WAREWOLF BEST XI:
Molded the warewolf
Eleven artists that wired how I listen, the ones I came up on, and the ones that taught me what I love before I knew how to write about it. These eleven acts are not flawless, but deeply, deeply formative.
Pyromania came to me through inherited vinyl from my late uncle, and I latched onto it hard before my dad handed me Hysteria right after.
Here's what made it stick, though: where most of that era coasted on attitude, Def Leppard built harmony, dynamics, and real songcraft. Underneath the arena-sized production and the swagger was actual craft of layered vocals, dynamic control, songs engineered with real care. I latched on before I could articulate why, and only later understood I'd been responding to the songwriting all along.
Two records, one handoff, one late uncle's vinyl, and a foundation I didn't know I was standing on until years later. That's an XI spot earned several times over.
def leppard
crowded house
This one was passed down from my dad, who came up on Split Enz, so Crowded House arrived already carrying a generation of family history before I added my own. We played them together (his piano, my drums) the same way we played The Beatles, and that shared jam time is baked into every song for me.
Then a front-row show in middle school left me obsessed. Seeing them that close, that early, tipped it from "my dad's band" to my band. And I'll go to the wall on this: their self-titled debut belongs among the greatest debut records of all time. Not "great for its genre," not "underrated", but genuinely one of the finest first albums anyone has ever made, top to bottom.
Crowded House is the sound of my dad's musical lineage becoming mine, and one of the purest examples on this list of how the best music gets handed from one generation to the next.
two door cinema club
I came in through What You Know, the obvious door, but Beacon is why they made this list. Whatever door Tourist History opened up for me on indie and synth-pop living in the same bloodstream, Beacon is the no-skip room I actually stayed in. The single got my attention; the album is what kept it, front to back, no reaching for the skip button.
That distinction matters to me. Plenty of bands catch you with one song and then can't hold a whole record. Two Door proved they could build a complete, cohesive, endlessly replayable body of work, and Beacon is the one I keep returning to: the one that turned a catchy single into a permanent slot on this list.
They're the sound of indie and synth-pop refusing to be separate things, and Beacon is where that fusion clicked into place for me for good.
bastille
Pompeii pulled me in, and the Bad Blood album is where it happened. My exact reaction to that record was that it was weird, unconventional, and that I needed all of it. Looking back, that thought is basically the Warewolf being born in real time. That instinct, to be drawn to the slightly-off, melody-forward, texturally strange thing and want to live inside it, is the whole foundation of what I do now. Bastille is early on where I felt it.
Then Wild World delivered even harder and became the soundtrack to a full year of college drives home. That's the kind of record that fuses to a specific stretch of your life: the road, the season, the headspace, until you can't hear it without being back there.
Bastille didn't just make music I loved. They showed me what my own taste was going to be before I had a name for it.
noel gallagher’s high flying birds
Noel is the one entry on this list where the music flowed the other direction. Every other artist here came down to me from my dad, an uncle, the radio, a mixtape. This one I found myself, and then I played the debut for my dad in high school. For once I was the one making the handoff, and that reversal is a big part of why it means so much.
By the second record it had become one of the most paradigm-shifting albums of my fathers life, and I'd argue every High Flying Birds record belongs in the conversation for some of the best of the last decade. This isn't an Oasis afterthought or a legacy-act victory lap. This is a songwriter who kept evolving, kept taking real swings, and kept landing them long after he could have coasted.
Noel earned his own chapter, on his own terms, and he's the pick that reminds me the passing-down can go both ways.
st. lucia
Four life eras and one band. No other artist on this list logged that many chapters in a row, and that's exactly why they're here. The debut cracked something open in high school. The second record scored my senior year. That topped with a deeply emotional concert from them just days after Pulse in Orlando solidified them as forever important to me. And Hyperion became the soundtrack to falling in love and getting my heart broken for the first time.
That's the thing about St. Lucia for me, they didn't just soundtrack one moment, they kept showing up for the next one, and the next. Most bands catch you once. St. Lucia caught me at four separate turning points, each time with a record that happened to say exactly what that version of me needed to hear. When a band is present for that many of your chapters, they stop being a band you like and become part of the architecture of your life.
Shimmering, euphoric, and permanently tied to some of the most important years I've lived.
pink floyd
Pulse Live is what locked it in. I watched that concert film on a loop growing up, and it taught me what album-as-architecture actually looks like at scale. How a record could be built like a structure, how sound could be designed rather than just performed. That idea, that an album is a space you walk through, came from Pink Floyd, and it changed how I hear everything long-form.
Division Bell still sits in my all-time XI, and this is where I'll plant my flag: the late-era, post-Waters Pink Floyd that the canon debates love to undersell is the Floyd I actually love. I know the arguments, I know which era you're "supposed" to crown, and my honest ear keeps going to the records the purists wave off. They built the ceiling for what a rock records could aspire to be, and I've been chasing that scale ever since.
imagine dragons
Radioactive hooked me right when it was released, so I preordered the debut on a whim, and it landed like nothing I'd heard. Night Visions didn't sound like anything else in my rotation at the time, and the tour behind it was the best concert of my life at that point with extended versions of every song, the whole thing cracked wide open. I've never forgotten it.
I'll defend this pick to anyone. Smoke + Mirrors is their sharpest, most poetic record, and the first four albums are load-bearing enough that I refuse to be embarrassed by the “stigma” they carry now. Somewhere along the way it became fashionable to dismiss this band, and I've watched people who once loved these records pretend they didn't. Not me. These albums did real work on me at a real time in my life, and I'm not going to rewrite my own history to look cooler in front of people whose taste I didn't ask for.
They made this list honestly, and they're staying on it honestly.
rush
Obsessed is the only honest word for it. Three eras deep with Rush: the pre-new-wave run, the new wave era, and the 90s pocket is where I live. Roll the Bones was and still is my favorite, which I know isn't the fashionable pick, and I don't care. That's the record that landed for me.
Neil Peart is the reason I picked up sticks. I heard what he was doing behind that kit and something clicked: this was what drums could be. Every drummer has an origin, and he's mine. But Rush gave me more than a reason to play. They taught me that technical rigor and melody were never opposed, that you could be dazzlingly complex and still write something that moves you. That lesson shaped not just how I drum but how I hear every band on this list.
Rush is the sound of a band refusing to choose between the head and the heart, and getting away with it for decades.
the beatles
The Beatles saturated the house growing up. This was the air we breathed. My dad and I played them together, him on keys, me on drums, working through the songs by ear. We watched the movies, watched the documentaries, ran the whole catalog on repeat until it stopped being something we listened to and started being something we spoke.
They've been there the whole way through. Every phase of my life has a Beatles record somewhere underneath it, and because my dad and I built so much of our relationship on their songs, they're inseparable from him too. When I hear them, I hear us.
But beyond the sentiment, this is foundational in the most literal sense. The melodic vocabulary The Beatles built is the foundation of how I hear everything else. Every hook I love, every chord change that gets me, every harmony that lands, I can trace the instinct back to them. They're second on this list only because one band got to me even deeper. In terms of pure influence on my ear, nobody's built more of it.
lifehouse
I heard Smoke & Mirrors first. That was the doorway. I put it on a summer mixtape CD, played it into the ground, and came home and bought the entire discography on iTunes in one sitting. No easing in, no greatest-hits sampling, just all of it at once. From that point on, Lifehouse was woven into everything. Not a phase, not a season, but a permanent layer in how I listen.
They're the band that gets reduced the hardest, and the most unfairly. One hit, one genre, one era. That's the framing most people carry, and not one piece of it survives an honest listen to the actual discography. Dig past Hanging by a Moment and You and Me and you find a catalog with far more range, weight, and staying power than the casual verdict allows. This is a band people think they know from a single radio moment, and they have no idea what's actually there.
That's why they're number one. Not because they're the flashiest or the most critically decorated name on this list, but because no other artist is stitched as deeply into who I am. Lifehouse didn't just shape my taste. They helped solidify the baseline for it.