Even when I was a tween watching "Alternative Nation," I realized that the word 'alternative' was a silly, meaningless name for a genre of music, especially at a time when alternative rock bands were all over MTV and selling in the millions. In the last decade, the word has curdled even further, with people throwing 'alt-pop' and 'alt-R&B' at music that doesn't need prefixes, and 'alt-right' becoming the branding of choice for young hip neo-Nazis. But as much as I've wanted to abandon the word 'alternative,' it remains a semi-useful catchall for things that are rock-adjacent but not guitar-driven or formally 'rock music' in any meaningful way. This year Billboard came to the same conclusion as me, putting both words into the name of of a chart for the first time as Rock Songs became Hot Rock & Alternative Songs (while the radio-driven Modern Rock Tracks chart that started in 1988 has morphed into Alternative Songs and now Alternative Airplay). My list of 2000s rock singles was hard to compile just in terms of identifying what a weird amorphous beast mainstream rock had become, and it was an even more slippery task for the 2010s. One of my annual rock/lists, for 2015, has been one of the most visited posts on this site for years, and I'm not sure why. 

Here's the Spotify playlist of all 100 songs. And here's my other 2010s lists of albums, TV shows, R&B singles, country singles, rap singles, and pop singles. This wraps up the genre lists, so I'll do a big all-genre singles list later. 

I loved "Sail" and its hypnotic, swinging drum machine groove and raw, ominous vocal the first time I heard it, but it took its time catching on. It was the first song in Hot 100 history to reach its peak after over a year on the chart, and it nearly made Billboard history in another way -- its 79 weeks on the Hot 100 would be an all-time record if "Radioactive" by Imagine Dragons, a song I like a lot less with a somewhat similiar rocktronica aesthetic, hadn't gone 87 weeks around the same time. 

Once it crossed over to Top 40 radio, some stations opted for a deeply unnecessary remix that added a drum machine beat to the song, but in the original version that got the most spins, "Somebody That I Used To Know" has a stillness and patience in the way it works its way into your brain. It's one of the quietest and quirkiest songs to ever become a 8x platinum monster hit, where Gotye cedes the spotlight to Kimbra for the song's biggest vocal moments. In that context, it's not surprising that Gotye disappeared from the music landscape about as completely as anybody with a #1 song ever has. Some other songs from his 3rd album Making Mirrors were promoted as singles, and he's trickled out a few songs, covers, and collaborations over the past 8 years and vague murmurs of a new album someday, but he seems admirably content with having one giant, almost universally revered song. 

3. The Joy Formidable - "Whirring" (2011)
#7 Alternative Airplay, #21 Rock Songs
Welsh power trio The Joy Formidable have dozens of songs with the same gorgeous neo-shoegaze roar, but "Whirring" has that big surging chorus that makes it a fitting commercial breakthrough. I have found memories of putting this song on my 30th birthday party playlist and how amazing it sounded on The Windup Space's speakers. Kendrick Lamar later rapped over a loop of the song's main riff for a Lonely Island digital short on "SNL." 

The 1975 are the most ambitious mainstream band of the past decade, a Manchester-based quartet that cram emo, synth pop, Brian Eno's ambient albums, and shoegaze into a shiny new package that's topped album charts on both sides of the Atlantic. But they've been something of a hard sell for highly regimented American radio, where many of their singles manage to be both too quirky for pop stations and too glossy for alternative stations. And surprisingly, their biggest alternative hit was kind of a sensual slow jam, albeit a big bombastic one, with great Matt Healy one-liners like "I'm looking through you while you're looking through your phone." 

5. Nothing But Thieves - "Trip Switch" (2015)
#1 Alternative Airplay, #28 Mainstream Rock Songs, #6 Rock Airplay
In a couple decades of British frontmen trying to sound like Jeff Buckley, Nothing But Thieves singer Conor Mason got closer than most, but it feels like his band is doing something else a little more modern behind those vocals that lets them get out from under that influence a little (although their cover of "Lover, You Should Have Come Over" is pretty straightforward). I like most of what I've heard from the band, who are releasing their third album this month, but nothing hits remotely as well as "Trip Switch," the biggest hit from their self-titled debut. 

Of all the music on alternative radio in the past decade that were basically synth pop, I always thought Phantogram's biggest hit had the potential to appeal to R&B audiences like new wave hits by Art Of Noise and The Eurythmics did in the '80s -- after all, Ty Dolla Sign accurately called it "the hardest shit out" at the time, and the first time I heard Phantogram was on a Big Boi album. Alas, Lorde scolding rappers on "Royals" was the song that crossed over big from alternative radio to R&B radio instead. 

After establishing the rap/rock/EDM sound that made them arguably the biggest band of the 2000s, Linkin Park spent their second decade tinkering with the formula releasing the proggy concept album A Thousand Suns, the return to nu-metal The Hunting Party, and the more pop-leaning One More Light, the band's last album before lead singer Chester Bennington's 2017 suicide. And all of these albums contributed interesting new shades to their catalog particularly A Thousand Suns -- even "Waiting For The End," probably the most accessible song on the album, has a weird fragile beauty to it that you don't necessarily associate with rap/rock, Mike Shinoda using a more melodic flow and Bennington really giving one of my favorite performances of his career.  

8. Dead Sara - "Weatherman" (2012)
#26 Mainstream Rock Songs, #31 Hot Rock & Alternative Songs
There are a lot of songs on this list that I think are rock music in name only, but I wanted to make sure there were still some lively guitar/bass/drums tracks in the mix, and "Weatherman" is still just absolutely scorching to me. It feels like the song starts with every level turned up to 10, and then in the last minute they find a way to crank it up a little more to a Tufnelesque 11. 

"Shut Up And Dance" is incredibly on-the-nose with its jangly John Hughes movie evocation of '80s pop/rock, but sometimes subtlety is overrated. This is probably the only song on the list that I have fond memories of dancing to at multiple weddings. 

The pipeline from real grassroots touring-driven success to mainstream radio airplay doesn't exist remotely as much as it used to. But there were still occasional moments in the 2010s when I really enjoyed seeing a band rise up the ranks the old fashioned way, building buzz with indie albums, playing in slightly bigger venues each time I saw them, and then signing to a major and finally getting a song on the radio, like nostalgic Jersey punk quartet The Gaslight Anthem did. "45" wasn't their absolute best song, but it encapsulated their scrappy Springsteenesque sound pretty perfectly, and my only complaint is that it didn't make them a mainstay of radio playlists. 

11. Bleachers - "I Wanna Get Better" (2014)
#1 Alternative Airplay, #6 Rock Airplay
Jack Antonoff was behind some of the biggest records of the 2010s, whether as a sideman on fun.'s triple platinum Some Nights or as a writer/producer for albums by Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, and Lorde, and people generally seem to kind of tolerate him as a ubiquitous dork who's played a necessary supporting role for artists they like. But I actually liked his work out front as the main guy in Bleachers the most, particularly the debut single, love the stuttering piano riff and that build up from the bridge back to the chorus. 

My Chemical Romance, who made my #1 rock single of the 2000s, entered the next decade at the peak of their fame, but only managed one album before going into the hiatus/breakup/solo albums/reunion shows cycle. But I really loved the bonkers rock opera Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys and its deliriously fun lead single, honestly more than The Black Parade. 

13. Of Monsters And Men - "Alligator" (2019)  
#2 Alternative Airplay, #1 Rock Airplay
The Lumineers haven't gone electric yet. But some of the folky acoustic strumming acts that flourished on alternative radio in the 2010s have cranked up the amps to great effect, from Mumford & Sons to Icelandic band Of Monsters And Men, whose album #3 pivot to big fuzzed out guitars appealed to me a lot more than "Little Talks."

Billie Eilish is a pop phenomenon that hit the sales/acclaim/Grammys hat trick with When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, the biggest album of 2019. And arguably alternative radio didn't really drive that success -- her streaming numbers were through the roof even before "You Should See Me In A Crown" started getting airplay -- but it's become her home more than Top 40 radio. In fact, Eilish is only the 3rd female solo artist with multiple #1s on alternative radio (after Sinead and Alanis, both of whom had their #1s before Eilish was born), and she's probably the only artist with five top 10 alternative hits in just the last two years. "Bad Guy" feels kind of singular in her catalog, I have no idea what she could do to repeat its success, but she managed to translate her odd muted aesthetic to something darkly funny and uptempo and bass-driven without really getting out of her comfort zone. 

Sam Harris is one of the best vocalists on alternative radio in the last decade, and I didn't really appreciate his range until I heard "Unsteady." My wife loves this band, we saw them last year and he can really pull this song off live too. 

Another act that really grew on me via my wife playing them around the house, and also a vocalist who I respected even more after seeing them in concert. She closed with "Shake It Out" at the show we saw, and it was just such a perfect moment, I kinda feel like she should've gotten Adele-level popular with this one.  

Neon Trees make such snappy neo-new wave singles, I think it's a shame that they only got 2 big hits in before starting to decline commercially, ideally they'd have a Cars-like career. At least their recent singles have gotten a bit of airplay. 

J. Roddy Walston & The Business formed in Tennessee, but were based in Baltimore when they started to really pick up a following, very justifiably with some of the greatest shows I've ever seen at the Ottobar, and signed to Vagrant Records and then ATO Records, where they scored a few radio hits, most notably "Heavy Bells." I'm friendly with drummer Steve Colmus, who I shared a practice space with for a couple years, but mostly I've admired these guys from afar and was just so happy when they got some national recognition. They played some farewell shows last year and have gone their separate ways for the foreseeable future, but hopefully we'll get more music from these guys in one form or another. 

I was very amused by the Island Records rollout for Bishop Briggs, which put one of her songs in a car commercial a year before she had any public profile or a confirmed record deal, and booked her on a Coldplay tour before she had anything resembling a hit. But she has a big, distinctive voice and "River" is a great song, I'm not going to get too hung up on 'industry plants' when it results in some enjoyable music. 

20. Arctic Monkeys - "Do I Wanna Know?" (2014)
#1 Alternative Airplay, #12 Mainstream Rock Tracks, #1 Rock Airplay, #70 Hot 100
Popular British bands seem to either break America quickly or never pull it off. But Arctic Monkeys are an unusual case -- back when their debut album was breaking UK sales records in 2007, American radio played one single and then pretty much ignored them. And then, on their 5th album, America finally came around, whether it was their sustained UK success or just that they finally slowed down the tempo a little and made a song that suited U.S. alternative radio a little more. Billboard's Alternative chart itself has slowed down in recent years -- all 10 of the songs that have spent more than a year on the chart are from 2009 or later. And "Do I Wanna Know?" went 58 weeks, which was #2 for all-time chart longevity at the time but has already moved down to #5. The 76-week record is currently held by the execrable Lovelytheband. 

21. Coldplay - "Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall" (2011)
#4 Alternative Airplay, #5 Hot Rock & Alternative Songs, #14 Hot 100
Coldplay broke America immediately and permanently on their first album, and have spent a lot of the last 20 years kind of flitting around, adopting different sounds and trying to stay current like '90s U2, or a software update. Their two Brian Eno-produced albums naturally achieved better than the others, but what I like about songs like "Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall" is that you still hear quite a bit of the quartet that made Parachutes over the ravey synth. 

Muse, like Coldplay, launched their career by presenting a more commercially savvy version of Radiohead (although the more arena prog side than the "High And Dry" side), and somewhere along the way got a little U2 in the mix as well. "Madness," which has a lovely Zooropa kind of shimmer to it, is all the better for blossoming slowly and never quite exploding into the kind of bombast Muse frequently rely on. It went #1 for 19 weeks on alternative radio, holding the all-time record for a few years until Portugal. The Man beat them out by a week. 

Garrett Borns is a guy from Michigan, but given the name and the voice, I pictured probably a Norwegian woman the first time I heard "Electric Love." Still kinda works on that level if I don't think about it. 

Foo Fighters have enjoyed a third decade of reliable ubiquity, and at this point either you either like 'em or are good and sick of 'em. But I thought Wasting Light was their best album since The Colour And The Shape, and "Rope" is one of the rare late period songs where they actually sound like a band with three guitarists, stacking so many different riffs and tones on top of each other with interesting results. 

For a few years, getting featured in an ad for iPods or other Apple products was the quickest route to a viral hit for an alt-rock band, and Grouplove were probablyt he last really major beneficiaries of that. I thought "Tongue Tied" sounded obnoxious in the clip in the iPod Touch ad, but once the full song started getting played on the radio, it really grew on me. Grouplove have continued making moderately successful alt-rock radio singles, but I feel like "Tongue Tied" really launched the career of the group's drummer/producer Ryan Rabin, who eventually left the band to focus on his Captain Cuts production team, which which has made hits including Walk The Moon's "Shut Up And Dance." 

One of the more surprising but not unwelcome developments in recent alt-rock history was to turn on the radio and hear a ska punk song that sounded like Rancid with a woman on lead vocals. And it turned that that's pretty much what "She's Kerosene" is, since it was co-written and co-produced by Tim Armstrong and released by Hellcat Records 

I decided to grandfather this song, which was released too late in 2009 to make my 2000s rock singles list, because I really enjoy it more than I'd like to admit enjoying anything written by Jared Leto. And again, a middling band won me over with a little U2 grandeur, in this case thanks to producers Steve Lillywhite and Flood. Shannon Leto is also one of those drummers I really like in a band I otherwise don't really care for, he blacked out on this song. This song also sounded pretty majestic in the trailer for my favorite Zack Snyder movie, Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole. 

I don't know if I 'get' Lorde because I think I'm the only person who thinks "Green Light" and "Yellow Flicker Beat" are by far better than all her other songs. It probably would have been a bigger hit if it didn't take so long to get to those ecstatic pianos, but either way, another win for Jack Antonoff. 

No band had a bigger hot streak in the last decade than Twenty One Pilots, who had three enormous back-to-pack top 5 hits on the Hot 100 in 2016. Of course, those songs crossed over in part because they feature a lot of Tyler Joseph rapping like a nice Christian homeschooled Eminem. But I much prefer the song released right before the "Stressed Out"/"Ride"/"Heathens" hit parade, the alt-rock radio breakthrough "Tear In My Heart," which sounded more like a Something Corporate song with a big transcendant ravey synth riff on the chorus. 

Back in the early 2012, I wrote a Village Voice column about noticing all the bands on the radio with 3-word names with "the" as the middle word: Foster The People, Cage The Elephant, Portugal. The Man, and so on. All those bands have continued to thrive to various extents, largely to my chagrin, although Young The Giant kind of seemed like a flash in the pan who peaked on their debut, until their 4th album's arresting 2nd single took off and seemed to revive their momentum with a sleek groove and a great vocal from Sameer Gadhia. 

31. Hozier - "Take Me To Church" (2014)
#2 Alternative Airplay, #3 Rock Airplay, #3 Hot 100
Hozier is 6'6", Irish, and has the mane of a romance novel cover model, puts woke bae messages in his songs and videos, and just generally has a great voice. I'm not surprised that he's kind of a sex symbol, if anything he should probably be even more famous, but this is a pretty good single crossover hit to hang his hat on. 

One of the things that I think irritates me about the state of alternative music in the U.S. is that even in the streaming era, genres are kept in such separate silos that it still takes a lot of format crossover for a song to really climb the charts. So a song like "No Roots," which went top pretty much all over Europe, gets stuck on alternative radio in the U.S., and winds up on the low end of the Hot 100. But it's just such an irresistible little track, I love that bassline. 

Live shows have kind of felt like a higher priority for Pearl Jam than new songs for a while, but it still surprised to me to realize that they only released one studio album in the 2010s, even though they really always remained active and played nearly 200 shows over the course of the decade. Pearl Jam were my first favorite band, and I tend to get frustrated with the band's expectation-defying lead singles. But I liked "Mind Your Manners," which matched the speed and heaviness of an earlier lead single, "Spin the Black Circle" from Vitalogy, but added a great melodic bridge. 

Joe Newman of alt-J has such a bizarre little muttering voice, at turns it reminds me of Les Claypool or the guy from Southern Culture On The Skids, which are odd references points for a British band that sounds nothing like Primus. This song has a really cool texture and massive hook, though. 

I'm kind of obsessed with the fact that some of the songs on the first Imagine Dragons album, arguably the biggest rock album of the 2010s, were originally written for the musical Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark, including the album's biggest hits "Radioactive" and "Demons." However, I always preferred the folky mandolin sound of their first single "It's Time" to the slicker, more bombastic songs that followed. 

Really enjoyed this little uptempo blast of indie rock when it was briefly on the radio. I saw Bear Hands live last year and they put on a good show. 

Obviously, Fall Out Boy's real classics are back in the 2000s. But I like their 2010s work more than most, and I thought it was cool that the poster boys for guyliner could come back and make jock jams that get played at sporting events like this and "Centuries." 

I never expected it when they first came out, but Bastille has really grown on me over the years, even "Pompeii." And this was the song that really won me over, a weirdly jaunty song about death featuring a funky bassline and samples from the '80s comedy Weird Science. 

Hobo Johnson had a very brief, very 2010s hype cycle: go viral on YouTube, get signed, and make a polished major label album that gets terrible reviews and doesn't hit it big on the charts. But as someone who didn't like the rambling poetry slam songs that brought Hobo Johnson fame, I really enjoyed hearing him try to compress that aesthetic into a fast anthemic 3-minute radio song. 

Only maybe a dozen of these 100 songs were bigger on hard rock (aka 'mainstream' rock or 'active' rock) radio than on alternative radio -- mostly it's not as much my scene, but also I'm just not that interested in new Metallica songs or new school arena bands like Five Finger Death Punch. But one development I enjoyed in 2010s hard rock radio was that bands fronted by women, particularly Halestorm and Pretty Reckless, became a lot more commonplace. Lzzy Hale of Halestorm's vocal teacher was Kix frontman Steve Whiteman, and Halestorm sometimes has a pretty enjoyable '80s Lita Ford vibe. 

"Love It If We Made It" is the most divisive song from a divisive band -- what made Matt Healy finally delete his Twitter account this year was the reaction when he posted the song's lyric about Eric Garner's murder following the murder of George Floyd. It's a big gesture of a song, and many of the lyrics make me cringe, but musically it just wins me over with the way the song builds up and explodes. George Daniel is really one of the best drummers working today, the hi-hats on the chorus are fucking sick. 

My brother gave me the Chris Cornell box set for Christmas in 2018, and it's awesome, an impressively comprehensive overview of nearly every chapter of his long career: Soundgarden, Temple of the Dog, Audioslave, guest spots, soundtracks, solo albums, you name it. The only song I find myself really wishing the box set had is "Heavy Is The Head," his collaboration with country hitmakers Zac Brown Band that helped them break through to rock radio. I like Soundgarden's final album King Animal, but in a way I felt like Zac Brown did just as good a job as them of capturing the band's classic sound, there's even a few measures in 7/8.

Lana Del Rey became a huge star largely without the support of radio, with 2 flukey exceptions: the 2013 dance remix of "Summertime Sadness" that pop radio loved, and last year's cover of Sublime's "Doin' Time" that briefly supplanted the original on alt-rock playlists. In between those, she made a less successful play for alternative radio with "West Coast," produced by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys. I'm not a big fan of Del Rey or the Black Keys, but I thought they really combined their respective sensibilities in an interesting way here. 

44. Meg Myers - "Lemon Eyes" (2015)
#23 Alternative Airplay, #42 Rock Airplay
Like Lana Del Rey, Meg Myers cultivated a big stylized persona in her original songs, but alt-rock didn't really embrace her until she covered a familiar old song, in her case Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill," which went to #1 last year. But I really prefer the singles from her debut, 2015's Sorry, particularly the third single "Lemon Eyes," which has an odd percussion sound and unpredictable vocal melody that always stick in my head. 

There was an odd moment in 2014 when Michelle Pfeiffer was name-dropped in 2 hit songs around the same time, both as a signifier of beauty and glamor. In a decade when Soundcloud became associated with grassroots hip hop hits, "Riptide" might be the first song that traveled from Soundcloud to alt-rock radio, taking a guy from Australia with a ukulele and an unusual voice around the world with his catchy songs. 

Occasionally, the music press pays attention to rock radio just to look down its nose at whatever weird or old-fashioned band people are excited about. And about a year after Greta Van Fleet started blanketing rock airwaves, critics started to notice and spent a few months mercilessly mocking this group of college age guys who did a startlingly accurate Led Zeppelin impression. Almost every heavy band sounds at least a little like Zep, but leaning into it as much as Whitesnake or Wolfmother or Greta Van Fleet is definitely a choice that can turn people off, so I get it. But "Highway Tune" was a fun little "Immigrant Song" knockoff before their subsequent singles suffered the inevitable diminishing returns. 
 

My wife loves Chevelle and they really grew on me over the years, they had a pretty great run of singles in the 2000s and early 2010s. But we saw them around the time this song was out and they're kind of disappointing live, definitely a studio band. 

Paramore's self-titled album was my favorite rock album of the 2010s, but its 2 biggest singles went straight to pop radio without alternative stations even touching them. In retrospect, the rockier lead single feels like a red herring, but it's still a pretty killer song that sounds even better in the context of the album. 

Like their Fueled By Ramen labelmates Paramore, Panic! At The Disco leaned more towards Top 40 crossover over the course of their career, culminating in their biggest hit ever last year. But I never really liked the band much, and when "High Hopes" was out I was fond of saying that I'd never found any of their songs more than tolerable. But then they had to ruin it by releasing a follow-up single that I absolutely loved. It's pretty interesting that Las Vegas, a city that turned out few bands of note in the 20th century, produced 3 of the biggest alt-rock bands of the 21st century (Panic, The Killers, and Imagine Dragons). 

I always wanted to know if anyone yelled "Judas!" at one of the fist Mumford & Sons shows where they walked out with electric guitars and played "The Wolf," but in all likelihood people weren't quite so purist about the 50th acoustic folk revival. Still, this nice generic modern rock song really won me over in a way that the band's Grammy-winning banjo picking tunes never did. 

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