The 100 Greatest Indie-Rock Albums Ever

评语：Despite/because of zero aptitude, the Wiggins sisters made an accidental masterpiece of screwed-up, desperate self-expression.

评语：These L.A. amp torturers loved druggy late-’60s rock, but their pouty new-wave aspect made the throwback seem cool.

评语：Will Oldham warbles oddly over country-blues. So freaky, R. Kelly cast him in “Trapped in the Closet”!

评语：The smartest band to come out of first-wave U.K. punk — you can almost hear the quotation marks in their voices.

评语：An arena-scale vision of indie rock broadcast straight from some grimy Brooklyn loft.

评语：Travis Morrison’s upper-class critiques meet these off-kilter jams like he’s trying to cram three albums of smartness into a single CD.

评语：Undeniably difficult and trium­phantly messy, it’s a 69-“song” treatise on why talent is for suckers.

评语：Steve Albini’s guitar sounded like sheet metal being torn in half, his lyrics concerned bored suburban self-immolators and his band played at plane-crash volume.

评语：San Francisco anarchist Jello Biafra sang about modern atrocities with an absurdist irony. The shtick worked.

评语：This New Zealand band’s alternately hopeful and shattered early singles revisited the abandoned halls of ’60s party music.

评语：These New York weirdos fashion deceptively hummable melodies out of burbling, buzzing, fidgety synths.

评语：Eddie Argos is indie rock’s finest stand-up comic. While his bandmates chug along punkishly, he reels off fantastic one-liners.

评语：This mentally ill Texan’s homemade tapes, championed by the likes of Bowie, Beck and Matt Groening, are so lo-fi they make Guided by Voices sound like Jefferson Starship.

评语：Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug bellow like existential carnival barkers over desperate skronks.

评语：The slowest, heaviest hardcore-punk band; Will Shatter’s dogmatic optimism turned stage dives into trust falls.

评语：This two-disc set spans the bright-eyed bashes of their teenage years, their ’80s breakneck jams and their ’90s psychedelia.

评语：For onetime childish primitivists, their final album was the sound of growing up, with all its pain and joy.

评语：Fronted by a rabid Glenn Danzig, this crew of Jersey kids channeled their obsession with vintage horror flicks into fist-in-the-air hardcore.

评语：The Wichita wiseacres yelped ironic choruses like “I’m a Don Juan!” over nervy power pop, as if being regular was way weirder than being weird.

评语：Sky-high on their own hormones, trading jabs and uncertain har­monies, this Scottish duo bounced through songs like they couldn’t wait to get back to making out.

评语：Chicken soup for the indie-rock soul: sweet but not precious, warm and inviting like a flannel duvet.

评语：Alec Ounsworth’s voice is pinched and ugly, but he wrings pretty melodies from it, moaning about child stars and glam androgynes over ramshackle dance-rock.

评语：They frightened flower children with their garage-rock freakouts, then met a sad end when singer Roky Erickson was committed.

评语：This debut dazzles with lyrics about dead-end geezers and Saturday-night punch-ups so excellent that cynics suspected 21-year-old Alex Turner of thievery.