The Best Garage Punk Bands

Every list of the best garage punk bands is a rewrite of the same list, and everyone rewriting it is working from the same three compilations and each other. We wanted a different source, so we counted one.

Sixteen underground radio shows, documented in our archive, put 7,663 tracks on air by 5,016 different artists between roughly 2005 and 2019. The hosts did not coordinate. Most never spoke. What they independently reached for is the closest thing this genre has to evidence, and it produces a list that no editor would have written on purpose.

How this was counted, and why it matters

There are two ways to rank the same data and they disagree sharply.

Most plays tells you what one host loved that year. It is a measure of obsession, and one enthusiastic programmer can put a band at the top of a genre single-handed.

Played by the most separate shows tells you where independent people converge. It is slower, duller and far more useful, so it is the ranking below.

Nothing here was added because it seemed canonical, and a few things stayed in that we would not have chosen. That is the point of counting.

The consensus, in order

1. Ramones — 9 shows, 18 plays. The most widely agreed-upon artist in the entire archive is not a garage band. Nine of sixteen hosts played them, which is a broader consensus than the Sonics, the Kinks and Bo Diddley managed. The method is the same as a 1965 garage single with the tempo doubled and the fat trimmed off. Start with the first album and stop when you get bored, which for most people is around album four.

2. The Sonics — 7 shows, 22 plays. Tacoma, 1964, cut by Kearney Barton for Etiquette. The widest reach of any 1960s band here and the highest play count of any 60s band, which means they are the rare act both counts agree on. Gerry Roslie does not sing so much as commit an offence. Here Are the Sonics first, everything else after.

3. 13th Floor Elevators — 7 shows, 13 plays. Austin, 1966, and the electric jug is not a novelty, it is the reason the records sound haunted. The debut is essential. Easter Everywhere has passionate defenders and we think it sags badly in the middle, which is heresy we are comfortable with.

4. The Cramps — 6 shows, 16 plays. The band that turned record collecting into a genre. No bass, Poison Ivy’s guitar tone, and a repertoire assembled from 1950s singles nobody else had bothered to look up. Songs the Lord Taught Us.

5. Bo Diddley — 6 shows, 8 plays. Six hosts reached past 1960 without discussing it, which tells you the lineage is longer than the word garage admits. He is not garage anything. He is the reason for most of it.

6. The Kinks — 5 shows, 20 plays. Twenty plays is the fifth-highest total in the archive and it rests almost entirely on about eighteen months of work in 1964 and 1965. The Kinks got better later and less useful to this music at exactly the same rate.

7. Dead Kennedys and The Fall — 5 shows each. Neither belongs here by any strict definition and both are here anyway. The Fall are the least likely name in the top twenty and five separate hosts still could not run a show without them.

8. Miracle Workers — 5 shows, 8 plays. The only 1980s revival band to reach the consensus tier, from Portland, Oregon, playing 1966 with 1985 amplifiers. If you want the decade they came from, we covered it in the history of garage punk.

9. The Damned, The Saints, The Real Kids — 5 shows each. Filed under punk everywhere else and played in the same hour as 60s 45s here. The Saints made “(I’m) Stranded” in Brisbane with almost no scene around them, which is the most garage circumstance imaginable.

10. The Eyes — 5 shows, 7 plays. A mid-60s London band with a tiny discography and no career to speak of. Five separate hosts found them regardless, and that is what a canon assembled by diggers rather than by magazines looks like.

11. Little Richard — 5 shows, 6 plays. See Bo Diddley. The oldest records on this list are the ones with the least to apologise for.

The obsessions, which are a different list entirely

Rank the same data by raw plays and the top of the genre changes completely. Liquids, 26 plays. Neo Neos, 26. Erik Nervous, 18. Sick Thoughts, 16. Red Mass, 16. Suburban Homes, 15. Soupcans managed 12 plays from a single show.

All recent, all pressed in small numbers, none of them on anybody’s canonical list. Three shows carry most of that between them, so it is not consensus, it is enthusiasm. But it is the more honest picture of what an underground radio show sounds like week to week: mostly current records, with the classics used as punctuation.

The exception is the Ventures at 24 plays across three shows, and they are the most boring band anywhere in this data. A catalogue that largely sounds like a driving lesson, redeemed by “The 2000 Pound Bee” and not much else. If you want the instrumental branch done properly, the best surf rock songs makes the case far better than the Ventures do.

What this count cannot see

The sample is a sample, and pretending otherwise would be the same laziness we are complaining about.

Two of the largest shows in the archive are missing from every number here. Big Enchilada does not parse at all, and House of Wild Delights parses so badly its tallies are artefacts, so we excluded both rather than publish noise. The window stops in 2019. It leans heavily English-language and towards the scenes those particular hosts lived in. A play count from one defunct network is evidence, not a verdict.

Bands we would put on the list anyway

The count undersells four groups badly, and all four turn up repeatedly across the recovered episode pages without reaching the top of either ranking.

The Gories. Detroit, 1986, two guitars, no bass, Mick Collins. Alex Chilton produced them, as he had the Cramps. More influential on everything after 1990 than most of the 60s bands above.

The Oblivians. Memphis, three members who all sang and traded the drum stool, no bass again. Popular Favorites is the record.

Teengenerate. Tokyo, on Crypt, recorded so hot the songs arrive as one continuous noise. Get Action!

Billy Childish. A discography nobody has fully catalogued, spanning four decades and several bands, and the most consistent argument in this music that you should just keep making records.

Together with the counted list, that is a shelf. If you are still working out where the boundary of the term sits, garage punk vs garage rock argues it out, what garage punk is covers the sound, and the garage rock revival explains why the biggest names of the 2000s are nowhere on this page.