R.E.M.
City of Origin: Athens, GA, USA
Period of Activity: 1980s to early 2010s
Members: Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, Michael Stipe
Related Artists: Baseball Project, Filthy Friends, Hindu Love Gods
Discography:
- "Radio Free Europe" (1981, single)
- Chronic Town EP (1982)
- Murmur (1983)
- Reckoning (1984)
- Fables of the Reconstruction (1985)
- Lifes Rich Pageant (1986)
- Dead Letter Office (1987, compilation)
- Document (1987)
- Eponymous (1988)
- Green (1989)
- Out of Time (1991)
- Automatic for the People (1992)
- Monster (1994)
- New Adventures in Hi-Fi (1996)
- Up (1998)
- "The Great Beyond" (2000, single)
- Reveal (2001)
- "Bad Day" (2003, single)
- "Animal" (2004, single)
- Around the Sun (2004)
- R.E.M. Live (2007)
- Accelerate (2008)
- Live at the Olympia in Dublin (2009)
- Collapse into Now (2011)
- Unplugged 1991 & 2001 (2014)
Social Media: Bandcamp | Instagram | Website
Look, I know it's objectively insane of me to look at one of the most popular rock bands of all time and declare "well, that's indiepop too". But hear me out here! I've been making notes to myself to add more American jangle pop bands to the site, and that starts out with bands like the Dream Syndicate or Let's Active, no real controversy there. But once you have them, you realize you need more Paisley Underground groups, the most prominent of which was the Bangles. And once you've established that a band with three number-one hits is indiepop, it doesn't make sense not to have R.E.M., who's just as closely tied to Let's Active as the Dream Syndicate is to the Bangles and who are clearly central figures in the popularization of American jangle pop. (Plus, they're my all-time favorite band by a wide margin, so I'm honestly pretty happy to do the mental gymnastics necessary to justify their inclusion here.) Make no mistake, their work up through Fables of the Reconstruction is some of the finest jangle pop any band in the world has ever done. Past that, they're still the greatest band of all time, but I couldn't really make an argument for calling them indiepop afterwards.