32 Essential Alternative & Indie Vinyl Records, Ranked
By Keith, Viking Records · May 2026
Alternative and indie isn’t one sound — it’s a 55-year argument with the mainstream, running from Radiohead and Nirvana through The Smiths and Joy Division to Wolf Alice, Arctic Monkeys and Lorde. Late-70s post-punk dread in Manchester, loud-quiet-loud guitars in 80s American basements, shoegaze in Dublin and Camden, lo-fi confessionals from a Vermont cabin, Auto-Tuned art-pop on a 2025 release. The records on this list are the ones that drew the lines, then redrew them, then handed the pencil to the next room.
This guide is a curator’s route through our Alternative & Indie collection — thirty-two albums I keep recommending to anyone serious about understanding the genre’s arc. The story moves between the UK and the US and back again, between the underground and the moment it briefly takes over the charts, between guitar-band orthodoxy and the producers who broke it.
Every record on the list is in stock at Viking Records, new and sealed, with fast UK delivery.
Shop All Alternative & Indie Vinyl →
Alternative is the long argument with the mainstream. Sometimes the mainstream loses. Sometimes it absorbs the argument and pretends it always agreed. Either way, the records keep coming.
Part One: The Essential Canon
Eleven records that any serious alt/indie shelf is built around. The foundations — UK post-punk, American underground, art-rock origins — that everything else on this list responds to.
1. Radiohead — OK Computer (1997)
The album that turned a promising guitar band into a generational concern. Radiohead spent eighteen months in Catherine Wheel’s former house and Jane Seymour’s mansion, mostly arguing about what came after The Bends. What emerged was an album about millennium-eve anxiety, surveillance, motorway alienation and computers that already sounded like prophecy. Gatefold 2xLP captures the analogue warmth Nigel Godrich layered under everything — OK Computer is one of the records that rewards a turntable rather than tolerating one.
Key track: Paranoid Android
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2. The Smiths — The Queen Is Dead (1986)
The album that British indie is measured against. Johnny Marr’s guitar architecture is the great unfinished business of UK pop — the way There Is a Light That Never Goes Out turns a phrase about a double-decker bus into one of the most quoted lyrics in popular music, while the title track barrels through twelve-bar shouts about the Queen and the Falklands. Morrissey’s public life later complicated the listening experience, but the songs remain extraordinary. 180g remaster from the original tapes.
Key track: There Is a Light That Never Goes Out
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3. Nirvana — Nevermind (1991)
The moment alt rock stopped being a sub-genre and became the genre. Butch Vig’s production polished what should have been an unpolishable record — the dry-eyed nihilism of Cobain’s songwriting set against pop hooks borrowed from the Pixies and the Beatles. Smells Like Teen Spirit displaced Michael Jackson at the top of the Billboard chart in January 1992 and the major-label industry has never quite recovered from the precedent. 180g pressing captures the cymbal-and-bass dynamics that compressed CDs flattened.
Key track: Smells Like Teen Spirit
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4. My Bloody Valentine — Loveless (1991)
Kevin Shields spent two years and almost bankrupted Creation Records building one of the most distinctive sonic textures in popular music. Loveless is a wall of guitars that pretends to be a wall of synthesisers — tremolo-arm bends, layered feedback, vocals submerged in the mix until they read more like another instrument than a singer. Shoegaze begins and effectively ends here, in the sense that nobody has matched it since. Deluxe 180g LP is the pressing this record was waiting for.
Key track: Only Shallow
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5. Joy Division — Unknown Pleasures (1979)
Recorded in three weekends at Strawberry Studios in Stockport, mixed by Martin Hannett with so much reverb and delay that the band reportedly walked out unhappy with the result. They were wrong. Unknown Pleasures invented a sound the next forty years of post-punk, goth, electronic and indie have all drawn from — Peter Hook’s melodic basslines carrying the song while Ian Curtis sang from somewhere far inside his own head. The Peter Saville pulsar sleeve is on more T-shirts than most living musicians sell. 180g remaster.
Key track: She’s Lost Control
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6. Pixies — Doolittle (1989)
The album that taught a generation of bands how to write a song. Loud-quiet-loud arrangements, Kim Deal’s harmonies running against Black Francis’s yelping leads, Joey Santiago’s surf-noir guitar lines, and lyrics that read like Biblical horror translated through B-movie pulp. Kurt Cobain famously cited Doolittle as a direct template for Smells Like Teen Spirit, but Pixies got there first and arguably more inventively. Few albums have been quoted more by the indie generation that followed.
Key track: Debaser
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7. The Velvet Underground — The Velvet Underground (1969)
The third Velvets album is the one where the band quietens down and reveals what was underneath the noise. After John Cale’s departure, Lou Reed steered the group toward something closer to chamber-folk than the Warhol-era art-rock that made their name — whispered ballads, fingerpicked guitars, and a tenderness that didn’t fit any contemporary New York scene. Brian Eno’s observation that everyone who bought a Velvets record started a band applies to all four, but this one in particular taught indie that volume isn’t the only way to be radical. 45th Anniversary LP reissue.
Key track: Pale Blue Eyes
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8. Patti Smith — Horses (1975)
The opening line — “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine” — is one of the great declarations of intent in popular music. Patti Smith took the structural template of rock and roll and grafted Beat poetry onto it, with John Cale producing in a way that left enough space for her vocal performances to register as primary text. Horses is where punk crosses with literature, where the New York club scene starts taking itself seriously as an art form, and where a model emerges for every indie songwriter who decided that lyrics could carry as much weight as the riff.
Key track: Gloria: In Excelsis Deo
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9. Pulp — Different Class (1995)
Most Britpop-era records have aged, gracefully or otherwise, into period pieces. Different Class still sounds like a working argument with the time it was made in. Jarvis Cocker’s lyrics about class, sex, surveillance and the rave generation’s morning after were written with novelist’s precision — Common People remains one of the most cutting songs about class tourism ever pressed to vinyl. Chris Thomas’s production is sharper than anything else from the era, the rhythm section is the under-credited star, and Pulp earned this album’s place in the canon by being twenty years smarter than the discourse. (For the deeper Britpop story, see our dedicated Britpop collection.)
Key track: Common People
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10. Sonic Youth — Daydream Nation (1988)
The point at which the SST-era American underground built itself a cathedral. Across seventy minutes and a double-album structure that nodded to the rock canon they were supposed to be rejecting, Sonic Youth turned guitar-as-noise-instrument into a vocabulary anyone could quote. The chord tunings, the long-form structures, the seriousness about the material all directly seeded the 90s alt-rock breakthrough — without Daydream Nation there is no Smashing Pumpkins, no Nirvana, no later Radiohead. 180g 2xLP with poster and download code.
Key track: Teen Age Riot
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11. Talking Heads — More Songs About Buildings and Food (1978)
Brian Eno’s first record as the band’s producer, and the moment Talking Heads stopped being a CBGB curio and became one of the most interesting rhythm sections in popular music. The Al Green cover (Take Me to the River) is the calling card, but the deep work is in songs like Found a Job and Thank You for Sending Me an Angel, where David Byrne’s anxious phrasing locks against Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz’s funk-trained playing. Red indie-exclusive 2xLP — one of the most listenable pressings in the band’s catalogue.
Key track: Take Me to the River
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Part Two: Expanding the Map
Eleven records that took the canon’s lessons and went somewhere unexpected — lo-fi confessionals, dream-pop atmospherics, alt-rock blockbusters, indie-folk landmarks, the 2000s reset.
12. Arcade Fire — Funeral (2004)
The album that gave 2000s indie its emotional template. Recorded in Montreal as members of the band were losing parents and grandparents, Funeral turned grief into anthems — Wake Up, Rebellion (Lies), Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) — with arrangements that pulled in strings, glockenspiel, accordion and seven voices at once. Indie before this record was mostly defensive; indie after this record knew it could fill arenas. The 180g LP captures the maximalist mix beautifully.
Key track: Wake Up
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13. Pavement — Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (1994)
The slacker-indie manifesto. After the deliberately scrappy Slanted and Enchanted, Stephen Malkmus and the Pavement line-up made an album that wore its melodies on the sleeve while still hiding the seriousness three jokes deep. Cut Your Hair was the closest the band ever came to a hit single and they sounded faintly embarrassed by the result. Crooked Rain remains the high-water mark for an entire strain of US indie — the kind that values smart over loud, sketch over statement, and knows exactly when to stop.
Key track: Cut Your Hair
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14. Cocteau Twins — Heaven Or Las Vegas (1990)
The Cocteau Twins record where Elizabeth Fraser’s glossolalia briefly resolves into something close to actual English, and where Robin Guthrie’s chorused-guitar architecture finds its perfect balance against the rhythm section. Heaven Or Las Vegas is dream-pop’s defining text — later cited as a touchstone by everyone from Beach House to Cocteau Twins’ own latter-day collaborators in Massive Attack. 180g remastered with download code.
Key track: Heaven or Las Vegas
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15. Tom Waits — Rain Dogs (1985)
The middle panel of Waits’s Island Records trilogy and the album where the genre boundaries finally stopped pretending to apply. Marc Ribot’s broken-blues guitar lines, marimba and accordion textures, songs that sound like they were recorded in a New York basement at three in the morning. Downtown Train is the late-night radio hit, but Jockey Full of Bourbon and Hang Down Your Head are the record’s deeper centre. 180g LP captures the deliberately rough mix Waits insisted on.
Key track: Downtown Train
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16. Neutral Milk Hotel — In The Aeroplane Over The Sea (1998)
The most beloved cult record in indie history. Jeff Mangum and the Elephant 6 collective recorded an album of fuzz-drenched acoustic songs, brass-band horns, and stream-of-consciousness lyrics partly about Anne Frank, then largely disappeared from public life. The result has the strange afterlife of a record that doesn’t do anything for first-time listeners, then becomes structurally important to the next several years of their listening. Indie folk doesn’t really exist as a genre without this album. 180g LP.
Key track: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
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17. R.E.M. — Automatic For The People (1992)
The Athens, Georgia group’s most beautifully restrained album. After the breakthrough commercial scale of Out of Time, R.E.M. retreated into chamber-rock arrangements with John Paul Jones’s string charts and Mike Mills’s harmonies sitting just behind Michael Stipe’s deepening lyric writing. Everybody Hurts, Nightswimming and Man on the Moon are all here; so are the deeper cuts that make Automatic the band’s most consistently rewarding listen. 25th Anniversary 180g LP edition.
Key track: Nightswimming
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18. The Cure — Seventeen Seconds (1980)
The Cure’s second album and the one that set the template for the band’s entire goth-adjacent post-punk catalogue. Robert Smith pares the arrangements down to bass, brushed drums, two-finger keyboards and the most haunted vocals on a debut-era record — A Forest emerges fully formed as one of the great atmospheric singles of the 80s. The album that taught a generation that minimalism could feel maximalist if the mood was right. 180g LP.
Key track: A Forest
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19. Pearl Jam — Ten (1991)
Released within a month of Nevermind, and treated by the grunge-purist press of the time as the more conservative cousin. The truth is that Ten is a more conventionally structured album that has aged in interesting ways — Eddie Vedder’s vocal performances on Black, Alive and Jeremy still set the standard for arena-scale alt-rock singing, and Mike McCready’s solos owe more to classic rock than the underground would have admitted in 1991. The legacy remastered 180g pressing is the version to own.
Key track: Black
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20. Bon Iver — For Emma, Forever Ago (2007)
Recorded by Justin Vernon in a cabin in northwestern Wisconsin over a single winter, after a relationship breakdown and a bout of glandular fever. The myth has been over-told; what isn’t over-told is how strange and finely made the record actually is — falsetto vocals layered into harmony stacks against fingerpicked guitar, the absolute minimum of percussion. Indie folk as it was understood in 2007 begins with this album, and most of what came after is in some kind of conversation with it.
Key track: Skinny Love
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21. Tame Impala — Currents (2015)
Kevin Parker’s pivot from psych-rock guitar workouts to a fully synthesised dance-pop record done in one man’s studio in Fremantle, Western Australia. Currents reframed indie as something that could comfortably belong on a Saturday-night radio show in 2025 without surrendering any of its underground credentials — The Less I Know The Better has aged into one of the defining indie singles of its decade. Fiction Records reissue on 2xLP.
Key track: The Less I Know The Better
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22. The Smashing Pumpkins — Siamese Dream (1993)
Billy Corgan and Butch Vig spent four months building a guitar-rock cathedral. Layered fuzz, orchestral structures, Today and Disarm and Cherub Rock all delivered with a maximalism that didn’t fit the slacker mood of its release year and aged into one of the most influential alt-rock production statements of the 90s. The 2xLP reissue captures the sheer density Vig and Corgan baked into the master tapes.
Key track: Today
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Part Three: Range and Texture
Seven records that show how wide the genre runs — genre-collage, art-pop, indie-folk roots, the 2000s NYC and Chicago scenes, garage rock revival.
23. Beck — Odelay (1996)
The Dust Brothers’ production turned Beck Hansen’s folk-tradition songwriting into a sampladelic rock record that should not work and did work. Where It’s At, Devil’s Haircut and The New Pollution all became MTV-era standards while keeping the genre-collage instincts that defined the underground Beck came out of. Odelay is the moment 90s alt rock stopped pretending it didn’t love hip-hop production. 180g LP.
Key track: Where It’s At
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24. Björk — Post (1995)
Björk’s second solo album after The Sugarcubes, recorded with Nellee Hooper and 808 State’s Graham Massey alongside Tricky and Howie B. Post is where art-pop becomes a workable genre — big-band brass on It’s Oh So Quiet, junglist programming under Army of Me, chamber-electronic arrangement on Hyperballad. One of the records the 1990s exported to the rest of the next thirty years of independent music. 180g LP.
Key track: Hyperballad
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25. Nick Drake — Bryter Layter (1971)
The brightest, most arranged album in Nick Drake’s posthumous-famous catalogue. Robert Kirby’s string charts, John Cale guesting on viola and harpsichord, Richard Thompson on guitar — Bryter Layter is folk treated with the production care normally reserved for orchestral pop. Drake’s voice and fingerpicked patterns are the consistent through-line, but the arrangements lift Northern Sky and Hazey Jane II into something that prefigures indie-folk’s entire sensibility forty years before the genre existed.
Key track: Northern Sky
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26. Wilco — Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002)
The album Wilco delivered to Reprise Records, were dropped over, then released themselves to wider acclaim than the label could have engineered. Jim O’Rourke’s production wraps Jeff Tweedy’s Americana-rock songwriting in tape loops, drones and processed noise — one of the most distinctive textural records in 2000s indie. The deluxe remastered 2xLP is the version to own.
Key track: Jesus, Etc.
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27. The White Stripes — Elephant (2003)
Recorded in Toe Rag Studios in Hackney on eight-track tape, mostly because Jack White wanted the constraint. Seven Nation Army has since become one of the most-quoted basslines in modern music (Jack White famously plays guitar pitched down an octave; there is no actual bass). The record is the high-water mark of the early-2000s garage revival, and Meg White’s drumming is the engine that makes the whole thing work. 2xLP.
Key track: Seven Nation Army
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28. Interpol — Turn On The Bright Lights (2002)
The album that briefly made the rest of the music press think New York indie was the centre of the universe. Paul Banks’s deadpan vocals, Daniel Kessler’s ribbon-thin guitar lines and Carlos Dengler’s lead-melody bass lines were openly indebted to Joy Division, but Interpol turned the post-punk template into something that worked on its own terms. Obstacle 1 and PDA both still ride on the original drum machines as if they were filed yesterday. Matador reissue LP.
Key track: Obstacle 1
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29. Yeah Yeah Yeahs — Fever To Tell (2003)
The other half of the early-2000s NYC garage revival. Karen O’s vocal performance is the kind of thing critics call a force of nature for a reason — Maps in particular remains one of the most affecting indie singles of the decade. Nick Zinner’s open-tuning guitar work and Brian Chase’s drumming round out a band that sounded both more vicious and more tender than anyone expected. 180g LP.
Key track: Maps
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Part Four: The Modern Era
Three records that map where indie has actually gone in the last fifteen years — UK indie’s most ambitious art-pop turn, the 2010s arena-indie pillar, and the auteur-pop record that closed out 2025.
30. Wolf Alice — Blue Weekend (2021)
UK indie’s most ambitious turn-of-the-decade statement. Ellie Rowsell’s vocals carry registers from shoegaze whisper to grunge belt across the same record, and producer Markus Dravs (Arcade Fire, Mumford) gives them the kind of arrangement scale that recent UK guitar bands have mostly forgotten how to ask for. The Last Man on Earth and Smile in particular set the standard for what 2020s indie can sound like. Black vinyl LP.
Key track: The Last Man on Earth
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31. Arctic Monkeys — AM (2013)
The Sheffield band’s American pivot. After four UK guitar-indie records, Alex Turner and producer James Ford retreated to Rancho de la Luna in California and built a slick, swung, hip-hop-influenced album that became Arctic Monkeys’ biggest-selling release worldwide. Do I Wanna Know? and R U Mine? both turned into festival headline material almost immediately. The 180g remastered LP is the version to own.
Key track: Do I Wanna Know?
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32. Lorde — Virgin (2025)
The closing record on this list is also the newest. Lorde’s fourth studio album, recorded with Jim-E Stack and Dan Nigro, is a more openly art-pop turn than her commercial peaks — quieter arrangements, electronic-leaning rhythms, and a writing voice that has aged into something closer to PJ Harvey or Cat Power than the chart-topper era of Royals. Released in 2025 on red indie-exclusive vinyl, Virgin is the rare contemporary art-pop record that earns its place next to the canon rather than copying it.
Key track: Hammer
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Part Five: Additional Canon
Ten records that round out the post-punk, modern-indie and singer-songwriter threads above. Added after a stock audit revealed canonical gaps.
33. The Cure — Disintegration (1989)
The most beloved record in The Cure’s catalogue and arguably the high point of the entire post-punk-into-goth tradition. Robert Smith’s most-quoted melodies (Pictures of You, Lovesong, Lullaby, Plainsong) stretched out across a double album of cathedral-sized atmospheric arrangements. The record Robert Smith decided he wanted to be remembered by. 180g 2xLP.
Key track: Pictures of You
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34. Lana Del Rey — Norman F*cking Rockwell! (2019)
Lana Del Rey’s most fully realised art-pop record. Produced with Jack Antonoff, NFR is a sustained meditation on a particular Californian malaise — cinematic strings, finger-picked acoustic guitar, vocals processed to sit half a step back from the room. Mariners Apartment Complex, The Greatest, Venice Bitch (the nine-minute side-two anchor) all pointed to a writer at the peak of her instinct. 2xLP.
Key track: The Greatest
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35. Phoebe Bridgers — Punisher (2020)
The album that confirmed Phoebe Bridgers as the most-quoted indie songwriter of her generation. Recorded during the pandemic year and released into it, Punisher pairs Bridgers’s spare vocal phrasing with arrangements that build to genuine catharsis — the closing track I Know The End is one of the most affecting climaxes in 2020s indie.
Key track: I Know The End
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36. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds — Skeleton Tree (2016)
The album written and largely recorded before, but released after, the death of Cave’s son Arthur. The accidental relevance of every line to the loss became one of the most discussed listening contexts in 2010s indie rock. Distant Sky, I Need You, Jesus Alone: spare arrangements, Warren Ellis’s loops, Cave’s voice working in registers it had never worked in before.
Key track: I Need You
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37. PJ Harvey — Rid Of Me (1993)
Steve Albini produced PJ Harvey’s second album in two weeks in Cannon Falls, Minnesota, with deliberately minimal recording techniques and no compression. The result is some of the most viscerally physical guitar-rock of the 1990s — 50ft Queenie, Rid Of Me and Man-Size set the template for every female-fronted alt act since. Island remastered 180g LP.
Key track: Rid Of Me
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38. Foo Fighters — Wasting Light (2011)
Recorded by Butch Vig in Dave Grohl’s garage, on tape (no computers), in eleven tracks of straight alt-rock that Foo Fighters fans had been hoping for since The Colour and the Shape. Rope, Walk and These Days are the most-played; the whole thing functions as a back-to-basics statement of what made Grohl matter as a songwriter rather than a frontman. 2xLP.
Key track: Walk
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39. Queens of the Stone Age — Songs for the Deaf (2002)
The Josh Homme / Nick Oliveri / Dave Grohl line-up of QOTSA, recorded as a continuous drive across the California desert with fake radio stations stitching the tracks together. No One Knows became one of the defining alt-rock singles of the 2000s; Go With The Flow and First It Giveth are deeper cuts that hold up across the full ride. 2xLP.
Key track: No One Knows
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40. Sam Fender — Seventeen Going Under (2021)
Newcastle’s most-discussed singer-songwriter writing about his hometown with Springsteen-level emotional precision. The title track is one of the best UK indie-rock singles of the decade so far; the rest of the album sits comfortably in the lineage of working-class British songwriting that Paul Heaton and Mike Skinner extended before him. Gatefold LP.
Key track: Seventeen Going Under
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41. Elliott Smith — Either/Or (1997)
Smith’s third album, written and largely performed alone in a Portland basement. Between the Bars, Say Yes, Angeles — songs that crossed over from the indie underground to a mainstream listenership when Smith’s Good Will Hunting work landed two years later. The record indie-folk has been measured against ever since.
Key track: Between the Bars
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42. The 1975 — Notes on a Conditional Form (2020)
The 1975’s sprawling, twenty-two-track pandemic-era release. Genre-collage on a scale earlier indie acts wouldn’t have attempted — punk, ambient, gospel, country and dance-pop in the same record, held together by Matty Healy’s lyric writing about online life and the cultural moment that produced it. 2xLP clear vinyl.
Key track: If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)
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Honourable Mentions
Five records that didn’t make the main thirty-two but are in stock now and worth a place on the shelf.
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Fontaines D.C. — Romance (2024) Dublin post-punk’s contemporary frontline. The album that broke Fontaines wide internationally. Shop → · More Fontaines D.C. |
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Wet Leg — Moisturizer (2025) Isle of Wight duo’s second album. Sharper, weirder, and harder to dismiss than the debut. Shop → · More Wet Leg |
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Geese — 3D Country (2023) Brooklyn quintet’s second album. Indie rock with country-rock instincts and a wild front-man performance. Shop → · More Geese |
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Liz Phair — Exile In Guyville (1993) Track-by-track response to the Stones’ Exile on Main St. One of the most undersold underground records of the 90s. Shop → |
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Massive Attack — Mezzanine (1998) Bristol trip-hop’s most influential record. Sits on the borderline of indie, electronic and dub. Shop → · More Massive Attack |
Related guides on Viking Records
If alt and indie is your way in, these are the threads worth pulling next.
- 32 Essential Pop Vinyl Records, Ranked — the bigger arc of mainstream pop, including the Britpop crossover.
- 15 Essential Folk, Country & Americana Vinyl Records — where Bon Iver, Tom Waits and Nick Drake’s tradition keeps going.
- 32 Essential Heavy Metal Vinyl Records, Ranked — the louder cousin of alt rock.
- 32 Essential Hip-Hop Vinyl Records, Ranked — the parallel underground story.
- 32 Essential Soul, Funk & R&B Vinyl Records, Ranked — the rhythm-section heritage every great alt band has absorbed.
- Best Jazz Vinyl Records — the harmonic vocabulary alt rock keeps borrowing from.
- Oasis Vinyl Albums Guide — the Britpop pillar in full.
- Depeche Mode Vinyl Album Buying Guide — synth-pop’s most enduring alt crossover.
- Kate Bush Vinyl Albums Guide — art-pop’s pre-alt godmother.
Where to start
If you’re building an alt/indie shelf from scratch, the cleanest five-record entry point is Radiohead’s OK Computer, The Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead, Nirvana’s Nevermind, Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures and Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Together they cover late-90s art-rock, 80s UK indie, 90s grunge, late-70s post-punk and 90s American slacker indie — the five corners every conversation about the genre starts from.
Add Loveless once you’re curious what shoegaze sounds like at the very best, Funeral if you want to understand how 2000s indie filled arenas, Bon Iver’s For Emma if you want the indie-folk pivot, and Blue Weekend or AM as your bridge into the modern era. Working backwards from those, the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, Talking Heads and Nick Drake are the deeper sources everything else on this list is drawing from.
Browse the full Alternative & Indie collection — every record on this list is in stock, new and sealed, with fast UK delivery. Britpop pillars are gathered separately in our Britpop collection, grunge in our Grunge collection, and the post-punk lineage in our Post-Punk collection.
