The Indiecision Decade In Review is our retrospective of the last 10 years in Indian independent music.

These are our picks of the best Indian indie albums of the last decade.

#15: Confect. – Scribe
With their debut album Confect, Scribe made an indelible mark on Indian metal. This was a quality album from a top notch metal act, given away for free. They’d either have to be incredibly stupid or incredibly brave to put themselves in that position. The scene would either discard the music as the product of another bunch of overwrought metalheads, or take to it entirely in reverence of these new metal heroes. Turns out the album was actually pretty good.

#14: Swarathma – Swarathma
Indi-folk-rockers Swarathma have a sound that’s as bright as the clothes they wear on stage. We doubt that any recording could fully capture the exuberance of their gigs but their self-titled debut, produced by no less a name than Indian Ocean’s Amit Kilam, comes pretty close. Bursting with spritely melodies and infectious rhythms, it’s the feel-good album of the year, and possibly, the decade.

#13: Shillong – Soulmate
Shillong, the debut album by the duo of guitarist Rudy Wallang and vocalist Tipriti Kharbangar, doesn’t sound as polished as their 2009 sophomore release Moving On but there is a beauty in the rawness that only first releases seem to have. It reintroduced the country to Indi-rock veteran Wallang’s guitar prowess and introduced us to Tips, inarguably one of the country’s best female vocalists. Together, they proclaimed, in their own understated way, that “Indian blues” was a legitimate genre indeed

#12: Hello Hello – MIDIval PunditZ
The PunditZ never really broke through entirely. Sure they had gigs in New York and they were big in New Delhi, but all the old places just thought they were big somewhere. With Hello Hello a crucial barrier was broken. And it had to do with the fact that as an album, this really is the duo’s most complete, least region-specific work. Songs like ‘Atomizer’ and ‘Electric Universe’ add much to a PunditZ arsenal that now stands tall in a global electronica market waiting to find out what they’ll throw at us next.

#11: Light Tribe – Shaa’ir + Func
Light Tribe was harder, faster, and just as strong as Shaa’ir + Func’s groundbreaking debut New Day. A collection of club tunes that buzzed and reverberated such a kinetic force – the anthemic robotic futuro-pop of ‘Light Tribe’, the digitally-enhanced drum n’ bass of ‘Across The Universe’, the floor-stomping shuffle of ‘Hard To Forget’ – it is undoubtedly the definitive dance-rock album of the noughties.

#10: Escape The Roar – Skinny Alley
‘Mature’ isn’t an adjective typically associated with pop-rock, even less so when it’s written and composed by an Indian band. But the members of Skinny Alley had already been performing together in different avatars for over 20 years before they released their first album of original material. As a result, we got songs with meat, tunes that were not about breaking up or smoking up – but about real life and real people. The stories were told through melodies that were so eminently infectious, that even though the band themselves may have moved on to more muso-style jazz-rock, we find ourselves occasionally returning to the ‘Pleasures Of Suburbia’.

#09: Up – Pentagram
Up was a big step and a big risk for Pentagram. The question they needed to address was – what the fuck were Mumbai’s biggest alternative exponents doing screwing around in electronica loops? Their answer – evolving. This wasn’t Pentagram’s political statement, or a commentary about world peace (even the album’s bonus track ‘Price Of Bullets’ couldn’t convince us otherwise). What it was was a template; the perfect example of an Indian rock band making a crucial transition in sound, without coming off as total poseurs, and actually making sense. Ace.

#08: Avial – Avial
By the time Avial’s debut album was released, their lead singer had left the band. It didn’t matter that the songs had spent so many years in the cans – the band’s sound, a brand of classic rock, garnished with elements of metal and electronica was fresh enough, but the vocals, sung in Malayalam further distinguished them from anything else around. As exemplified by lead video ‘Nada Nada’, Avial was a band that proved virtuosity and simple melodies weren’t necessarily incongruent.

#07: Jupiter Cafe – Thermal & A Quarter
Jupiter Cafe, despite Bruce Lee Mani’s best efforts, is actually a pretty simple album. Sure, it had much guitar wizardry and songs about “Jack and the bean”, but it was rooted in some pretty orthodox constructions that weren’t overthought, or overproduced. Added to this was the then Thermal & A Quarter raw, bare-bonesed, guitar-driven sound. But when you put that yellow labeled disc into your walkman and heard ‘Brigade Street’ for the first time, you were taken by this smart, rewarding, rock ‘n roll. And that was awesome.

#06: Kandisa – Indian Ocean
The commercial success of Kandisa was not surprising, but you can’t exactly say it was entirely expected. Here were four guys making tunes jazz-tinged, blues-flecked rock based on traditional folk and tribal music from around the country – not exactly chart-friendly stuff. But the musicians and the melodies in question was so damn strong, that Kandisa, released right at the start of the decade, became one of the best-selling non-film albums of all time. The most incredible thing about it all? They did without a video, at a time when most Indians didn’t have the internet at home.

Check out #25 – #16.

The Indiecision Decade In Review