Deerhunter

Deerhunter came out of Atlanta in 2001, started by singer and guitarist Bradford Cox and drummer Moses Archuleta, and they have been slippery to pin down ever since. They called it "ambient punk", which gets you halfway: the records drift through noise, garage rock and art rock, then turn around and hand you a pop hook you never saw coming.

The early going was brutal. Bassist Justin Bosworth died at 24 in March 2004 after a skateboarding accident, and Josh Fauver took over the bass for the 2005 debut. Cox then brought in his childhood friend Lockett Pundt as second guitarist, co-writer and sometime singer, and the band caught fire: Cryptograms, cut in two days in 2007, set hazy ambient washes against jagged garage songs, and Microcastle and Weird Era Cont. both landed in 2008.

Halcyon Digest, made as a four-piece with producer Ben H. Allen in 2010, is where the haze and the hooks finally fused, and it gave the countdowns "Desire Lines" and "He Would Have Laughed". Critics fell hard for it; Pitchfork later ranked it the 29th best album of the decade and Stereogum the 78th. With Josh McKay and Frankie Broyles aboard, Monomania in 2013 went darker and more primitive, right down to taped rats and insects. After Cox was hit by a vehicle while walking his dog, he wrote his way through the recovery, and out came Fading Frontier in 2015. Cate Le Bon produced Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? in 2019, and the band has been on hiatus since that tour wound down.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.