Sub Pop

If Sub Pop's slogan is to be believed, the Seattle label's been "going out of business since 1988." It should also be noted that it's spent the better part of that time performing a breathtaking balancing act between risk taking and taste making, beginning with the unhinged white noise of an unassuming trio from Aberdeen, Washington: Nirvana. In the two decades since, it's continued to mine the underground for solid gold, from Ben Gibbard's synth-slinging side project — the Postal Service, Sub Pop's biggest seller since Bleach — to a couple of guitar-toting comedians (the GRAMMY®-winning Flight of the Conchords). In between, they've served up the pioneering grunge of Mudhoney, the immaculate indie pop of the Shins, the backwoods folk of Iron & Wine, and so much more . . .

At last count, the label had pressed nearly 800 EPs, LPs, and singles, and we've pulled the cream of the crop — everything from Wolf Parade to No Age — in our Next Steps.

Sub Pop isn't merely a record label; it's an institution. And a frequently incestuous one at that, as indicated by the quirky, catchy indie pop of "Molly's Lips," a Vaselines tune that Nirvana simply couldn't resist covering on Incesticide. The rest of our Next Steps reveals a roster that tackles every corner of your favorite record store: hipster-approved comedy routines (David Cross, Patton Oswalt), jittery dance-rock jams (Hot Hot Heat), muscular noise rock (Pissed Jeans), ominous, speaker-rattling slices of slowcore (Low), and enough leaders of the new school to change the landscape of independent music forever (the Shins, No Age, and "the next Arcade Fire," Wolf Parade).

And those are just the obvious, standout artists in Sub Pop's ever-evolving stable. Our Deep Cuts bounces between buzz acts and cult icons without missing a beat.

Sub Pop was at the ground floor of grunge when it conquered the charts and swallowed pop culture whole, becoming so big that Vogue magazine ran a flannel-centric spread of lumberjack couture at the tail end of 1992. Needless to say, the Seattle-based label could've chased the almighty dollar, flooding the market with a steady supply of Nirvana clones. Instead, its staff has followed nothing but their ears and hearts for more than two decades, which is good for them . . . and even better for us, seeing as we're the recipients of a seemingly endless procession of circuit-bending noise cadets (Wolf Eyes), patient, plodding magma-metal (Earth), amp-frying guitar rock (Comets On Fire), and one of the loudest bands in the history of indie rock (Six Finger Satellite, from whose ashes rose dance-punk stalwart the Juan Maclean).

"Sub Pop was winging it 20 years ago," said Mudhoney frontman Mark Arm. "No one knew how royalties worked, no one had a contract — it was just, 'You wanna put a record out? Sure, let's do it.'" While the Seattle label — make that legend — has certainly figured out how to balance a spreadsheet, their sign-now-ask-questions-later spirit has never wavered. No wonder virtually everyone we know has a life-changing Sub Pop moment, sparked by such classic albums as Bleach (the knotted hooks of "About a Girl" and "Love Buzz"), Oh, Inverted World (the breezy balladry of "New Slang"), Superfuzz Bigmuff (the Stooges-gone-Seattle stomp of "Touch Me I'm Sick"), and Give Up (the skittering beats and smoothed-out melodies of "The District Sleeps Alone"). Put it this way: Sub Pop is one of the only labels we can think of that can't be judged by critical and commercial success alone — not when it's spent its entire history burning its way into pop culture consciousness, actually improving the music industry (and our lives) in the process.