. The production is gorgeous (thanks to Brad Wood, who's also worked with Sunny Day Real Estate, mewithoutYou, and more), the melodies are stronger than they ever were before, and the band played tighter than they ever did before. Even more so than on Parting the Sea, Touche Amore blurred the line between hardcore and post-rock on Is Survived By, coming out with songs that are fast like the former but ebb and flow like the latter. (It was an album that paired especially well with Deafheaven's Sunbather, which came out on the same label the same year, and had similarly watercolor-y artwork to Is Survived By, both of which were designed by Touche's Nick Steinhardt. Deafheaven may be black metal and Touche may be hardcore, but both combined melody and aggression in ways that were similar more often than they were different.) Is Survived By came out six years ago at this point, and because there's so much music out there, I don't listen to it these days as much as I did in 2013. But as soon as I hear that opening drum fill on album opener "Just Exist," I'm transported right back to the place I was the very first time I clicked play on this masterpiece.

This year, Phoebe Bridgers has been busy with Better Oblivion Community Center, a new collaborative project with Conor Oberst, and that's a great fit, as Phoebe is kind of the Conor Oberst of her generation. With Bright Eyes, Conor gave young people around the world hushed singer/songwriter songs that captured all of the uncontrollable emotions they were dealing with, and with her 2017 debut album Stranger in the Alps (which Conor also guests on), Phoebe did the same. Phoebe just has that ability to write songs where the words find clever ways to mirror universal feelings, and the melancholic melodies are the perfect vessel to deliver them with. When Phoebe sang "I have emotional motion sickness / Somebody roll the windows down," she came out with a line as iconic as anything any of the Away Message-era emo bands wrote in the previous decade. And that's far from the only quotable one-liner that Stranger has to offer. It's one of those albums where almost every song was my favorite at one point or another, and I imagine I'm not alone in feeling this. It established her as a masterful songwriter and a masterful interpreter -- when she covers Mark Kozelek's "You Missed My Heart" as the penultimate track, she not only entirely makes it her own, she may have bested the original. Though this list unsurprisingly has more bands than solo artists, emo needs that quiet singer/songwriter, that heartbreaker who gets thousands of people singing every word as if they were their own. In the 2010s, that singer/songwriter was Phoebe Bridgers.

In some ways, Attack On Memory still feels like the catalyst for the decade's critical acceptance of a whole slew of punk, emo, and post-hardcore albums, genres that were typically trashed or completely ignored by critics in the previous decade. They weren’t the first critical indie darling band of the late ’00s/early ’10s with a record under the punk umbrella, and the emo revival (which Cloud Nothings never really fit into) was on the verge of a breakthrough anyway, but Attack On Memory felt like the moment when it became overwhelmingly clear that a large number of indie rock fans and critics were craving a hard-hitting, cathartic record like this. Cloud Nothings emerged out of the buzzed-about lo-fi boom of the late '00s, but with Attack On Memory, they ditched all of their trendy traits and came out with the best and most widely-loved record of their career. It ditched the lo-fi indie pop of their early work in favor of abrasive post-hardcore, and it tied together elements of various '90s rock bands -- from Nirvana to Sonic Youth to Weezer to Sunny Day Real Estate -- in a way that felt both like the nostalgia dose you didn't know you needed and the freshest new rock record around. They made it with Steve Albini, whose raw, bare-bones style and killer snare sound was the perfect fit for a record that bounced seamlessly between punchy hooks ("Fall In," "Stay Useless"), entrancing noise rock ("Wasted Days"), dark post-hardcore ("No Future/No Past"), angst-ridden grunge ("No Sentiment"), and more. It helped bring all of this music back into the indie rock zeitgeist, but Attack On Memory doesn't succeed just because it helped kickstart a sea change within the genre. It holds up today as one of the most brilliant, impassioned, and endlessly listenable rock records released this decade.

There might not be a more accurately titled album on this list than Celebration Rock. It's exactly what this album does; it celebrates the pure thrill that you can only get from rock and roll. Every song (except the initially underrated album closer "Continuous Thunder") is turned up to 11 and played like the two members of Japandroids are challenging each other to play just a little bit faster. They've said they included all the "whoa"s because they were trying to think of how fans would sing along at shows. They stuffed the album with fist-raising heartland punk anthems that sounded like The Replacements with a literal fire lit under their asses, and they included such classic rock-isms as "Hearts from hell collide on fire's highway tonight" and "hitchhiked to hell and back, riding the wind / waiting for a generation's bonfire to begin." These eight songs sound like all the most fun parts of rock, stripped of all the pretension. It felt like a breath of fresh air in 2012, when stuff like art rock and psych-pop was still dominating indie rock, and -- along with Cloud Nothings' Attack on Memory -- it helped open the doors for modern indie rock to embrace music that actually rocked. It holds up after all these years not just because it rocks so hard, though, but because underneath all the ruckus, Japandroids conveyed enough raw emotion to shake the hearts of anyone who listened to the core. "It's a lifeless life, with no fixed address to give / but you're not mine to die for anymore, so I must live," Brian King shouts as the drums drop out of penultimate song "The House That Heaven Built," and it's among the most life-affirming sendoffs put to tape this decade.

When the "emo revival" started in the late 2000s, it was a way for a new wave of bands to take emo back to the underground and pull influence from bands like American Football, Cap'n Jazz, and Braid, rather than the pop rock bands who brought the genre to arenas in the mid 2000s. Eventually, though, a handful of bands in this new wave of underground emo bands started offering up a much more original take on the genre that looked forward rather than backwards. No one's really given it a name yet -- maybe "post-emo" will take off, but the word "revival" shouldn't be anywhere near it. Whatever you want to call it, it produced a lot of great music throughout this past decade, peaking -- so far, at least -- with Foxing's stunning third album Nearer My God. Like most great albums, Nearer My God transcends its genre; in fact, there's a good case to be made that this album shouldn't qualify as "emo" at all. Nearer My God is to "emo revival" what OK Computer is to Britpop and grunge; the roots are there, but it takes those roots into nearly-undefinable territory. Like OK Computer did, Nearer My God pulls from all across the musical spectrum, and it brings tons of seemingly incongruous styles of music together in a way that somehow feels natural. And as much as you can draw comparisons to anything from M83 to TV on the Radio to The Blood Brothers to Frank Ocean, Nearer My God doesn't sound like any band other than Foxing. They started out in a scene of bands who proudly wore their influences on their sleeves, but grew and came out with a sound that they can truly call their own. It is strikingly original, deeply experimental, and yet somehow it goes down like fine wine. It's one of those albums where, no matter how many times I listen to it, I still can't fully wrap my head around the idea that it was created by humans who walk the same earth as you and I.

The thing about The Shape of Punk to Come is that it wasn't the shape of punk to come. Punk got a lot more popular in its wake, but none of it really sounded like that album. Back in 2014, when White Lung released their third album and Domino debut Deep Fantasy, I wondered if maybe this would be the shape of punk to come. Well, it turned out this wasn't either. It sounded like the future of punk in 2014, and it still sounds like the future of punk in 2019, because nobody's had the guts to try and copy it. Deep Fantasy did everything that its excellent 2012 predecessor Sorry did but with better production and even nastier songs. Sorry was nasty as all hell, but when "Drown with the Monster" opens Deep Fantasy with its low, thundering power chord riff, you know you're in for a different beast entirely. As on Sorry, the White Lung of Deep Fantasy figured out how to apply gigantic hooks and face-melting fretwork to the tried-and-true formula of short-fast-and-loud punk, managing to defy the genre and strictly adhere to it all at once. The songs on Deep Fantasy are just as intense as Sorry, but the production really helps bring out the best in them and it's no surprise that this album -- which is ever so slightly easier on the ears -- helped gain White Lung a bigger fanbase. And like the great hardcore and punk bands of the past, White Lung used their platform to amplify necessary messages in direct opposition to the status quo. A few years before the #MeToo and #BelieveWomen hashtags went viral, White Lung captured the essence of both on Deep Fantasy highlight "I Believe You," a takedown of rape culture that could've been an anthem for the #MeToo movement if it had been released a few years later. Deep Fantasy is a pre-Trump album that only became (sadly) more relevant in the Trump era, and the absolute finest example of real-deal punk music released this decade. It might never be the future of punk, but it still sounds better than whatever punk became in its wake.