Minimalist, stripped down, raw — call it what you want. There’s no denying the Detroit-based combination of Jack and Meg White packs an underhanded punch with their fierce, swaggering, cacophonous trash. After building a solid foundation of dedicated fans in the underground circuit, the group somehow found an audience in the mainstream, garnering radio and MTV exposure on their third album with explosive tracks like “Fell in Love With a Girl” and “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground.” Jack White’s guitar style began to grow out of the electrified, bottleneck blues style and into something more white-hot, like Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page melding into one. The group’s fourth album, Elephant, proved to be even more of a success, with “Seven Nation Army” providing a riff that was almost instantly recognizable. Increasing critical acclaim set expectations high for their fifth album, the diverse, piano-driven Get Behind Me, Satan. Meg and Jack followed that up with the irresistible Icky Thump, a return to straightforward rock that was one of the high points of ‘07.
- Jon Pruett

Following the 1994 breakup of alt country pioneers Uncle Tupelo, co-founder Jeff Tweedy immediately formed Wilco. Over the next three albums, the band recorded the rootsy A.M., veered toward the orchestral pop of Being There, and earned a Grammy nomination for Mermaid Avenue (an album of Woody Guthrie lyrics for which the band and Billy Bragg wrote music), before running toward a sunny, West Coast-inspired pop utopia of complex introspection with Summer Teeth. Upon parting ways with founding member Jay Bennett, Wilco independently released (after some wrangling with Warner Bros.) Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. It was with Foxtrot that Wilco succeeded at leaving any alt country vestiges behind, venturing into more moody, dislocated songwriting tangled up inside noise experiments and amputated guitar leads. Wilco’s fifth album A Ghost Is Born continued to help the band search for their sound somewhere between sonic gambles and innovative production. Their sixth, Sky Blue Sky, came in the spring of 2007, sounding like a return to simplified guitar pop with sing-along songs that unfold and unleash stormy guitar solos courtesy of Nels Cline. Some songs even hint at a slight return to the band’s twangy roots.
- Eric Shea

Billy Corgan and his Chicago cohorts arrived just as the alternative sea-swell was crashing ashore in the early 1990s, doing so with shiny, super-produced alt rock far removed from the Pacific Northwest’s guttural Grunge rumblings. Corgan’s obsessive, perfectionist nature helped rear an omnipresent triumvirate of crucial albums between 1991-95, each of which grandly built upon the scope and sound of its predecessor. Gish, Siamese Dream, and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness — in addition to the myriad songs released as non-album tracks during that time — were chiefly characterized by Corgan’s vocals that could whisper one moment and wail the next, Corgan and James Iha’s overdriven, buzzing, these-go-to-11 guitars, and Jimmy Chamberlin’s propulsive, overwhelmingly powerful drum work that thrust “Silverf*ck,” “Bury Me,” and “Geek U.S.A.” into fifth gear. Lineup changes and an electronica-embracing sound muddled the band’s late ’90s efforts, and the Pumpkins called it quits in 2000. After years of near-constant speculation, Corgan and Chamberlin partnered to reform the group in 2007, releasing the bombastic Zeitgeist and returning to the world stage.
- Charles Hodgkins

Toronto-based Three Days Grace are one of the innumerable metal bands that made the charts in the early ’00s. While they owe their success (and elements of their sound) to Creed, who seemingly broke the whole metal phenomenon open with a mixture of post-grunge vocals and heavy guitars, Three Days Grace nevertheless manage to cut their own identity from the cloth. Louder and angrier than many of their peers, the band falls somewhere between the mechanical rage of Trapt and the sing-able hipness of Saliva.
- Mike McGuirk