10 Greatest Garage Rock Music Albums Of The 2010s
Garage rock had a great decade in the 2010s, as these albums prove.
What is garage rock?
Well, like with most subgenres in music, nobody really knows.
In short, it's an amateur style of rock music popularised in the 1960s by the surf rock craze and the British Invasion led by The Beatles.
Thousands of teenagers across the land took up guitars and started trying to emulate their heroes in their parents' garages, much to their annoyance.
The genre has shifted and evolved many times over the years, but at its core it's still about embodying that unpolished spirit of those early days.
Even if most big modern garage rock albums are actually recorded in very expensive studios with some of the finest equipment known to man.
Whilst it has been around in some form or other in many different decades, garage rock really found a home in the 2010s.
As pop punk and nu metal faded away, garage was still embraced by its hardcore fans and, occasionally, it would break into the mainstream.
Thanks to excellent albums like these, the subgenre helped define the 10s in so many different ways and wrote the newest chapter in the history of one of music's most enduring offshoots.
10. Crazy For You - Best Coast
Bethany Cosentino was a child actor before turning her attention to music in her teens.
She was courted by several major labels, who saw her as the next big thing in conventional pop. Cosentino, whose heroes included Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan, took one look at these offers and politely declined.
She teamed up with musician and producer Bobb Bruno to form Best Coast in 2009. The duo put out their first album Crazy for You the next year and it blew everyone away.
Cosentino had struggled with depression after her initial creative career floundered and channelled a lot of those feelings into this album. It's full of longing; a melancholy sense that there is a better world out there if you can just reach for it.
It sounds absolutely beautiful, with Cosentino's dreamy vocals blending perfectly with the messy guitars that back her up. The production is intentionally lo-fi, harkening back to the early days of self-made artistic rock music.
Best Coast have gone on to make three more albums since this one, but went on hiatus in 2023. Here's hoping they're not away for too long.