The Beginner’s Guide to Post-Rock

If rock music is dead, when did it die?

That isn’t a rhetorical question, please do think about it. Your answer is obviously going to be dependent first and foremost on how you define a “dead genre”, with any semi-arbitrary date being secondary to that. If you deem a genre dead when it’s no longer a radio-popular format, then you’d probably say rock died by the early 2000s. The alternative rock revolution had gasped its last breaths with the bands of the very late 90s and gave way to the burgeoning, but all the while less popular, generation of indie musicians. By 2005, rock hit a popularity low it probably hadn’t seen since before the term Rock & Roll was put to paper. Rock lived on through Classic Rock radio, and you could be assured that Nirvana still had their following, but rock’s time in the sun had otherwise passed. Pop, hip-hop, and some miscellaneous electronic genres were quickly taking rock’s place in the radio sphere¹.

But if you define a “dead genre” a little differently, then no genre of music has ever truly died. I can say with confidence that some of the best rock music of the last two decades was made in the last five years, by old and new bands alike. Not to mention, other genres which crumbled far longer ago as radio-popular formats, like soul and folk, are still flourishing. Modern classics are still being released in all of these genres, which are popular among fans and media journalists alike. They just aren’t utterly dominating the Top 40s like they did in their respective heydays. Rock remains perhaps the most common “indie” genre other than pop. So then, I ask again, when did rock die?

The 90s. No, not the late 90s, the early 90s.

In March of 1994, journalist Simon Reynolds published a review of the album Hex in Mojo Magazine, in which he posited that alternative rock had quickly stagnated. He, and the bands he reviewed, were finding the alt-rock scene to be feckless and stale, just a meager stage for worshipping the golden years of rock. Reynolds put it most succinctly himself: “these days, alternative = antiquated”. In his review, he noted a trend among rejectors who constructed albums “not around riffs and choruses, but layers and loops”. This was an accurate description of a blossoming scene which rejected the clichés of mainstream rock, much like the post-punk movement of some decades prior. And while Reynolds noted this primarily as a rejection within alt-rock, he simultaneously felt that, from a creative perspective, the scene was more reminiscent of art pop and experimental rock.

Now going on to review the album Hex itself, Reynolds attended to its signature stylings: its “lush, intricate arrangements”, its “blue mood”, its “jazzy drumming”, its “abandonment of the song and [stretching] to explore pure texture”, and its place within the greater “rise of ambient-tinged rock”.² And Reynolds associated all of these features with a term which he first used a short time earlier, in a different review³: “post-rock”.

You see, some bands saw the writing on the wall for alt-rock early on into the 90s. And rather than phone it in, they were inspired to make some changes. New rock bands of the era were pushing the boundaries of radio-friendly rock music forward, and imbuing it with new soul, hence, post-rock. Where rock surpassed rock.  

Despite the age of Reynolds’ guide, we can actually glean quite a bit which remains mostly accurate today. Reynolds notes two important features of what he called “post-rock”: that it began as an offshoot of alternative rock, but had more in common with experimental styles of rock. And, that it mostly abandoned the verse-chorus-verse structure of alternative rock in order to emphasize the atmosphere and the “pure texture” of its arrangements. All of that remains accurate of post-rock in the 21st century, and I will expand and elaborate on the definition he put forth shortly.

Post-rock fascinated me from the moment I heard it. It challenged so much of what I expected a rock album to sound like, to feel like, to impose upon me. It turned my conceptions of rock music on its head, and that was very exciting to me as a younger listener. I want to introduce new listeners to the subgenre in hopes that they can experience the same.   

This guide was written primarily for those who are completely, or essentially, unfamiliar with post-rock’s story: those who range from never having heard the term “post-rock”, to those who’ve maybe listened to a couple of its classics. I will be providing a fairly comprehensive, entry-level definition of post-rock in the first part of my guide. The second through fourth parts of my guide will go over the history of post-rock, from its birth through today (2022). In these parts I will be discussing key post-rock albums and bands, important trends in the styles of post-rock, and occasionally side tracking to discuss other meta information about the post-rock movement; all of this will be structured in a rough timeline of events. After all of that you’ll (hopefully) be itching to actually hear some full albums, so in the fifth part, I will be recommending five different entry-level post-rock albums. I’ll be going into some detail about each, in hopes of helping you decide where to start with the subgenre.  

One of post-rock’s greatest strengths (or most obvious flaws, depending on how you look at it) is that it’s a very broad, all-encompassing genre. Some post-rock albums retain a vocalist who sings in a conventional way, and some do not. Some post-rock sounds more like classical, or jazz, or ambient, or metal, or a mixture of multiple. Some classic post-rock albums fall pretty close on the rock spectrum to alternative rock, and some don’t sound like just about any other rock music you’ve ever heard. This is good for us, because post-rock of its various styles appeals to many different sorts of listeners.

To momentarily temper my own authority on the subject, I should say that gauging the initial popularity and acclaim of older post-rock releases is difficult for me. I often have to base these claims on music media outlets and reviews which, as you likely know, often don’t represent the greater consensus surrounding an album. I hope you’ll cut me a ribeye of slack considering that I wasn’t even alive when many pivotal post-rock albums were released.

If you’re a reader who’s more acquainted with post-rock and I end up not discussing an artist which you expect to see, consider it to be an intentional omission rather than a forgotten entry. For example, experimental rock bands like Stereolab, who were associated with the early post-rock scene, were essentially caught in the crossfire. The genre early on had no clear canon or definitions, and the bands I’m omitting didn’t display some of the few near universal traits of post-rock. But on the other hand, it is entirely possible that I just forgot to mention an artist which you justifiably consider a key player in the scene.

The parts of this guide are disparate enough that you could probably read them in any order, especially if you have no interest in the history of the movement. However, take this guide like a post-rock song itself. You can listen to just the “best” parts, but you’ll be missing the bigger picture and cheating yourself out of some appreciation you’d otherwise have. Throughout this guide I’ll be including embedded Spotify links to songs I’m talking about, and I suggest listening to these as you reach them. However, as the total length of all of the songs exceeds the expected reading time of this guide (and all these songs should be heard to completion!), I’ll include a playlist at the end of this guide of all of the embedded songs, so you can later listen at your own pace.

Movement 1  

Simon Reynolds, who would go on to make significant contributions to post-rock journalism after 1994, talked about something in his review of Hex which he called the band’s “exploration of pure texture”.

If you’re mostly unfamiliar with music theory (like me), you may be asking, what is “texture” as it relates to music? A good way to imagine it is by the definition you’re more familiar with. Imagine something physically tangible, something you can touch with your hands, unlike music. How do you describe that feeling? How does it compare to and contrast with other things you can touch? Is that something dry, or wet, soft, or rough, warm, or cold, vital, or artificial? That essentially all applies to musical texture, even if it isn’t something we can physically touch⁴. Since this is an entry-level guide, I’m going to intentionally oversimplify texture a tad.  

Imagine any song. Think of its melodies. How many melodies does it have? If it has more than one melody, how do these melodies play off of each other? How does the song transition between these melodies? How many vocalists are present? How many layers of vocals are there? (For example, you may hear a vocalist sing the same part three times, all parts layered on top of each other). What range does the vocalist sing in? This can be anywhere from bass (a low men’s voice), to soprano (a high woman’s voice). If there’s an electric guitar, what sort of tone does it have; a fuzzy thick one, a plucky thin one, or something completely different? What is the range of all of these sounds; is there a lot of bass, or a lot of treble, or a gradient of both?

All of that, is texture.

Another key player in musical texture is timbre, which is a little bit simpler. Texture is like a big circle, which contains timbre in its entirety, but also contains some other stuff like what I listed above.

For the moment, imagine a flute and a guitar, both playing a C note. These instruments may be playing the same note, but you can still perceive an audible difference between them. The two instruments sound different, despite their pitch and volume being the same. That is timbre, which is often thought of as the “color” of the sound. Timbre is the “sound” an instrument makes at any given pitch. Synths, brass instruments, acoustic guitars, electric guitars, flutes, human voices; these can all perform many of the same pitches, but the timbre of those notes varies greatly.

Post-rock, in a very cursory definition, wants to emphasize the texture of its songs rather than what is typically emphasized in a rock song: riffs, power chords, and choruses. Post-rockers often consciously disregard the verse-chorus-verse writing structure, and the short to medium song lengths associated with the alternative rock of the 90s.  

You’re probably now thinking “well that’s all well and good but how do post-rock bands actually emphasize the texture of their songs?”. Or you aren’t thinking that at all and I’m a poor guesser, but let’s assume for simplicity’s sake that I was right. Post-rock emphasizes texture through minor changes and adjustments in said texture. This can be via obvious transitions, like the addition or subtraction of a particular instrument from a song. Or, perhaps the playing of the band speeds up or slows down. Perhaps an instrument switches to playing a different chord progression. Perhaps the vocalist starts singing more loudly, or softly, or stops singing altogether. These are some basic examples, but many different changes in a song can emphasize a constantly transforming texture. Post-rockers design their songs so that all of these minor shifts in texture add up to something noticeable, and hopefully, something engaging.

This sort of aim within rock is extremely valuable and unique as a sound in two departments.

One, post-rock is often far more atmospheric than other styles of rock. Post-rock often utilizes its sense of detail and instrumental palette to evoke strong moods, often without the use of narratives to guide the emotional tone.

Two, post-rock often hones in on tension and release more than many other styles of rock. Just as a strong fictional narrative has a winding upward trajectory to some sort of big moment or climax, post-rock often builds that same sort of tension through its progressions before releasing said tension through its crescendos.

A song which builds is a simple example. Picture an imaginary song. It starts quiet, perhaps only one instrument is being played. Then, another instrument slowly fades into the track. Another instrument is added, instruments begin playing the same notes, the instruments play louder, maybe one of the instrumental tones gets fuzzier, and then at the end of the song, it climaxes in a great crescendo.  

Consider how this song gradually builds to its big finale to understand this idea:  

A build is one of the most common progressions for a post-rock song, although many post-rock songs do not utilize builds/crescendos, and if they do, they often don’t sound just like this. A post-rock song can often be thought of in terms of many different large changes in texture, which are stitched together in subtle ways. Perhaps a post-rock song has one crescendo over its entire runtime; or it has multiple, or one of those crescendos is especially grandiose, or the builds are broken up by a “soundscape” section between them. Post-rock songs can evolve in many different ways in order to explore their unique texture.

Instead of or in addition to crescendo-ing, many post-rock songs draw influence from ambient music and drone to emphasize an “environment of sound”, also known as a soundscape⁵. The interplay of the sounds and the way they immerse a listener into the song are the emphasis here.

As post-rock shares many traits with other rock subgenres like slowcore, experimental rock, krautrock, art rock, and progressive rock, it can be difficult on paper to separate them. The biggest culprit among those is prog rock. Both of these genres challenge pop norms and the radio-environment in attempts to expand conceptions of what defines rock music. Both combined rock’s traditional sound with elements of classical and jazz. And both often output sprawling, progressive, multi-segmented tracks, resplendent with instrumental breaks.

It can be a sort of grey area to truly understand what makes them different, but I think its best thought of that progressive rock and post-rock seek to expand rock music in different directions. For starters, progressive rock almost inherently makes rock music more technical, but post-rock does not. Progressive music (post-Woody Guthrie’s political progressivism) usually suggests advanced performing technique and compositional talent. Knowledge of music theory, and years of experience with an instrument are often necessary tools in a prog rocker’s toolbox. However, skills like soloing and playing at high tempos are rarely if ever associated with post-rock, where tracks are often built upon relatively simple, repetitious, midtempo rhythms and melodies. Irregular time signatures (those other than 2/2, 2/4, 3/4, 4/4 ), a trait nearly synonymous with prog rock, are rarely present in post-rock, at least not in the post-rock which isn’t consciously influenced by prog rock. I’m not trying to suggest that post-rockers aren’t instrumentally talented, but you will rarely be wowed by their technical prowess in quite the same way as prog rock.  

There are some notable overlaps between these genres but those are the exception rather than the rule. The band Tortoise, for example, grew popular by blending post-rock with a sprawling and often complex krautrock sound. Other notable post-rock bands, such as Talk Talk and Bark Psychosis, drew inspiration from instrumental improvisation. And a few bands, like Slint, display some of the technical playing and irregular time signatures of prog rock. Past this particular example, post-rock overlaps with many of rock’s more “experimental” subgenres; but they all remain fairly distinct scenes, with their own separate evolutions, histories, and fanbases.  

The sound palette of post-rock is fairly eclectic; most post-rock albums utilize the same instruments that alternative rock does: electric guitars, bass guitar, and drums. On top of those, post-rock bands frequently implement baroque instrumentation, including strings such as the violin and piano, brass instruments like trumpets and saxophones, a variety of percussive instruments, and a swath of traditional folk/classical instruments. The second-wave of post-rock bands brought synths into the mix, drawing from a range of genres, from techno to IDM.

Post-rock vocalists often perform in four atypical ways. The first is where the post-rock vocalist sings in a conventionally appealing way and writes a cohesive narrative, but doesn’t follow the common verse-chorus-verse structure of pop. An example of this would be a song which has no chorus and only verses. Alternatively, a vocalist may sing in a conventionally appealing way but the lyrics themselves are incohesive; the lyrics may be more cryptic or stream-of-conscious, and clear meanings/themes are ill-defined.

Some post-rock vocalists do not sing traditional lyrics whatsoever, instead utilizing the vocals as just another source of texture. Famous Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós coined the term “Vonlenska” to refer to the passionate adlibbing sung on their album ( ) (yes, that album is called “left-parenthesis-right-parenthesis” or simply “untitled”). Vonlenska is described in the band’s FAQ as “a form of gibberish vocals that fits to the music and acts as another instrument”⁶.

And perhaps the most common atypical vocal style (or lack thereof), is when bands completely eschew the vocalist, choosing to create a through-and-through instrumental rock album. Almost all post-rock does this to a certain extent: many post-rock albums with dedicated vocalists have instrumental tracks. Tracks on many of these same post-rock albums contain multi-minute long intros, outros, or instrumental breaks.

With those ideas in mind, let’s get two common misconceptions out of the way early into this guide. First, post-rock is commonly thought of as any rock music without a vocalist, or any album with rock instrumentation but no pop structure. With the notable success and influence of the purely instrumental post-rock band Tortoise, common understanding of post-rock moved towards perceiving it as any “vocal-less rock”. This goes double as more post-rock bands in recent decades have forgone the vocalist role. But a rock album without a vocalist does not necessarily make for a post-rock album, unless it intentionally eschews the vocals in order to emphasize the texture of its other instruments. An easy way to understand this is with any rock album you’ve heard which was released alongside an instrumental-only version. Is this instrumental-only version inherently post-rock? No.

Nearly all older post-rock bands had dedicated vocalists on most or all of their songs. And to say post-rock songs inherently lacked vocalists would discredit the efforts and legacies of classic performers like Mark Hollis (of Talk Talk), Brian McMahan (of Slint), and Efrim Menuck (of Silver Mt. Zion), among many others, who often poured their hearts and souls into their deeply passionate performances on the mic.  

A second misnomer is that for a song to be post-rock, it must be long. Like the “no vocals” thing, this is merely a trait of some popular post-rock which does not extend to many other popular post-rock songs. As bands like Talk Talk, Slint, and Bark Psychosis brought genres into the mix such as jazz, classical, and ambient, song lengths naturally went up. These genres never tied themselves to a golden song length and post-rock progenitors didn’t either. On early post-rock albums, songs often pushed ten minutes in length. With later post-rock bands like Tortoise and Godspeed You! Black Emperor (Godspeed for short), who explored genres like Krautrock and drone, songs often hit the 20-minute mark. This is easily contextualized when you consider that these genres frequently emphasize repetition in their compositions, so the post-rock songs influenced by them did the same.

But just as often these 20-minute-long songs explore rather dynamic song structures with multiple segments deftly stitched together, much like classic prog rock. Godspeed often blended both the drone and the dynamic progressions to form their impressively long tracks. A good rule of thumb is that, the longer the post-rock song, the more moods and instrumental styles it’s likely to touch on during its duration. Famed tracks like Swans’ composition “The Knot” hits a 45-minute runtime, but it also explores at least seven distinct segments during said runtime. But this isn’t an inherent exploration within the frame of post-rock. Plenty, and I mean plenty, of post-rock songs, both old and new, find themselves in the 3–6-minute range, a quite common length for the 90s alternative rock scene which they grew out of. These songs likely have just one progression, or crescendo, or rhythm section.

With those features and misconceptions of post-rock defined, we have a pretty decent working definition of the scene. But let’s try to boil it down into a more succinct few-sentence summary, or what we might call the elevator pitch of post-rock:

Post-rock refers to a style of experimental rock which blossomed out of the 90s alternative rock scene as artists grew tired of stale trends in popular rock music. Post-rock highly emphasizes minute changes in the texture of its songs, the way those songs evolve over their often-extended runtimes, or the atmosphere of those songs. Post-rock is stylistically influenced by rock genres which rejected popular trends in music, and by genres of music usually unrelated to rock. Because of this, post-rock often eschews core components of rock music like its pop lyrical structures or the role of dedicated vocalist.  

Early adopters of the style would go on to develop this definition in a broad swathe of ways, so here we will switch to discussing the early history of post-rock to better understand how these bands explored, rejected, or evolved upon trends in alternative music.

Movement 2

Talk Talk, the godfather of the post-rock subgenre, released their fourth album Spirit of Eden in 1988. This was the sole post-rock album released in the 80s, but considering that Spirit was borne of the ethos of popular-rock-rejection, it was greatly representative of 90s post-rock movement which would follow.

Talk Talk’s debut and sophomore albums both had a fairly established new wave sound, which was unrepresentative of bandleader Mark Hollis’ love for classical and jazz. Hollis lacked the funding on Talk Talk’s first two albums to capitalize on these influences, and lacked the creative control to capitalize on them with the third; but with newfound revenue rolling in from successful singles like “It’s My Life” and “Such a Shame”⁷, Talk Talk’s label gave them an open budget and total control over the recordings of their fourth album⁸. With this newfound freedom, Talk Talk drastically reoriented their sound. Hollis took staples of alternative rock, injected his own influences, and then blended them together during the development of Spirit of Eden; forming something mostly unrecognizable to new wave, pop, or any of Hollis’ other genres of influence, Spirit was retroactively understood as the first post-rock album. Few knew what to make of it at the time of its release, and no one could have guessed it would go to define a whole new subgenre of rock.

Roughly a dozen guest instrumentalists introduced newfound sounds to the rock equation, many snatched directly from classical and jazz, including: keyboards, upright bass, trumpet, violin, and a variety of woodwinds. While baroque instrumentation in rock was not exactly novel by 1988, Hollis’ emphasis on ethereal dynamics was wonderfully new.  

The compositions of Spirit of Eden were formed from extensive improv sessions. The advent of digital music editing allowed Mark Hollis and producer Phil Brown to loop, manipulate, and stitch together smaller sections of instrumentation. Eight months of recording gave Hollis and Brown over 800 instrumental “fragments” to work with, which explains the Spirit’s very organic-sounding compositions.

Don’t get the wrong idea, this is not a freeform jazz-esque take on rock music. Songs on Spirit, despite their improvisational origins, don’t emphasize the technique of soloing like much jazz. A seamless package of six tracks is formed by instrumental subtlety, Hollis’ highly evocative vocals, and rhythm. It’s often a drumline or a piano chord progression, sometimes a bassline, but these sources of rhythm regularly trade hands with one another to keep the soul of the album unrestrained. The chamber of instruments is constantly breathing new life into the album, making Spirit a lush and mysterious listen. It’s a constantly shifting canvas where instrumentalists focus and blur, new forms take shape and disappear, moods change colors, as though the album itself is evolving.

The vinyl release of Spirit lists tracks 1-3 as a 21-minute suite, reflecting the fact that “The Rainbow”, “Eden”, and “Desire” don’t have clear beginnings and endings, and more-so gracefully shift from one to the next. The album kicks off with a three-minute-long instrumental build, foreshadowing the many extended instrumental breaks across the album. Lyrics on the album are evocative yet highly abstract, as Mark Hollis passionately muses on philosophy, religion, and family.

The album sold not nearly well as Talk Talk’s prior effort The Colour of Spring⁹ and was critically controversial. Many journalists found it intentionally vexing in its disregard for rock norms, but even these same writers found it to be, on occasion, awe-strikingly beautiful¹⁰. However, decades later, Spirit of Eden has been reappraised as both an alternative classic and the first ever post-rock album. Many of its features became evergreen for the subgenre, including its immersive atmosphere and sparsity, its lyrical presentation which emphasized mood over narrative structure, and its sense of dynamic texture¹¹.

A little under four years later, Talk Talk would release Laughing Stock, which shared and developed upon many of the same signature stylings of Spirit of Eden. Hollis once again utilized his swath of instruments drawn from many different genres to emphasize the texture of his songs. Innumerable instrumental breaks and their ever-shifting progression evoked an atmosphere which was constantly forming and reforming.

Just like on Spirit of Eden, the first three songs on Laughing Stock form a 21-minute suite. And in the case of the latter, they also present a storied climax and resolution: “Myrrhman” is essentially the jazzy ambient intro to the suite, with “Ascension Day” forming the krautrocky punch. Its cacophonous instrumental coasts along to the very end of the track where it suddenly disappears to kick off the soundscape of “After the Flood”.  

Laughing Stock was both Talk Talk’s magnum opus and their final contribution to the future of rock music. Mark Hollis was working on a sixth Talk Talk album in the mid to late 90s before he decided to release it under his own name, owing to its much different sound compared to Talk Talk’s recent efforts¹². The Mark Hollis self-titled transcends the post-rock medium, instead referring back far more closely to Hollis’ jazz, classical, and ambient influences. The texture was there but it was simply too subtle, too pretty, too delicate to be defined within the rock ecosystem. Hollis deemed the material on his self-titled far too intimate to ever be played live. Mark Hollis passed away from illness in 2019, at age 64, with a permanent mark made on the landscape of post-rock¹³.

Let’s now move back in time some years. In March of 1991, the European magazine Melody Maker published a review by (in)famous American producer Steve Albini. In said review, Albini discussed “an amazing record”, and confidently stated “no one still capable of being moved by rock music should miss it. In 10 years' time, it will be a landmark and you'll have to scramble to buy a copy”¹⁴. This album was Slint’s sophomore project Spiderland, and some decades later, Albini turned out to be right on the money. Although the album made no waves when it first came out and sold fewer copies¹⁵, Spiderland holds the position today of rock trailblazer and genre classic. Albini, the producer of Slint’s first album, predicted much the same while talking to the band: “I don't think you guys will ever get big, but you'll be really influential”. Magazine Louder Sound called Spiderland “Kentucky’s ‘post-rock’ masterpiece¹⁶”, Pitchfork reviewed it as a 10/10 in 2014¹⁷, and The Guardian called Spiderland the “album that reinvented rock.¹⁸”

Notably, Slint’s confrontation of rock was exact and opposite to that of Talk Talk. Spirit of Eden, released by a somewhat heralded and mature pop outfit, was lush, intimate, sparse, and felt like a transcendental album. Standing in stark contrast, Spiderland was cold and dissonant, covered in jagged edges, and was borne of the emotional turmoil of a band of teenage nobodies. So, what brings these albums together as forerunners of post-rock? Their experimentation and emotional intensity through dynamic texture.

Spiderland took the form of a fairly typical homegrown math-y post-hardcore punk release, utilizing the swirling energy, the irregular time signatures, and the shouted vocals associated with those styles. However, it had a few key and influential assets which distinctified it from the crowd. For one: Spiderland’s compositions are highly progressive and suspenseful. While post-hardcore added a great deal of complexity onto the homogenous aggression of hardcore punk, Spiderland pushed dynamics ever father. Consider the track “Don, Aman”. It’s instrumented through the middle by a lone guitar, which stories much of the narrative’s building tension after the track’s ominous, lethargic introduction. The guitar is eventually joined by a far noisier one which soar together, before eventually they both return to the crawling pace of the intro.

Slint convincingly builds and releases tension across Spiderland, much in part to the way they’re constantly subtly tweaking their songs, in large and small ways, to always keep the listener on the edge of their seat.

Other tracks on Spiderland, like “Washer” and “Good Morning, Captain” are also multi-segmented, with instrumental breaks stitching together the verses; while each instrumental portion on a particular track may play the same chord progression and drum line, there are usually minor textural alterations to tease along the listener. These progressive and lengthy compositions with multiple distinct sections are now commonplace for post-rock, even in its many disparate styles. The album’s dynamic dissonance and intensity were especially influential to both post-rock and the indie rock bands of the early 2000s.

The vocal presentation on Spiderland was also quite unique for the time. While most tracks feature both sung and shouted vocals, typical of both alternative rock and post-hardcore, all of these tracks also feature monotone spoken word monologues. You’ll hear it as soon as you start the album: the first lyrics on the opener “Breadcrumb Trail” are not presented as a sung verse, but as a story being read aloud, sentence by sentence. This delivery was rather experimental for the post-hardcore scene, yet rooted post-rock early on in atypical vocal styles.  

Narratively, the album concerns itself with intimate topics for the young bandmembers, like fleeting romance, suicide, and the existentialism of growing up. Vocalist McMahan infamously vomited from the intensity of screaming the final verse of “Good Morning, Captain” in studio, and soon after finishing the recordings for Spiderland, left the band. This story has been twisted over the years into him being hospitalized after the recording sessions due to his faltering mental health, but this is essentially a farce¹⁹.

Because of McMahan’s departure from Slint and the band’s subsequent breakup, there was no fanfare for Spiderland’s release. No tour, few sales, no charting; for that the album likely would have been forgotten to history if not for the significant influence it had on an entire movement of rock. Many notable post-rock bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mogwai, and Explosions in the Sky, credit Slint as a major influence²⁰.

At this point in post-rock history, it’s first two key albums had been released: Spirit of Eden and Spiderland. And by the mid-90s, post-rock was a blossoming scene, ripe for new bands to come and run away with the sound in all directions.  

Bark Psychosis, one of post-rock’s earliest contributors, released their notable “single” Scum in 1992. “Single” is in air-quotes because Scum was originally released on a 12” record, as a 21-minute long, single-song release.

The inspirations for the project are complicated: Bark Psychosis wanted to put something out, but didn’t have material they found fit for a single. So, renting out gear, they entered their local church basement/recording studio, with no clear end goal but some “rough galactic ideas”, and ten-ish days later had the material for Scum. Guitarist Graham Sutton said that Scum “came about as a general disaffection with general sentiments from records that were being shoved down my throat. Crap house tracks.²¹”

Scum itself was an eerie track with a challenging sound. Perhaps the lyrics on Scum can describe it better than I can: “it’s all around you – it’s all about you – can’t escape what you can’t see”. Scum is ethereal and foggy; it seeps into you, but its minimalistic instrumentation never quite sticks around for long enough to pin down. Over three minutes of mic-feedback serve as the intro for the single, before its ominous soloists creep into a dance around each other. Dubby drums, dissonant horns, and the bellowing of a crowd of church-goers form much of the track’s tense atmosphere. Scum’s improvised dynamics which emphasized mood over any readily describable progression, established Bark Psychosis as one of post-rock’s original key players.

Bark Psychosis would release their debut album Hex soon after. Disco Inferno, another English band, also in 1994, released their sophomore album D.I. Go Pop, after a series of avant-rock EPs. Considering just how un-poppy D.I. Go Pop is, you should probably be picturing satire à-la Throbbing Gristle’s industrial classic 20 Jazz Funk Greats; because D.I. Go Pop sounds like the purgatory between being shitfaced drunk and the throbbing hangover which follows. The atmosphere on Go Pop is surreal, frightening, and pummels like a madman. The vocal presentation is absolutely alien; if the vocal track isn’t buried under layers of samples and drums, they’re slurred and breathless. The lyrics, if not existential and political, are cryptic to the point of nonsensicality.

Keep in mind, this is all a great thing! Disco Inferno and their challenging perspective on pop was invaluable to pushing the medium forward, like The Residents of a new decade. Go Pop is widely considered a post-rock classic, and influential to the greater field of 2000s rock. However, Disco Inferno themselves rejected the post-rock term²², aligning themselves instead with the pop movement they were seemingly trying to criticize. But the post-rock ethos of Go Pop is obvious. It’s an album which not just rejects alt-rock norms, but shatters their bones. While many post-rock albums create atmosphere through minimalism and restraint, Disco Inferno used it’s at the time novel digital sampling to create dense scenes of shock and terror. Genres from industrial to jazz, to the real-world sounds of camera shutters snapping and snow crunching, are fed to the maw of Go Pop. Disco Inferno sounded more like Butthole Surfers than any post-rock bands which would precede or follow them, but they still had a key role in the history of the movement for their rejection of alt-rock norms and desire to push rock forward.

Between 1994 and 1996, post-rock continued dropping classics left and right. The post-rock scene had reached Australia by this point, with Melborne giving us Dirty Three’s self-titled debut. Their anxious and raucous compositions often passed double digit lengths, and tracks like “Indian Love Song” are resplendent with the noisy builds and crescendos which became an eventual staple of post-rock. Godspeed You! Black Emperor later put forth their own twist on this style and were revered for it, but Dirty Three were already confidently presenting the sound on albums like Horse Stories (1996) years prior.

In 1995, Long Fin Killie released their own debut in the form of Houdini. It’s a much different affair than everything else on this list so far; Houdini takes the rhythmic, punkish atmosphere of Spiderland but greatly recontextualizes it. Long Fin Killie often forgoes the dissonance and the energy of bands like Slint and returns to post-rock’s roots in indie and pop. Vocalist Luke Sutherland provides a beautiful performance in his sultry upper register across Houdini, and there are more than a handful of songs on the album which retain the verse-chorus-verse structure of alternative rock.

However, this is by no means a literal pop album. Themes on Houdini are notably transgressive despite the album’s alt-rock veneer. Sutherland introspectively explores subjects like male beauty standards, sexual pride, homophobia, and racism. Sutherland goes as far as singing slurs on Houdini in order to portray the swathe of bigoted characters who are resistant to Sutherland’s mere existence.

Houdini, in the fashion of post-rock, is also frequently driven by its baroque rhythm sections and post-punkish grooves as oppose to any sticky riffs or standout, singular moments. Even its longest tracks, which butt up against 9-minutes long, feel just like extended rhythm sections. There are kicks in the energy level, newly introduced instruments, and a great deal of progression, but they all orient themselves a grounded mode of melody. Houdini wants you to fall in tune with its repetitive instrumental portions and feel out the minor changes presented throughout them.

The years around 1995 weren’t just important for debut albums. By then decade-and-a-half old rock outfit Swans released their then final studio and accompanying live album, in the form of Soundtracks for the Blind (1996), and Swans are Dead (1998). Soundtracks was predominately a towering, multi-hour-long collection of the myriad styles of rock and experimental music which Swans had dipped into over the years. But it also contained many lush post-rock tracks with Swans’ signature misanthropic touch.

Swans had been teasing a post-rock release for years, especially on the two albums which preceded Soundtracks, with their sense of repetition and atmosphere within the rock idiom. However, post-rock was the only relatively new style to Swans which the band embraced on Soundtracks. “Helpless Child”, “Animus”, “The Sound”, and “The Final Sacrifice” were all instant cult classics from a cult classic band, with their monumental and texturally detailed crescendos, and nihilistic commentaries on subjects like abuse and religion. Each embraced a wild mishmash of genre influences from neofolk acoustics, to shoegaze haze, to gothic rock somberness, to totalistic complexity.

Swans’ take on post-rock blended many of the different post-rock styles which were circulating around 1996. You can hear traces of Disco Inferno on Soundtracks, with the hi-fi instrumentation joining forces with ominous and muddied samples; and you can hear the field-recorded monologues which predated their popularity with bands like Godspeed.  

The accompanying Swans are Dead release, on the other hand, was pure rock music. All of the ominous ambience of Soundtracks is trimmed away in favor of cacophonous maelstroms of guitars and percussion. Soundtracks and Swans are Dead, Swans’ twin magnum opuses, were released just as the band was accruing a real audience. At the same time, Swans’ battered performers had finally thrown in the towel, declaring Swans were, well, dead²³. The context surrounding these releases gave them a great deal of emotional weight to fans new and old, and was important in establishing their cult status.  

Bands like Bark Psychosis, Disco Inferno, Dirty Three, Long Fin Killie, and Swans, had not much in common with their post-rock experimentation. They all drew from different scenes and genre influences, incorporated different instrumental palettes, and had different goals with their music. But all of them were crucial to the growth of the post-rock movement. While none of these bands in particular had total control over the future of the subgenre, all of them unequivocally broke through the confines of the alternative scene to push rock forward. The ingenuity, novelty, and creativity of their rock, and the rock of a myriad of other bands who I didn’t even mention, is the reason we’re even talking about post-rock today.  

This fact plays into a common misnomer about the first nine-or-so years of post-rock: that post-rock developed into two distinct, regional scenes; the European scene, influenced by genres like classical, jazz, and ambient, which was a sort of response to the stylings of Talk Talk. And on the other side of the pond, the American scene, which occupied a math-y post-hardcore punk space alongside bands like Slint.

Evidence of this stratification is at best, circumstantial. Sure, Spiderland was an eventually seminal post-hardcore classic. And other 90s post-hardcore bands like June of 44, Drive like Jehu, Rodan, and others, had many of the same post-rock touches as Slint. But no interviews exist to substantiate that these bands were influenced by Slint themselves. Also worth mentioning are the other American post-rock outfits, like Swans, who had a difficult to qualify, avant-rock sound. These bands didn’t sound much like Slint or their contemporaries at all. And sure, many European contemporaries to Talk Talk evolved similarly baroque and intimate sound palettes, but importantly, many did not. Three of the earliest big names in European post-rock (Disco Inferno, Young Fin Killie, Mogwai) sounded nothing alike, and if anything, were more sonically inclined to the punk and noise rock of American bands like Slint. By the end of the 90s, all of post-rock’s distinct styles has cross-pollinated and blurred into a great melting pot of sound. Which means if the stratification ever existed to any degree whatsoever, it existed for no more than a mere decade in the now 34-year lifespan of the subgenre.

Back in 1996, we saw the band Tortoise beginning to stratify post-rock’s future sound with their album Millions Now Living Will Never Die. Tortoise was one of the first post-rock bands to compose multiple of the signatures now nearly synonymous with the genre. The first of which: Millions Now Living features no vocals of any kind. The release is completely instrumental. As I said earlier, “post-rock” frequently equated to any vocal-less rock album by the ‘10s, for better or for worse. But Tortoise was the first big band to take the leap and completely eschew the human voice from their rock music, bridging the gap for innumerable future post-rock bands. Millions Now Living also showcases the first 20-minute-long, fully composed (no freeform improv), post-rock track, in the form of “Djed”: a mellow, krautrock-y composition with a complex slew of distinct sections and instrumental builds. “Djed” draws from the reverb and bouncy basslines of dub music and, significantly, introduces electronic music to the post-rock equation, with at least one extensive synth section devoid of acoustic instrumentation.

By 1997, with debuts from bands like Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, we saw the post-rock movement shift towards drawing influence from within the post-rock scene itself; as oppose to what had been happening up to this point, where post-rock bands were predominately influenced by unrelated scenes and genres. This transition period is a pretty reasonable guess for when the second wave of post-rock began. Here, let’s take a moment to discuss what the waves of post-rock refer to.  

A “wave” of music usually refers to a smaller period of time within a genre or movement, and denotes artists who made music of a similar style within said period of time. Emo music, for example, has 4-5 moderately well-defined waves. These waves each had key bands, prominent styles, and were each individually important to the popularity (or lack thereof) of emo music.  

In a similar fashion, the history of post-rock is often referred to in terms of its three waves. Googling “first-wave post-rock” and “third-wave post-rock” in particular will present you with a myriad of articles, webforms, and social media posts, where people toss around the terms quite flippantly. These waves, in this form of music discussion, have nebulous definitions (at best). Waves of post-rock overlap heavily, and lack clear stylistic signifiers to dictate the death of one wave and the prominence of another. Not to mention, post-rock may have entered a rarely mentioned fourth-wave by now. If the third-wave of post-rock did in fact end in the last decade, the 2010s would exist as a sort of post-rock-revival. But this is what we can say for certain about post-rock’s first three waves:

The first-wave started in 1988 with post-rock’s debut Spirit of Eden, and this wave was defined by its lack of defined sound. As you’ve heard by now, many of these bands were directly influenced by their desire to set themselves apart from 90s alternative rock by blending rock with new genres, and injecting new influences. Many of post-rock’s key bands exist during this time period, including: Talk Talk, Slint, Bark Psychosis, Disco Inferno, Long Fin Killie, pre-reunion Swans, and Tortoise. As these bands began to decline in popularity or disappear entirely, so did the first-wave of post-rock, implying it disintegrated by 2000 at the latest.

The second-wave of post-rock refers to the coagulation of the post-rock style. With releases in 1997 like Young Team by Mogwai and F♯ A♯ ∞ by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, post-rock started to cohere around certain compositional choices and moods. That’s why I think it’s a safe assumption that Godspeed’s original five-year studio discography marked the transition from the first to the second-wave. Bands like Explosions in the Sky, Godspeed, Mogwai, Mono, and Sigur Rós heavily influenced the sound of post-rock into the third-wave. These bands, with the potential exception of Sigur Rós, share many key elements: Long instrumental portions, a permeating somberness and sense of melancholy as oppose to feelings of anxiety or dread, and a heavy emphasis on instrumental builds/crescendos.

This is where things unfortunately get murky. The second and third-waves are practically stylistically inseparable, so it’s possible that the second and third-waves are essentially the same. I can say that, just based on the sheer popularity of the term, that the third-wave of post-rock certainly exists. But the trends in second-wave post-rock bands were so influential to their dozens of third-wave protegees that it can be difficult to separate them based on their sonic traits alone.

Further muddying the problem is the return to the 2010s scene of bands like Swans and Godspeed, after decade-long hiatuses (note: their hiatuses are not related to each other in any way). Their post-hiatus sonic stylings tread a middle ground between the sound of their 90s incarnations, and the trends of post-rock after the turn of the century. This makes it even more difficult to discern the difference between the second and third waves, as we can’t do so based on sonic traits or year alone. Hence, the only clear-ish difference between wave #2 and #3 would be the perceived decline of post-rock by fans and critics, both in terms of popularity, and in terms of inventiveness.

I probably wouldn’t have included this discussion in my guide at all, had not the popularity of these terms been so pervasive in online spaces. In XKCD style, I’m adding a fifteenth “universal standard” to the pile²⁴. I think mine mostly makes sense in context, and is at least important in terms of better understanding my own timeline of the history and trends of post-rock. But we’ve been sidetracked for a while, let’s get back to 1997.

Movement 3

It’s a huge year for post-rock, bringing us two of the movement’s most popular and prolific bands: Mogwai released their debut album Young Team in November, with a sound palette which struck a happy medium between post-rock and alternative rock. Mogwai took the relatively small instrumental kit of alternative rock (a drummer and a couple of guitarists) and applied the post-rock formula to it. Extended melancholic and sparsely orchestrated sections often build tension for crushing blasts of instrumental energy. Mogwai brought post-rock back to its alt-rock roots with screeching walls of feedback from howling guitars and complex drumlines. These “loud” sections owe a lot stylistically to alt-rock subgenres such as shoegaze.  

Despite how prolific and popular of a band Mogwai would become, and Young Team’s eventual classic status, you probably won’t find many people calling it the big post-rock album of 1997. That’s because 1997 also brought us the debut of the third pillar of the post-rock subgenre: Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

I want to underline here before I continue that Godspeed is by far the most influential band in post-rock history. More post-rock bands through the 2000s are indebted to the style of Godspeed than any other band.

Godspeed released their commercial debut F♯A♯∞ in 1997, but much like Slint, it wasn’t a story of immediate popularity. Independent Canadian label Constellation released F♯ as their third ever record²⁵, with a limited release of 500 numbered copies. But early reviews of the album were pretty positive despite how few hands it found its way into: Exclaim! called it a “slow soundtrack of regret and desire”, and Hour Magazine called it “way too cool to be merely coldly superior”. Barb Steward wrote in Stylus that the album was “innovative and inventive. [Godspeed] stake out unique territory in a world overrun with hackneyed experimentation. not an exercise in useless meandering, the musicians always have a destination, never leading you on a wanking wild goose chase.²⁶”

All of these reviews came to some similar conclusions and praised some similar assets, namely the record’s sense of allure, and the way it avoided falling into the same pretentions as art rock and experimental rock despite its clear debt to those genres. F♯ was famously released as two very different versions: the original vinyl pressing which was around 40 minutes long, and the later second release, a CD version which was about 65 minutes long. The CD version extended some of the original’s instrumental sections, adds others, and reorganizes much of the album. For the sake of clarity, this is the release I’ll be talking about from here on. 

One of Godspeed’s most distinct features is their lyrical presentation. Vocalist/bandleader Efrim Menuck sings for about 90 seconds in their entire seven album discography, but many of their songs still contain “lyrics”. How? Well in a similar style to Slint, Godspeed employs spoken monologues as intros to many of their tracks. These mysterious recordings²⁷ often set the tone of of the songs which they are found on. The most famous among these is the haunting speech from F♯’s opener “The Dead Flag Blues”, with the lines now synonymous with the band: “the car’s on fire; and there’s no driver at the wheel”.

These monologues often explore the coming end of the world, and criticize institutions like the government and organized religion. The dialogues usually reflect the band’s anarchic politics, but many are presented from less-than-reliable perspectives, like raving street preachers and interviewees in contempt of court.

Songs on Godspeed albums tend to be long; 15-minutes is often a hard minimum, and their older songs each usually contained multiple named “movements”, stitched together to develop entire worlds within each track. For example, “The Dead Flag Blues” has three movements listed in the liner notes of the CD release. These movements are: "The Dead Flag Blues (Intro)", which contains the track’s opening monologue and the somber rockish-ambience which backs it. The next movement, “’Slow Moving Trains’ / ‘The Cowboy...’” opens on a field recording of the chugging of trains, and contains the first instrumental build/crescendo of album. The final movement, “The Dead Flag Blues (Outro)”, fades the prior movement into a shimmeringly optimistic chamber instrumental.

Just in this way, most all Godspeed movements denote large shifts in mood, genre, or style; importantly, not all movements for a song are labelled something like “Intro” or “Outro”, as they usually have names completely unrelated to the title of the track they’re present on. If this concept confuses you, imagine each Godspeed song as its own EP, where 3-6 movements make up the track listing. Or, think of the parts of this guide: five different parts of varying lengths, grounded by an underlying subject, which flow between otherwise disparate elements.  

Godspeed’s command over the atmosphere of their instrumental movements allows them to delicately develop narratives which bridge despair to beauty, desolation to rebirth, melancholy to resistance, without verses to provide any clear plot points. The tension in these instrumental movements is built and released through the compositions alone.

Said instrumentation bridged the stylistic gap between post-rock and modern classical music, bringing them a little closer together than Talk Talk did a decade prior. Godspeed employed a chamber ensemble of instrumentalists, which included electric guitars, percussion, horns, acoustic guitar, and cello; perhaps the most important instrumentalist was Sophie Trudeau, who brought the violin to prominence within post-rock.

Many tried and failed to repeat Godspeed’s formula because they lacked the critical understanding of just what made it tick. It comes down to two points: one, Godspeed simply has more convincing production in studio than any of their knockoffs. Two: most bands tried boiling Godspeed down to their elements which were easiest to replicate, namely their instrumental crescendos. But it was Godspeed alone who truly managed to justify these crescendos, by properly platforming them with long periods of disturbing, heavy ambience, and their highly memorable field recordings.

This is why Godspeed as a band are so synonymous with post-rock itself, just how successful they are at developing atmosphere in a novel, boundary pushing way. It took some serious creativity to tactfully present such grand narrative scope within each of their songs, without any dedicated vocalist to describe clear narratives. F♯ is a key moment in post-rock history as a remarkably developed vision from a fresh band, famed for funereal atmosphere, and its massive instrumental crescendos.

Godspeed followed F♯ up at the turn of the century with their own magnum opus, Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven! This album, which I will refer to as LYSF from this point onwards, built upon all of the same stylings as F♯: its spoken word monologues and field recordings, sprawling track lengths formed from patchworks of named movements, and extended sections of ominous ambience. LYSF, like F♯, explored feelings of palpable melancholy and hope over its extended runtime.

This was the album which broke post-rock into the indie zeitgeist. Post-rock had its hits and successes by now, but none released to the near universal critical acclaim from major journalists as LYSF. Pitchfork reviewed the album as a 9.0/10 soon after its release, stating: “they show signs of doing what they condemn the world for not doing: changing, evolving, experimenting with new approaches, growing.²⁸” LYSF found its way onto many end-of-year/decade lists, cementing post-rock’s place among the great movements of rock history.   

Three years later, Godspeed released one final album in the form of Yanqui U.X.O., which was met to tempered acclaim despite stripping away some key features of the band, like named movements and field recordings. But by 2003, they went the route of Swans and announced an indefinite hiatus.

Godspeed bandleader Efrim Menuck explained in his hiatus announcement that the “tactics” of his band had fallen out of favor due to the developing War in Iraq²⁹. He was referring here to Godspeed’s famous lack of a singular voice associated with their songs; Menuck felt the one-way communication between the band and the audience was not the sort of music the times needed, so he shelved the music for a time. This problem was essentially solved by the Godspeed-related band Silver Mt. Zion, who by their third album had Menuck placing his passionate and reedy upper register atop nearly every track. Compared to the silent Godspeed shows with no banter between audience and bandmembers, Menuck and co. regularly talked to their audiences between songs during Silver Mt. Zion live sets, shooting the shit and discussing the political messaging of their music. But unfortunately for post-rock itself, Godspeed’s departure placed the subgenre between a rock and a hard place, as most big post-rock bands seemed to be vanishing into the fog.

Silver Mt. Zion wasn’t the only post-rock project associated with Godspeed in the 2000s. Guitarist David Bryant also started his own band, Set Fire to Flames, with many of Godspeed’s personnel. But only Silver Mt. Zion was met to any real fanfare, and was hence the only band of the two to continue releasing music beyond the 2003 hiatus of their parent band. Between both of these bands, they only released one album which turned heads like Godspeed as a unit: He Has Left Us Alone but Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace the Corner of Our Rooms…, by Silver Mt. Zion. While that album shared much of its sound and melancholy with Godspeed albums like F♯, He Has Left Us Alone bordered far more closely on classical music than post-rock. There are a mere three dedicated performers, with only one track on the album containing both drums and electric guitar, and there is little to be found in the way of their now famous crescendos. While a truly incredible album, it wasn’t a post-rock album, and I think that’s worth emphasizing to explain why I’m understating its significance. Also of note, it came out before Godspeed’s hiatus announcement, which further explains the unsteady position of the post-rock movement post-2003.

Moving on to another classic 90’s post-rock outfit, Bark Psychosis made a return to structure-challenging-rock in 2004 with their second album ///CODENAME: dustsucker, which was received positively but didn’t quite make waves³⁰. Like Yanqui U.X.O., it seemed to an album borne of changing priorities among bandmembers. Bark Psychosis bandleader Graham Sutton put together Dustsucker with few contributions from original bandmembers, as original drummer Mark Simnett was steadily becoming a full-time electronic producer. Bark Psychosis has remained in limbo since 2004, never announcing a breakup, but releasing no new original material in the last 18 years.  

A few bands, like Mogwai, actually did quite well through the 2000s. After Young Team, Mogwai embraced the somber side of their music on releases like Come on Die Young (1999) and Rock Action (2001). These albums hone a lonely edge, owing to their newfound sparsity and their occasional depressive lyrics, taking inspiration from acts like Low³¹ and Slint³². Mogwai eventually brought synths into the mix, a-la Tortoise, on releases like Happy Songs for Happy People (2003). Of Mogwai’s ten studio albums, most have been well received by contemporary critics and fans alike. Not to mention, every Mogwai studio release has charted in the UK, and their latest album As the Love Continues (2021) impressively managed to hit the #1 spot³³.

Other post-rock bands of once critical importance during the mid-90s hadn’t exactly fallen off the map, but weren’t releasing new classics either. Tortoise continued to play with their mellow/progressive style of post-rock with releases like TNT (1998) and Standards (2001), and continued to chart with said releases. Past the early 2000s, albums from Tortoise, Do Make Say Think, and Dirty Three, found some success on independent charts, and were met to tempered positivity, but almost all of this material was unfortunately relegated to “inessential” territory.

So, here’s a quick summary of where post-rock sits by 2005. Bark Psychosis, Disco Inferno, Godspeed, Long Fin Killie, Slint, Swans, and Talk Talk, have all taken a bow and departed from the scene. Other once notable 90s post-rock bands are continuing to develop their own “house styles” without setting a clear destination for the future of post-rock. All of these bands have put forth many different sounds for the post-rock bands of a new century to develop upon. It’s at this point that post-rock has to ask itself a difficult question: where do we go from here?

By now we are firmly past the first-wave of post-rock and into the second-wave. Post-2000, it’s essentially up to two bands to decide post-rock’s continuing legacy: Explosions in the Sky, and Sigur Rós.

Sigur Rós released their commercial breakthrough album Ágætis byrjun in 1999, and followed it up with ( ) in 2002 and Takk… in 2005. Sigur Rós were special because they were perhaps the last “new” sound in post-rock, and also because they were monumentally important to keeping post-rock popular through the 2000s. Sigur Rós brought post-rock back to its pop roots by embracing an uplifting tone through their tracks’ patient and beautiful rhythm sections. Lead vocalist Jónsi provides an incredibly tender and warm performance over wintery soundscapes of subtle drumming, cello-bowed guitar, and synth-y keyboards, which are supplemented by a vocal choir and a myriad of strings. This chamber of instrumentalists gave Sigur Rós the support to set off some real fireworks during their occasional crescendos.

But Sigur Rós was no mere “crescendo-core” band. Many tracks on Ágætis byrjun are cathartic for the cozy atmospheres of sound which they develop, not just for the inevitable payoff after some big instrumental build. Because of that, Sigur Rós was a rare band able to make crescendos as powerful and satisfying as Godspeed, because their songs didn’t make the crescendos feel like the point. Their crescendos are a natural evolution in their songs, songs which explored texture and atmosphere above all else.

Said atmosphere on Ágætis byrjun feels constantly in flux, somewhat like Talk Talk’s releases some decades prior, where the instrumentalists and synths exist in a lush and ethereal dream-space. Ágætis byrjun explores a sonically diverse range of compositions over its 70-minute runtime. Tracks like “Hjartað hamast (bamm bamm bamm)” (literally “The Heart Pounds (boom boom boom)”) are provided a real pulse by their drums and keyboards before an orchestra of strings swells toward the end. Other tracks like “Svefn-g-englar” simply breathe over a 10-minute runtime. Mellow drums, soft vocals, and dreamy synths, develop a soothing atmosphere, rather than the tense one which post-rock had been nurturing for the last decade.

Ágætis byrjun was a breakout success, selling 10,000 copies in Iceland in the first year and going platinum³⁴, despite little initial fanfare. A great deal of international buzz after the album’s Icelandic success meant it also became popular in the UK and US after distributions in those countries.

Ágætis byrjun’s follow up ( ) farther embraced the dream-pop melancholy of its predecessor. Once again, the sound is ethereal and picturesque, where tracks build and build but don’t necessary climax. Elements come to a head but there’s usually no massive payoff, other than the catharsis in sensing out the subtle changes within the compositions. The only real exception is found on the ultimate track, with a mesmerizing drum solo forming the climax after track’s hugely tense build. ( ) once again features vocals at the forefront, but they’re utilized as just another wistful tone for the album, as all lyrics were sung in a gibberish language (“Hopelandic”).

Takk… (2005) found Sigur Rós pushing post-rock even farther into pop territory. Tracks like “Hoppípolla” utilize a string octet and vocal choir to propel post-rock to stunningly uplifting heights, as though the music itself eclipses the Earth with its joyous scope. Across its runtime, Takk… embraces verse-chorus structure, beauty, and immediateness, more than any prior post-rock by any band had dared to try. Sigur Rós continued to play to their strengths with new albums released after Takk…, with their heavily orchestrated yet all the while mellow soundscapes. Sigur Rós recently (February 2022) announced they were developing their first studio material since 2013³⁵, after an extended break punctuated by some head-scratching ambient experiments.

The band Explosions in the Sky would define the future sound of post-rock much similarly to releases like Sigur Rós’ Takk…: with an uplifting sound, and pop-crossover appeal. On their 2003 release The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place, Explosions in the Sky boiled down post-rock to its bare essentials. The band stuck with the usual instrumental baseline for a post-rock release (2-3 electric guitars and a drummer) and took it no father. From that groundwork, the band composed a 40-minute, five-track album. Each track is roughly equal in length and are stylistically rather cohesive: saccharinely melodic instrumental builds strung in series, where tension and release come frequent. In that sense, The Earth is Not… is one of the “purest” post-rock releases ever. No other genres seem to have influenced the instrumental palette, and nobody but other post-rock bands influenced the compositional choices.

Explosions in the Sky owe at least some of their popularity within post-rock to a mere historical coincidence. Their sophomore project, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever, which released a week prior to the 9/11 attacks, got some heads turning for their printing of the words “this plane will crash tomorrow” in the liner notes. The plane in reference was of course not a plane involved in the 9/11 attacks, but the one pictured in the album art. Still, people talked, and that notoriety gave Explosions in the Sky slightly elevated fanfare for the release of The Earth is Not… in 2003. It was those same 9/11 anxieties which listeners contextualized the album with, giving it some perhaps undeserved emotional gravity. Bandmember Christopher Hrasky commented in an interview that 9/11 “never came up in the conversation about what these songs were about”, but stated that, “if people look at it as though ‘this song is about 9/11’, then that connection exists for them.³⁶”

The position of The Earth is Not… in the post-rock canon is, well, complicated. Critical reception of the album in 2003 was positive, but there’s a ridiculous breadth of opinions on the album by 2022. The album brought many new post-rock fans to the table, the fans who actually quite appreciated the eventual style of the third-wave, but disappointed many older fans who felt post-rock was having the novelty sucked out of it. The Earth is Not… was able to bring so many new fans to the table through its crossover appeal, thanks to the uplifting and immediate style of the album compared to earlier more “experimental” post-rock bands. But contemporary post-rock outfits, like Sigur Rós, brought that pop crossover appeal to the table without forgoing the novelty of an “artsier” sound.  

The Earth is Not… is highly influential within post-rock, likely the most influential post-rock band since the bands which influenced Explosions in the Sky themselves; unfortunately, the style on The Earth is Not… was of monumental influence to the critical mass of third-wave post-rock bands which brought the subgenre to its knees. If the formulaic approach of The Earth is Not… wore its welcome after a mere 40 minutes, imagine listening to hundreds more hours of that formula, replicated by copycats who lacked any desire to separate themselves from the pack. These bands are so formulaic that they’ve even been given their own derisive nickname: “crescendocore”. So even if The Earth is Not… is good, great, or fantastic, it’s hard to avoid judging it as the album which heralded the decline of post-rock. Or, perhaps it’s unfair to retroactively criticize The Earth is Not…, and it should instead be appreciated for how influential its style was.

As a result, critical respect for The Earth is Not… has declined steadily over the years into controversial darling territory, owing to its re-evaluation by some diehard fans as the “beginning of the end” for post-rock. Is the album boring, predictable, stale, feckless, and uninspired? Or is it touching, pretty, optimistic, vital, and monumental? You’d have to listen for yourself to say.

Movement 4

The years between 2006 and 2009 were the first real lull for post-rock; sparingly few notable works were released, and new bands to the scene were turning less heads. Older outfits like Mono, alongside some new faces like Yndi Halda and The Evpatoria Report, embraced the newly permeating cinematic side of post-rock. A few bands (Earth, Silver Mt. Zion, and Sigur Rós), were still developing their “house styles”, but they too were no longer releasing their most popular material. Regardless of the opinion among post-rock fans on any of these albums, it was difficult to ignore the fact that post-rock was leaving the indie music zeitgeist less than a decade after entering it.  

“Crescendocore” artists, retroactively, have shouldered much of the blame for post-rock’s declining popularity. I want to make it clear here that there is nothing inherently worse about “crescendocore” post-rock. But at the same time, many older post-rock fans into the third wave were watching the early experimentation of the genre go completely undeveloped upon by new artists. Many of these bands simply didn’t want to sound new. And from that fact, comes the derisiveness of the term “crescendocore”.

Post-rock might have been consigned to history like every rock movement which had “died” before it, if some classic bands hadn’t made a grand return to slap some sense into the third-wave. Between Swans’ last release Swans are Dead (1998) and the year 2010, former bandleader Michael Gira kept himself rather busy. He released two albums as The Body Lovers/Haters, a multitude of collaborative works and folk cuts under his own name, and six studio albums with his new band Angels of Light. He also started his own independent record label (Young God Records), and started a family (good for him!) But he decided around 2009, with his newly written batch of songs for Angels of Light, he wanted to “[re]embrace [the] sonic intensity³⁷” of Swans. Keep in mind, this was a style he had very cognizantly done away with after he put down the Swans name and moved on to new projects and sounds.

Michael Gira announced he had reformed Swans in 2010³⁸, and released a new studio album, My Father Will Guide Me up a Rope to the Sky soon after. My Father found itself as the incredibly well executed transition between the challenging totalism of Swans are Dead and the terrifying folk rock mania he had nursed with Angels of Light. Gira’s misanthropic songwriting makes a comeback atop a brand-new rotation of instrumentalists, all raking the hell out of their electric guitars and beating the shit out of their percussive instruments  

Michael Gira’s embrace of the catastrophic intensity of Swans was audibly obvious on My Father, but I said earlier that this was a transition album. Swans only fully returned to their former aggression and insanity with The Seer (2012), where it quickly became obvious that Swans were really, truly back; back to reinventing rock. The Seer kicked off an unofficial trilogy of two-hour long post-rock albums released over the span of four years, which peaked in popularity with To Be Kind (2014) and capped off with The Glowing Man (2016). This trilogy proved that, not just rock but post-rock, could once again could innovate and excite a 2010s audience. And all three albums were released to near universal acclaim from journalists, fans of Swans’ pre-reunion work, and fans newly introduced to the band.   

All of the aforementioned albums embraced a similar formula but they were never stretching their ideas too thin. Sprawlingly long tracks usually comprised of a near-drone of instrumental repetition, where new elements seemed to organically grow from the rhythmic nucleus, building to crushingly loud heights. These songs hypnotized listeners and threw them into new, frightening worlds.

A good example is found on the truly harrowing 32-minute title track of The Seer, which kicks off with the band’s whole instrumental entourage shrieking at the listener, before the carnage collapses after a couple of minutes. This instrumental murder kicks off roughly eleven minutes of ritualistic, elaborate, and intoxicating upward progression. For the 15 minutes to follow that, the track seems to give into a nightmare of rock-ish dark ambience. It’s a fascinating song, and showcases most all of the elements which made post-reunion Swans’ post-rock just so enticing. All of post-rock’s texture and atmosphere is here, but that atmosphere is often quite frightening. Compared to Godspeed’s take on the apocalypse, Swans’ interpretation sounded like literal hell incarnate.

Speaking of Godspeed, Swans wasn’t the only post-rock master to leave the shadows in the 2010s. Godspeed made their own studio return in 2012 with Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend!. They returned to the noisy, heavily reverbed production of their last album, Yanqui U.X.O, to once again bring the monumental sound of triumph to their crescendos. The actual compositions on Allelujah had been played live pre-hiatus; older fan-nicknamed tracks would be re-named “Mladic” and “We Drift Like Worried Fire” respectively with their 2012 studio treatment; both new tracks were minor reworks of their 2003 originals.

Godspeed continued down the path of Yanqui U.X.O. in other ways too: no named movements in the liner notes. This change has been somewhat maligned by fans; named movements were a pre-hiatus Godspeed staple which made their albums feel just a little more unique.

Also absent on their post-reunion albums are the spoken monologues of their yesteryear. Allelujah and Godspeed’s seventh album G_d’s Pee AT STATE’s END! both feature some relatively short field recordings, but the two albums in between are purely instrumental, similar to Yanqui U.X.O.. That last bit is technically a misnomer, you can hear someone shout “rolling!” if you pay very close attention in the first few seconds of Yanqui, but that clip was probably left in by the band as an easter egg.

A brand-new change with Godspeed’s post-reunion albums was the band deciding to chunk out their ambience from their post-rock. Any given track on F♯, for example, contained post-rock movements and drone/ambient movements. These seamless transitions made tracks on F♯ feel more alive, dynamic, and all-encompassing in scope.

Post-reunion, Godspeed’s albums mostly embraced a format of two lengthy post-rock tracks, and two comparatively shorter drone tracks. Here’s what the track listing of Allelujah looks like (italics added to denote the drone tracks):

1.     “Mladic” (19:59)
2.     “Their Helicopters Sing” (6:30)
3.     “We Drift Like Worried Fire” (20:07)
4.     “Strung Like Lights At Thee Printemps Erable” (6:31)³⁹

These cut-away drone tracks on releases like Allelujah and ‘Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress’, seem to be the least popular on those respective releases. It’s pretty easy to understand why: nobody associates Godspeed with their drone music.

Asunder, Luciferian Towers, and At State’s End! were all critically popular but not quite as revered as their pre-reunion material (which essentially includes Allelujah, as 40 minutes of the album was composed pre-reunion). Reviewers and fans came to some similar conclusions: Godspeed was still releasing some of the most moving post-rock of the new decade, but they weren’t still making albums that sounded 20 years ahead of the curve. Godspeed trimmed away some of their own signature motifs, just as they did on Yanqui U.X.O., in order to emphasize rock that kicked, screamed, and rebelled. But in doing so, they trended a little more closely to their myriad of knockoffs.  

Luciferian Towers (2017) in particular sounded to have embraced aesthetic of the third-wave. Pungent somberness and dread have been done away with, with newfound melodies that felt far more resoundingly optimistic than most of those on albums like F♯ A♯ ∞. Not to mention, the band’s anarchic politics felt more reverent than ever. While Luciferian is 100% instrumental (no preachers or weirdos to be found delivering speeches) the band’s political demands ring supreme in the album’s liner notes, and on track titles like “Bosses Hang” and “Anthem for no State”.

Through 2022, there was only one more band in the 2010s that feels like it’s making historic post-rock, and surprisingly enough, it’s a brand-new outfit. Black Country, New Road (BCNR) managed to sound wonderfully fresh in a post-rock world defined by its homogeny.  

BCNR became an alternative darling overnight with their lauded single “Sunglasses” in June of 2019. “Sunglasses” was coming out to quite a bit of fanfare, owing to the band’s intensely raw live sets which they were playing through 2019. Their first physical release, the post-punkish “Athen’s France”, sold out within days of hitting shelves.⁴⁰

“Sunglasses” was remarkably progressive, lyrically repugnant, and sonically overwhelming between the no-wavey saxophone, the spunky drums, and the front-and-center unhingedly manic vocals; with this second ever single, BCNR’s eventual debut became just about the most anxiously awaited release of the decade. New fans and indie journalists alike sung their praises⁴¹⁴²⁴³, and their debut album For the First Time would eventually release to near universal acclaim, blending the sounds of math rock, jazz, Klezmer, and punk, all under the post-rock umbrella.

BCNR was so special because they simultaneously drew obvious influence from classic post-rock like Slint and Godspeed but still felt the first new post-rock band in a lifetime. They pushed the post-rock formula and their own style up against boundaries which hadn’t been even touched for decades. Their chamber septet was something special, placing many of post-rock’s usually disparate but unique instruments all in the same place for once: synthy keyboard (ala Tortoise), the Godspeed signature violin, and a punchy saxophone. But the most immediately distinctifying element of the band was vocalist Isaac Wood, with his uniquely strained tremolo and brand of cryptically self-referential poetry.

Despite how unique their output already sounded, the band seemingly pushed themselves on their sophomore album in a direction which was simultaneously more challenging and more inviting. Ants from Up There (2022) combined their post-rock compositions with a beautifully lush chamber-pop sound. The tracks felt more immediate, the lyrics were even more intimate, the vocals were even more passionate. It was the sound of a band firing on all cylinders, and critical reception matched the scope of their decade-defining music. Lead vocalist Isaac Wood left the band four days before the release of Ants from Up There for mental health reasons⁴⁴ but the force of his impact lives on with BCNR’s first four years.  

By absurd coincidence, Ants from Up There might not be the event in post-rock on February 4th, 2022 which will be remembered years down the line. Godspeed’s debut cassette All Lights Fucked on the Hairy Amp Drooling, after 26 years in hiding, was leaked.

In the year 1994, a mere 33 copies were made, with most being given to friends of the band or to Godspeed’s label Constellation. By 2020, it was assumed all copies other than the ones held by Constellation had been lost⁴⁵. A few rumored copies made waves over the years but turned out to be hoaxes, fakes, or too disappeared to the crevasses of time.

On February 4th, 2022, it was dropped anonymously on the website 4chan and news of its release spread quickly across the internet⁴⁶. It was confirmed to be real when Godspeed themselves finally started selling it as a digital release via Bandcamp⁴⁷. Many had decided by 2022 it was an elaborate prank by the band (“Holy grail or legendary joke?” one prominent “review” from 2012 said)⁴⁸. Many more had simply lost hope it would ever be found. But the holy grail was found. A cerebral and mysterious mishmash of noisy guitars and eclectic folk music, the tape was neither truly post-rock, nor sounded much at all like Godspeed we’re familiar with today. Yet, it will go down as a huge moment in alternative music history.

Movement 5

If you’re still with me, you’ve read a lot about post-rock by now. Hopefully all of that reading about music has gotten you itching to actually hear some albums! What’s to come is my description of five beginner-friendly post-rock albums. Like I said many pages earlier, one of the great strengths of post-rock is how all-encompassing the subgenre is. Many of post-rock’s key bands have completely varying approaches to their sound, and that’s reflected by the sheer diversity of the post-rock umbrella. Which means that the albums to follow should appeal to a variety of listeners, and anyone reading should find one which suits their listening needs.

I suggest reading through the next few pages before you find an album that appeals to you. If you’re looking to dip in and out of these albums until decide on one to try, I can recommend the first track on each to give you a representative taste of what’s to follow.    

If you end up liking any given album here, I’ll be providing some follow-up recommendations for where you should go next. And if not, I heavily encourage you to try either another album I recommend below, or another you’ve already read about in this guide which piqued your interest.

Happy listening!

Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven! (2000) by Godspeed You! Black Emperor

Sonic influences: Field recordings, drone, ambient, modern classical

Lift Your Skinny Fists is perhaps the best-known album of the genre, and for good reason. If someone walked up to me on the street and asked me for the very first post-rock album they should hear, I’d hand them this.

Quickly gratifying but rich with replay potential. Impressive in scope but never over ambitious; each twenty-minute track deftly moves between more emotional tones than most full-length albums. Every spoken monologue is enticing and feels a perfect fit for the song its present on; all of which are socially conscious and thought-provoking, but far from overzealous. It’s for these reasons that Lift Your Skinny Fists has an undeniable cinematic appeal.

The album is somewhat like listening to a movie, if you can wrap your head around that, in that each track seems to convey a narrative plot as you listen. Always present is an established environment, with a mix of conflicts, suspense, growing momentum, climaxes, and falling action.

A million bands would try to duplicate this exact sound, but nobody grasped payoff and release like Godspeed. The impeccably slow addition and gaining pace of the chamber of instruments feel organic, enticing, and simply masterful. I’d recommend this album to just about anybody, but if you can’t stomach the 2LP runtime, you might want to look farther down this list.

If you listen to this album and find yourself wanting more, its sibling album F♯A♯∞ is an obvious next choice. You’ll find everything’s special about Lift Your Skinny Fists in a slightly tighter, more somber package. If you just love the rock music that Godspeed makes, I can safely recommend their entire discography to you (don’t forget about their EP Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada!) There’s no reason to hear it out of chronological order, but you won’t be missing much by moving between older and newer releases.

If after all of that you’re still itching for more, I’d point you Godspeed’s unofficial sibling band Silver Mt. Zion. Start with their first album if you enjoy Godspeed for their apocalyptic atmosphere, but start a little bit later with “This is Our Punk Rock” if you prioritize Godspeed’s exciting crescendos. Don’t forget to go in with an open mind, because it isn’t just Godspeed with a new name. Silver Mt. Zion draws more influence from folk than Godspeed did. Not to mention, Efrim Menuck is an incredibly passionate and talented lead vocalist, but he can be somewhat trying if you’re expecting just another rocker on the mic.

If you just want to be crushed by monumental post-rock builds with a somewhat more typical rock vocalist attached, check out post-reunion Swans. If you’re looking for other bands with a permeating sense of melancholy, check out Horse Stories (1996) by Dirty Three and Come on Die Young (1999) by Mogwai.

To Be Kind (2014) by Swans

Sonic influences: Noise rock, no-wave, post-punk

Let’s take a minute to talk about music on a meta level. I’m always impressed when an album can take traits which I usually don’t enjoy and spin them into something which engages me. I, for example, strongly dislike repetitive albums. There’s nothing worse than sitting through an album that feels like it’s stretching its few ideas far too thin. This goes double since I’m often subject to “long album fatigue”, especially on albums which push past the sixty-minute mark.

Swans push my usual limits pretty damn far. To Be Kind is a whopping hundred-and-twenty-one minutes long and every single song is repetitious to an extreme degree. But Michael Gira is quite the self-aware man, and he’s actively utilizing this sense of repetition as the crux of his album.

To Be Kind hypnotizes you. Eighty, ninety, a hundred repetitions of a chord are like the pendulum in front of your eyes, but it’s not lulling you to sleep. It’s taking you somewhere else entirely. Songs build and build until it feels like they can’t build no more and they collapse under their own weight. In those two hours, no song truly deviates from that goal, that affect which Michael Gira is honing in on, but all ten songs on To Be Kind feel fresh and unique by the time you reach them in the track list.

I’ve talked about atmosphere a lot in this guide, but what if you want a rock album which actually rocks? This is the post-rock album I’d recommend. Gira returns to his crushing, double-drumming, infernal New York no-wave era here; 30 years may have passed since Filth, but Gira’s still composing rock that wants to suffocate you, as though the music is being built atop your chest. A tight wound rock sextet of drummers (two), and guitarists (four), play like they could vibrate the studio down to the rubble at any moment. And to say Gira yells or screams into the mic feels like a pathetic understatement. Gira bellows into the mic, he commands the listener to hear what he has to say.

If you fell into this album’s groove, luckily for you, Swans has plenty more to give you that doesn’t deviate too far from To Be Kind’s strengths. Go back to To Be Kind’s prelude The Seer (2012), and then move on to The Glowing Man (2016) to hear what the new decade of post-rock has to offer. If you’re itching for more, you can check out their first post-reunion album My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky (2010), and then move all the way back to their live 3LP Swans are Dead (1998). You might find that particular album more emotionally impactful after hearing some of Swans’ even older albums (which are many things, but only occasionally post-rock).

Once you’re looking for some similarly heavy post-rock made by other outfits, I can easily recommend Yanqui U.X.O and Allelujah, Don’t Bend, Ascend! by Godspeed. If you want the noise rock, drone, and hypnotizing repetition of To Be Kind stretched over a single, monumental, 70-minute composition, check out Flood by the band Boris.

Millions Now Living Will Never Die (1996) by Tortoise

Sonic influences: Krautrock, electronic, minimalism, jazz-rock

Let’s talk about music on a meta level again. I love an album that sounds like its album art. Of course, album art has always sought to be commercial. Albums want to catch your eye and convince you to pick up something that you otherwise wouldn’t. But my favorite album art feels like a painting of the music it represents.

Millions Now Living makes me feel like one of those turtles on the cover, even if that sounds a little silly. But I maintain that it’s true. Millions Now Living is an aquatic and mellow little trip, wrought with intention but no key direction.

It’s an excellent multi-purpose album, good for any activity. One day I listen to it and it feels warm, playful, and inviting. Another day I see a different angle, and it feels a little more subdued, mysterious, spacious. It wakes me up in the morning and cools me down in the evening. I love paying attention to its little details and new grooves, but I just as much love letting it sit in the background like a good ambient album and guide my subconscious. It’s progressive enough to entice, but rhythmic enough to find a natural resonance in your soul.  

I’d recommend this to you if you’re looking for rock which explores lushness and dynamics but doesn’t quite “rock”, per se. If you enjoyed the complexity of tracks like “Djed”, “Glass Museum” and “The Taut and Tame”, I recommend looking at the rest of Tortoise’s discography. Starting with their debut self-titled and moving forward through the rest is a good bet, with my personal favorite among those being TNT (1998).

If you appreciate the more subdued, melancholic side of the album, on tracks like “Along the Banks of Rivers”, check out Hex (1994) by Bark Psychosis. If you want an album that hones in on baroque lushness to a beautiful degree, check out Spirit of Eden (1988) and Laughing Stock (1991) by Talk Talk.

Spiderland (1991) by Slint

Sonic influences: Math rock, noise rock, emotional hardcore, slowcore, spoken word

I’ve already spoken about this album in depth but I’ll give it more of an elevator pitch here:

Spiderland is a deceptive album. Sure, it packages itself as a post-hardcore release. It’s got the complex chords and frequent shifts in tempo, the shouted vocal delivery, the math-y drum lines, and the crunchy riffs.

But that exterior hides something quite unexpected. There’re all of the spoken stories in lieu of traditionally sung/screamed narratives. It’s bitterly cold and rich with gravitas, in contrast to rock’s usual sense of stride and confidence. It’s resplendent with suspense and delayed relief, and in a thematic sense, maybe there is no relief. Maybe that fear of what comes next, never goes away.

If you’re a fan of the more traditional rock genres that Spiderland associates itself with, but you also want to dip your toes into something out of your comfort zone, I think this is an excellent choice. You might find it’s a grower, but what it grows into is a memorable, thought-provoking, challenging, and thoroughly excellent rock album.

If after that you’re looking for more music that branches post-hardcore aggression and dynamism with post-rock atmosphere, check out Slint’s self-titled EP and the (unrelated to Slint) bands Rodan, and June of 44. If you enjoyed the atypical vocals and want to hear more bands who embraced vulnerable and intimate lyricism, check out Black Country, New Road’s discography. Their first album For the First Time and their singles “Sunglasses” and “Athen’s, France” are more sonically indebted to Slint, while their second album Ants from Up There is perhaps more emotionally vulnerable like Slint.

If you want to hear a band that leans father into the somber and mysterious aesthetic of Slint, check out the band The For Carnation, which rose from Slint’s ashes. They sound far closer to classic slowcore acts like Low than Slint proper, but retain that signature funereal ominousness.

Ágætis byrjun (1999) by Sigur Rós

Sonic influences: Dream pop, chamber pop, modern classical, ambient, new age

No post-rock album delivers the sort of sonic catharsis that Ágætis byrjun does. Sure, some other albums/bands elegantly release tension after a great swirl of ominous anxiety, but on Ágætis byrjun, none of that anxiety is found. Its entire 70-minute runtime is soothing and serene. Despite the album’s winter aesthetic, it’s never a chilly listen. It’s more akin to burrowing in blankets in front of the fire while watching snow drift down peacefully through the window.

This album is so hard for me to describe because it doesn’t sound like any of its sonic influences, even “post-rock” feels like an inaccuracy (but don’t get me wrong, Sigur Rós are firmly a post-rock band). They’re in this position because it feels like they make post-rock that’s hidden away from everyone else. Other bands embrace an uplifting, pop-ish crossover appeal, other bands deliver the atmosphere, other bands have the passionate vocals and the heavy orchestration, but nobody makes post-rock like Sigur Rós. They occupy what feels like a genre of their own, an eclectic superposition between dream pop and ambient and orchestral music and post-rock and shoegaze and slowcore and probably half a dozen other things.

I can recommend this album to you if no other post-rock album on this list really scratched your itch, because I assure you that none of them sounded quite like Ágætis byrjun. For its heavily orchestrated and uplifting sound, it sounds more like select cuts of Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois than most other post-rock in this guide.

If you enjoyed the tracks on Ágætis byrjun which pushed far into pop territory like “Starálfur” and “Olsen Olsen”, you’ll find much to love on the band’s 2005 album Takk…. The other album Sigur Rós I’d recommend, ( ), is interesting because it seems to take the two tones of Ágætis byrjun, and plays up their contrast to the extreme. You’ll hear more of the uplifting, heavily orchestrated cuts on the first half of the album. But on the second half, you’ll hear an aesthetic that takes the subdued and methodical atmosphere of tracks on Ágætis byrjun like “Svefn-g-englar” and “Flugufrelsarinn” and slows it way down.

If you want more of that heavily orchestrated pop aesthetic in the post-rock context, check out Ants from Up There by Black Country, New Road. Just keep in mind, BCNR is going for a much different effect with that sound palette than Sigur Rós was.

Post-Script

Thank you for taking the time to read this guide. I know it was long and quite a bit sprawling. It’s far longer than I expected it to be when I formulated it in my head but I’m quite satisfied with the material I included. I hope it’s spurred you on to find your new favorite song, album, band, or genre, just like it did for me!

1. https://thedataface.com/2016/09/culture/genre-lifecycles

2. http://reynoldsretro.blogspot.com/2014/08/bark-psychosis-interview-hex-review.html  

3. http://reynoldsretro.blogspot.com/2007/07/insides-interview-melody-maker-late.html

4. https://www.perennialmusicandarts.com/post/four-types-of-texture-in-music

5. https://folklife.si.edu/talkstory/the-sound-of-life-what-is-a-soundscape

6. https://www.abc.net.au/doublej/music-reads/features/sigur-ros-j-files-feature/11182438

7. https://www.officialcharts.com/artist/19546/talk-talk/

8. https://web.archive.org/web/20000303222847/http://users.cybercity.dk/~bcc11425/BioRC1291.html

9. UK Albums Chart, 1988

10. https://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/talk-talk-spirit-of-eden-

11. Andy Whitman, in Paste magazine

12. https://exclaim.ca/music/article/talk_talks_mark_hollis_has_solo_album_reissued

13. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/talk-talk-mark-hollis-dead-800033/

14. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/may/01/spiderland-slint-album-reinvented-rock

15. https://quotesponge.wordpress.com/2021/04/05/25-more-spiderland/

16. https://www.loudersound.com/features/opinion-in-praise-of-slint-s-spiderland   

17. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19182-slint-spiderland-remastered-box-set/

18. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/may/01/spiderland-slint-album-reinvented-rock

19. https://www.treblezine.com/slint-good-morning-captain-haunting/

20. https://www.sfweekly.com/music/the-last-time-we-reunite-except-for-that-next-time/

21. http://post-rock.lv/bark2.htm

22. https://thequietus.com/articles/07144-disco-inferno-interview

23. Swans: Sacrifice and Transcendence. Soulsby, published 2018.

24. https://xkcd.com/927/

25. http://brainwashed.com/godspeed/wire2.html

26. http://brainwashed.com/godspeed/deadmetheney/reviews/faoolp.htm

27. http://www.brainwashed.com/godspeed/deadmetheney/interviews/amazeine.htm Note: out of context, these are usually recordings of friends of the band. In context, they have no clear ties to the band, hence why I was slightly (intentionally) misleading earlier.  

28. http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3489-lift-your-skinny-fists-like-antennas-to-heaven/

29. https://www.nme.com/news/music/godspeed-you-black-emperor-12-1329786

30. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1132-codename-dustsucker/

31. https://magnetmagazine.com/2015/09/21/magnet-classics-mogwais-come-on-die-young/

32. https://www.uncut.co.uk/reviews/mogwai-come-on-die-young-deluxe-edition-674/

33. https://www.officialcharts.com/artist/2357/mogwai/

34. https://www.nme.com/news/music/sigur-ros-announce-agaetis-byrjun-20th-anniversary-reissue-2468232

35. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/sigus-ros-2022-world-tour-1310169/

36. The Politics of Post 9/11 Music: Sound, Trauma, and the Music Industry in the Time of Terror, Fisher & Flota, published 2011.

37. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/23/AR2010092301622.html

38. https://www.factmag.com/2010/01/10/swans-reform-working-on-new-album/

39

40. https://thelisteningpostblog.wordpress.com/2020/03/07/song-of-the-day-black-country-new-road-sunglasses/

41. https://www.pastemagazine.com/music/black-country-new-road/black-country-new-road-sunglasses/

42. https://joyzine.org/2019/08/24/single-review-black-country-new-road-sunglasses/

43. https://newsoundsmag.co.uk/2019/07/25/black-country-new-road-sunglasses-review/

44

BlackCountry,NewRoad @BCNRband

We have some news to share concerning the future of the band. Please read on for information on upcoming shows, but it seems right to pass on this message from Isaac first

45. https://www.nashvillescene.com/music/how-godspeed-you-black-emperors-ambiguity-evolved-from-a-building-block-to-a-selling-point/article_e544b881-3a0e-5603-a10d-f5847838ac3e.html

46. https://exclaim.ca/music/article/godspeed_you_black_emperor_all_lights_fucked_hairy_amp_drooling_2022_leak

47. https://exclaim.ca/music/article/godspeed_you_black_emperor_all_lights_fucked_hairy_amp_drooling_official_release#:~:text=Band%20founder%20Efrim%20Menuck%20confirmed,running%2016%E2%80%9317%20minutes%20long.

48. User “_tumbleweed_” on the website rateyourmusic.com, with their review in 2012, which has since accrued 110 upvotes: https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/god-speed-you-black-emperor/all-lights-fucked-on-the-hairy-amp-drooling/