Ratatat

Mike Stroud and Evan Mast met as students at Skidmore College and started making music together in 2001, at first under the name Cherry. As Ratatat, the Brooklyn duo settled on a sound that throws guitar rock and electronics into the same blender: Stroud on guitar, melodica, synths and percussion, Mast producing and covering bass, synths and more percussion.

Stroud already knew life on the road, having toured with Dashboard Confessional in 2000 and then with Ben Kweller's band, where he played on Kweller's On My Way before deciding he'd had enough. Ratatat's first single, "Seventeen Years", came out in 2003 on Audio Dregs, the label Mast ran with his brother Eric, and on Rex Records in the UK. XL Recordings signed them for the self-titled debut, which the pair wrote and recorded on a laptop in Mast's Crown Heights apartment. Apart from a few snippets of voices at the edges of some tracks, there's no singing at all; the guitars do the talking, harmonized and stacked high.

Magnifique, in 2015, kept that formula glossy and grand. "Cream on Chrome" slinks along on a fat, lazy groove, the riffs piled up like a glam-rock choir with the words taken out.

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