5 Modern Rock Songs We'll Be Blasting On Repeat 'Til The Day We Die

Try telling a 20-year-old that Soundgarden is "modern rock" and you'll probably get an "ok, boomer" eyeroll, if they've even heard of Soundgarden. But as strange as such labels sound, "modern rock" doesn't just mean rock released last Tuesday. It means rock differentiated from all the unparalleled masterworks of "classic rock" across its mid-60s to early '80s peak. Modern rock covers the late '80s all the way to the present — a time of musical eclecticism, iterative evolution, and genre crossovers. Roughly twice as long as the period of classic rock, that's a whole lot of time to scour for a mere five stellar selections that we'll be blasting till we die.

We needed ground rules for this endeavor. Sadly, this meant culling metal of all types from our radar, no matter how tempting it was to pull from Metallica's "Black Album," massive mainstream nu-metal bands like Korn, and metal with wider appeal, like Pantera. We also had to skip the most contemporary bands that are more than worth our attention and might attain pantheonic status in the future, like The Warning, a superb trio of Mexican sisters. Additionally, we neither devolved into a mindless list of greatest, overplayed hits like "Smells Like Teen Spirit," nor a rant about personally-loved, obscure masterworks, no matter how good.

Finally, all of these songs were of the moment when they released (difficult to qualify, we know), but also have staying power over time. That means they retain something universal related to rock's soul and history, as well as being excellent in their own right. And for brevity's sake, we had no choice but to omit a whole lot of fantastically worthy songs.

Yes, yes, yes, Radiohead fans: We know and settle down. You're likely thinking that "Pyramid Song," "Everything In Its Right Place," "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi," "Street Spirit (Fade Out)," or a dozen other songs are the bestest, most specialest, amazingest Radiohead song ever, ever. But we're not talking about personal preference. If you stop and think about Radiohead, an improbably-positioned Grunge-era band that started off as just dudes with guitars, but morphed into what is essentially the world's most beloved and heavily listened to (45 million monthly Spotify listeners) avant-garde, weirdly inventive, profoundly moving rock fusion group, then you'll see that it's 1997's "Ok, Computer" that needs to grant us a selection in our tiny list of five songs. 

"Ok, Computer" is the album that, near the turn of the millennium, marked not only a separation of Radiohead from its former self, but a separation of the '90s post-post-punk-meets-metal lineage that spanned back to the '70s and fizzled following the death of Kurt Cobain. In other words, "Paranoid Android" is not only a superb musical outing in its own right, imminently relistenable and full of distinct, memorable movements and mini-earworms, but we can take it to represent and encapsulate a whole chunk of musical time. It's also not so far down prog lane that more casual Radiohead fans (if such a thing exists) or rock fans in general can't grok it. 

Not only was "Paranoid Android" inspired by Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody," it drew comparisons to the track when it was released — both from critics and fans. No matter how accurate or high-reaching, even the mere suggestion that "Paranoid Android" stood up to such a masterwork makes it worthy of consideration for our list.

With big, bombastic symphonic elements, more than a bit of wildly talented piano playing mixed with synth-driven sections, enormous stadium anthems, top-tier guitar licks, and even the odd, beautifully moving, plaintive acoustic composition like "Unintended" off of 1999's "Showbiz," Muse is a truly unusual and exceptional band of rock musicians. Now matter how diehards may gripe about the band's increasingly tepid songwriting and ever-vague anti-establishment lyrics, everyone shuts up when you mention 2001's "Origin of Symmetry" or 2003's "Absolution." But really, there's one song, and one song alone, that sits not only at the top of the heap of Muse tracks, '00s rock tracks, but 21st-century rock, in general: Muse's permanent show closer, "Knights of Cydonia" from 2006's "Black Holes and Revelations."

Where to start with this one? As complex and nuanced as it is kick-ass and ragged, teeming with the relentless energy of horse-gallop drums and tight riffs, a crescendo into one of the most explosive, you-can-help-but-sprint-or-headbang outros of the past several decades, "Knights of Cydonia" is a bonkers, one-of-a-kind rock song with nigh-limitless replay value. Plus, we've got to reference its music video, which has taken on legendary status in its own right. 

You want robots shooting lasers and a unicorn-riding desert valkyrie aside holographic displays in western saloons full of martial arts showdowns? This video's got you covered. But even without its music video, "Knights of Cydonia" is top-tier, irrepressible, genre-bending rock overflowing with gonzo compositional and creative choices. What else do you want?

Elder listeners, trust us on this. From the first line that Greta Van Fleet vocalist Josh Kiszka sings on, well, any song, you'll swear that you were listening to a vast and unearthed archive of lost Led Zeppelin tunes (with modern production values). It's not just Kiszka's voice, but Van Fleet's composition, which focuses on writing well-developed, contained songs of radio-friendly length that are transparent enough to be understood by a wider audience, while dense enough to be engaging. All this from a band that's the newest and youngest band on our list, where every member is under 30 at the time of writing. But in 2017, when "From the Fires" came, Van Fleet's four members — three of whom are Kiszka siblings, and two of whom are twins, Josh and Jake — were that much younger.

We're going to settle on "Safari Song" from "From the Fires" because it's such a straightforward, infectious party rocker that's brimming with youthful energy, propelled by kick-ass riffs that the lay ear can follow but also aren't amateurish. In short, this specific song from this specific album and specific band is rock of the finest, cross-generational appeal that bridges the gap between classic and modern, can draw in crowds from any background, and scratches the same, bluesy, groovy itch that's scratched by bands like The Black Keys and The White Stripes. 

There's a case to be made that this is what rock is all about. As Kiszka told American Songwriter, "I love that [Music is] the universal language ... People gather in large spaces, shoulder to shoulder, to ... take something away from it that, again, transforms spaces and the people in those spaces."

While modern rock has many faces — creative, cerebral, or party-hardy — there's another face to modern rock that mirrors its mid-60s countercultural epoch: rebellious discontent. The rebelliousness of the mid-'60s counterculture might have taken the form of free love, flowers, and acoustic guitars, but that's just one way to run contrary to the war-mongering powers that be, and one that suited the time. Sometimes defiance looks like that, and other times it looks really, really angry. And could there be a better embodiment of such sentiments than the ever-relevant, roiling, and wrathful Rage Against the Machine?

Harder than lots of other rock outfits, blending rap circa the '90s, at times skewing metal, and skirting musical rules right down to Tom Morello's DJ-scratching guitar work, we could almost exclusively choose Rage songs to fulfill their unique role in this list. "Killing In the Name," "Wake Up," "Guerilla Radio" all have their place, but really, "Bulls on Parade" takes the cake — or rather, the shotgun shells. 

"Bulls on Parade" has such an outrageous flow, mingled with a brutal guitar tone and Zach de la Rocha's skyward teeth-gnashing vocals, that it not only represents the best of modern rock's untamed soul, but can be listened to again and again. Additionally, even though the band's aesthetics might not fit, we can take "Bulls on Parade" to fulfill the same you-can't-tell-me-what-to-do attitude as rock's dirtier and spikier-haired cousin, punk.

In large part thanks to the voice of late and beloved singer, Dolores O'Riordan, The Cranberries' 1994 ultra-smash hit, "Zombie," moves people as powerfully now as it did when it was released. It's one thing to sing about war and violence as conceptual topics of discussion in a removed, abstractified sense, and it's another to make their ground-level realities salient and visible. This is "Zombie's" great achievement, aside from its incredibly hooky melody, deceptively simple song structure, and strummed guitar parts. Heck, even Bad Wolves' 2018 cover of "Zombie" – originally a collaboration with O'Riordan before she died — went over 500 million listens and views, on Spotify and YouTube, respectively.

Indeed, "Zombie" is one of those songs that's so rich in emotional depth and social value, aside from its musical qualities, that it'd be worthy of this list even if it had 10,000 Spotify listens and not 1.6 billion. It's rock at its most heartfelt, written to express "a lot of different life experiences: births, deaths, war, pain, depression, anger, sadness," as O'Riordan told Songwriting Magazine. And of course, O'Riordan penned "Zombie" towards the end of The Troubles, a 30-year-long tangle of sectarian bloodshed (1968 to 1998) in Ireland, where O'Riordan was from. 

O'Riordan was initially driven to write "Zombie" after a conflict-related bomb in a garbage can detonated and killed two children, one of whom was 3 years old. Hence the children in the song's music video racing around a war-torn landscape, while a gold-painted O'Riordan stands like an idol among them. Point well made and remembered.