It's clearly a sibling of noise rock, but noise pop is younger, sexier, and a bit more aloof. Noise rock trashes your room and drinks all of your beer; noise pop, on the other hand, sashays in and treats you to whiskey kisses on a bed of white noise. Distinguished by swirling guitars, hazy melodies, and a relentless wall of sound, noise pop's earliest roots lie in the Velvet Underground's experimentation with feedback, distortion, and drones. Bands like Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr. pushed the movement further with their opulent terrain of guitar distortion, but it took the Jesus and Mary Chain and their landmark 1986 debut Psychocandy to clearly define the style. On its best behavior, noise pop is the perfect union of pop conventionalism and sonic experimentation; at its most bratty, it's the reason the beloved distortion box has an army of followers.

Notable Artists: Yo La Tengo, My Bloody Valentine, Mercury Rev