The band that inspired a thousand twee others, still going 30 years on.

Impossible not to love, impossible not to join in, bounce, dance, yell yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah at the right moments, clappable, hummable, brilliant.

If there was an indie-pop World Cup, I’d be putting my money on Scotland, and I’d be calling for the captain’s armband to be wrapped round the sensitive, sweetly soulful arms of Butcher Boy

Three minutes of Swedish win.

Twee genius, made improbably well-known thanks to its use in Budweiser adverts in the US since 2010.

Something more modern in the jangly style. The album Days was a 2011 end of year poll regular, even managing the neat trick of appealing to both Pitchfork and Uncut.

Let’s get this indie-pop ball rolling with an early creation classic, seen here in all the audio and visual clarity and fidelity we’ve come to expect from old VHS cassettes.

From the post-punk, 60s-infused DIY jangle of the 80s to their twenty-first century followers (yes, we’re a 90s free zone for once), the twee, the quirky, the surprising and the plain old melodic shapes of...

A track about being stuck in the 90s that manages to make you feel harmlessly nostalgic for that time, while at the same time making you hate yourself for it.

Nigel Godrich sprinkled his magic dust all over The Man Who, and helped turn a band that had briefly flirted with the top 10 (1997’s Good Feeling was well enough received, and hit number nine,...

One of the best sounding albums of the 90s, expanding on the sound of The Bends, and taking Radiohead into galaxies new, leaving Pablo Honey all but a distant memory; an album by another band...

This is roughly the point at which Aus/NZ group Crowded House started to move into “hey, even if you can’t necessarily immediately recall all their hits, there’s a chance that you’ve hummed a few of...

Falling perfectly into that sweet spot between experimentation and plain straight up song-writing panache, The Soft Bulletin was a creative and critical peak for The Flaming Lips, their work both before and since veering too...

In the late 1990s, at the tail-end of the britpop days, when interest was rapidly waning, a young Sophie fronted Theaudience, a gentle indie-pop group who managed one album and a handful of singles before...

It’s Tim Wheeler’s favourite Ash song, lyrically and musically, and who am I to disagree? Goldfinger is classic quiet/LOUD, driven by some furious pounding and heavy chords.

Monday saw the tenth anniversary of the death of the songwriter Elliott Smith. A remarkable, fragile talent, like so many others of his profession. So many great melodies, bittersweet lyrics, and equally at home in...

The second track from the forthcoming second album by Sweden’s I Break Horses continues the progress from their debut album Hearts that was apparent on Denial, with the hazy shoegazing once more playing second fiddle...

It’s the best ever, it’s the critics favourite, it’s the GOAT[1], it’s The Queen Is Dead, the 1986 album by The Smiths that was kept off the top spot in its week of...

Recorded initially during their 1995 tour, as members of the band were falling apart in very real and physical ways (only Peter Buck made it through unscathed), New Adventures in Hi-Fi marked a pretty extraordinary...

The idea behind Tindersticks’ new album Across Six Leap Years was to recapture songs that had somehow got lost along the way, or that hadn’t been recorded quite the way the band envisaged. Listening to...