Alternative rock in ten artists

The most restless major band of their era, who followed the biggest guitar album of the 1990s by abandoning guitars almost entirely. Every few years they reinvent themselves and the rest of the genre scrambles to catch up. The standard everyone is measured against.

The band that broke the underground into the mainstream and never looked comfortable there. Three chords, a generational scream and a discomfort with fame that ended in tragedy. They changed what rock looked like overnight.

The quiet-loud, surf-noise blueprint half of alternative rock was built on. Strange, funny and ferocious, they were never as big as the bands who copied them and twice as influential. Start with the songs, stay for the screams.

Guitars turned into weather: a wall of bent, glowing noise you feel as much as hear. They more or less invented shoegaze, then vanished for two decades, and the records still sound like the future.

Art-school noise turned into a career, the link between the New York avant-garde and the alternative explosion. They tuned their guitars wrong on purpose and made it sound like the only right way. The cool older siblings of the scene.

Ambition with no off switch: grand, heavy, romantic rock built to fill arenas and break hearts. Billy Corgan wanted to make the great American rock album and, on a good day, did. Maximalism as a feeling.

The keepers of the heavy-rock flame in a decade that forgot how to riff. Groove-driven, precise and effortlessly cool, they made hard rock dangerous and danceable again. The connoisseur's choice.

The band that made guitars cool again at the turn of the century and launched a thousand imitators. Effortless, detached and impossibly stylish, they handed the 2000s their sound in one perfect debut.

The last great word-of-mouth band, who arrived as the sharpest young songwriters in Britain and grew into shapeshifting rock stars. From sweaty indie debut to lounge-lizard reinvention, they refused to stand still.

Funk, punk and California sunshine welded into one of rock's most durable bands. For all the muscle, their best work is unexpectedly tender. Proof a party band can have a soul.