The U.K. music scene is notorious for launching previously unknown bands to the heights of stardom on word-of-mouth gossip and music-press hype alone. Arctic Monkeys took that phenomenon to an entirely new level when they sold 110,000 copies of their…

One of the most celebrated new bands of 2004, the Arcade Fire came out of Montreal's vibrant music scene with a melancholic, cinematic sound equally redolent of '80s heroes like the Cure and Echo & the Bunnymen and latter-day orchestral-rockers Mercu…

Seattle WAs Band of Horses plays dense aching mid-tempo indie rock reminiscent of Neil Young Crazy Horse Formed in 2004 by multi-instrumentalists Ben Bridwell and Matthew Brooke out of the ashes of former incarnation Carissas Wierd the group caught …