10 Greatest Garage Rock Albums Of The 2000s

It would be pretty difficult to discuss garage rock in the 21st-century without mentioning The Strokes, so integral were the band to the genre's revival in the early 2000s, and the album that did it all, for them, for us, for everyone -- Is This It.

Simple often to the point of sounding morose (but that's kind of the point), Is This It uses a barebones approach to capture the garage sensibilities of old and fuse them to the disaffected, high fashion aesthetic of the early 2000s. The solos are elementary, the beats repetitive and the lyrics revolve around the commonplace themes of drugs, relationships and life as a semi-somebody in the modern world. On paper, this ought not amount to much, and yet the album taps the zeitgeist and every song is vivid and unique.

The Strokes' seminal record positioned them as leaders of the pack alongside other big-name contemporaries like The White Stripes and The Hives, and while they may have spent the rest of their career chasing the same unattainable high, it is enough (for us, at least) that they made such an impact and had a hand in sculpting the rest of the decade's approach to the garage genre.