10 Huge Rock Artists That Went Electronic (And Nailed It)

When it comes to genre lines, both rock and roll and electronica feel like oil and water for most people. Since some of the snobbier fans of rock and roll emphasize how much heart and soul has to come from rock and roll, the digital nature of a band like Daft Punk gets in the way of their entire taste in music. That hasn't stopped some bands from trying it though, and more often than not they're not half bad at it either.

Through the beginnings of electronic music to today, rock bands have been known to mess around in the more digitized side of the genre and actually kept their identity intact along the way. As opposed to just running all of your ideas through a sequencer and hoping for the best, these are the kind of bands that understood their strengths as writers and chose to use the synthetic sounds as more of an extension rather than a crutch.

That doesn't include people who have used electronic rock as their calling card for years either. Though the likes of Nine Inch Nails and Twenty One Pilots have been known to indulge themselves in those styles from time to time, that's been their wheelhouse since their inception. These are for the people who took a nosedive into unchartered territory and learned to embrace the synthetic side of life.

At the turn of the century, the tides of popular music start to really pull away from rock and roll. As much as the Britpop movement may have brought things back to the clubs for a little while, the Oasis empire had ended and only the softer rock of bands like Coldplay were finding themselves on the charts. It was time for something new, and Damon Albarn managed to reinvent himself by embracing the digital atmosphere.

Looking to move away from Blur, Damon's friendship with artist Jamie Hewlett brought us Gorillaz, being one of the first virtual bands to grace MTV's main lineup. While there was still a lot of Damon's cynical bite that we were used to from his days in Blur, hiding behind a cartoon made him flex his muscles, with a lot of beats that were more in the vein of trip hop artists that were popping up around the same time.

In between the actual hooks on something like Rock the House, you'd get something like Double Bass which is just a piece of ambient noise that takes you on a journey without ever having to say anything. It didn't stop at just electronic either, with hip hop artists and the world of art rock gravitating to work with Gorillaz whenever they had the chance. Compared to the other rock offshoots happening in the '00s, this was the embodiment of what alternative was supposed to be. The future was coming on.