Dinosaur Jr.

Dinosaur Jr. formed in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1984, when guitarist J Mascis, bassist Lou Barlow, and drummer Murph turned a hardcore band's wreckage into something stranger: songs built from towering distortion and feedback, sung in Mascis's flat, sun-bleached drawl and cut through by guitar solos that felt both careless and precise. Early SST releases like You're Living All Over Me and Bug made the trio a cornerstone of American indie rock, pairing volume most bands reserved for hardcore with melodies that leaned closer to Neil Young than punk. The band splintered in the early 1990s - Barlow left to found Sebadoh, Murph eventually departed too - leaving Mascis to steer a run of major-label albums largely on his own before retiring the name in 1997. The original lineup reunited in 2005 and has recorded steadily since, its sound essentially unchanged: raw, loud, unhurried, and somehow still capable of surprising people who assumed they knew exactly what a Dinosaur Jr. record would sound like.