The 21st century has not been kind. Pop, hip-hop, R&B, country, and Latin music have pushed the genre away from the commercial and cultural mainstream. Looking back, the last great age of rock was the 1990s, when grunge, nu-metal, and pop-punk were happily – even furiously – exploding everywhere.
But rock was already stripped of some of its elements. Country appropriated the most popular sounds of arena rock, hip-hop borrowed drum beats and riffs, and pop artists learned to use electric guitars as attitude cues, if only for the duration of a song. Although some classic rock artists still sell out venues today, most 21st century rockers are well aware that their style will likely remain a niche choice. One clue is proof: in recent years, the Grammys have not awarded a single trophy for best prime-time rock album.
But the style stubbornly persists, and in 2025, rock bands are still causing a stir. They have a vast vocabulary at their disposal: from psychedelia to punk, from rockabilly to shoegaze, from yacht rock to emo, from progressive rock to industrial. And it’s not like today a band has to choose just one genre. In the age of streaming, rock’s biggest bands have demolished labels.
The limited expectations of 21st century rock may have proven liberating. For songwriters, musicians and – hopefully – enough fans to support them, rock is far from saturated. Let’s take a few examples of bands who have forged their music in a traditional style: concerts, multiple album releases, even more concerts.
New York band Geese has garnered extremely mixed praise and reviews in 2025. Their third album, “Getting Killed,” features the wandering vocals of Cameron Winter, in songs that oscillate between heartfelt reflections and absurdist verses and back again. There are those who point to Geese as the current critics’ darling, others consider him a spoiled joke, neither option, both or more. The fact is that Winter’s stage presence attracted so much attention that it merited a parody on “Saturday Night Live.”
Turnstile, a 15-year-old band from Baltimore that grew out of hardcore but never let itself be limited by it, has released “Never Enough,” an elegant work full of electronic elements, with songs about connection, desire and loss. Another band with punk and hardcore roots, The Armed, went in the opposite direction; they ferociously ramped up the frenzy and distortion, screaming and stomping their way through their aptly titled album “The Future Is Here and Everything Needs to Be Destroyed.”
M(h)aol, an Irish post-punk band – named after Irish feminist Gráinne Mhaol and “maol,” an Irish Gaelic word meaning shorn or naked – honed terse, jarring and dissonant songs on their album “Something Soft.”
On “Bleeds,” the North Carolina band Wednesday, led by Karly Hartzman, anchored its calamitous tales and vibrant melodies to explosive, feedback-filled grunge dynamics or country-tinged country-rock. New York duo Water From Your Eyes used the studio to experiment with lo-fi indie rock, complex math-rock and more, distorting all sound sources.
Now that every computer is a potential instrument, library, and recording studio, it’s never been easier to create music alone or through dynamic virtual collaborations. Artificial intelligence promises to further reduce human intervention; for some listeners in 2025, the band Velvet Sundown’s empty, AI-generated mediocrity was acceptable enough. But rock’s persistence in the face of mass-produced music is a welcome sign of humanist stubbornness.
For all the attractions of computational convenience and digital precision, there is still a strong appeal to the archetypal rock band as a group of rowdy outsiders. A task force is a contentious team that creates its own rules, brings together incongruous personalities, works across (or revels in) boundaries, seeks unlikely synergies, and makes a lot of noise along the way. There is friction, but also purpose; there is instinct with calculation. Rock promises the physical sensation and lived experience of playing an instrument and hearing vocals pushed to the extreme, calloused fingers and breathless effort. And there is passion, even when it is misguided or contrary to convention.
A rock band is also an imposing physical presence: a room full of people, instruments, amplifiers and microphones, not to mention pedals, cables and stands. It’s not necessarily something simplified or digitally optimized. Everything can fail or cause a comeback – and it can produce an unexpected sound that everyone loves. Machines can capture these unexpected sounds – hip-hop often turns noises into choruses – but rock makes them happen in real time.
By 2025, hand-played rock has invaded, albeit minimally, high-end pop. Justin Bieber invited composer, producer, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Dijon (whose last name is Duenas) to his albums “Swag” and “Swag II”. Dijon is just one of many theme songs, but “Daisies” — a megahit that helped earn Grammy nominations for “Swag” and a producer nomination for Dijon — has an improvisational, guitar-driven feel that’s just a bit more polished and poppy than the Prince-style rock-R&B songs on Dijon’s 2025 album “Baby.”
Bieber has always been a keen observer of trends, anticipating where pop is going. Perhaps he feels a residual, primal desire for a human touch as the machines come closer and closer.
Even with these signs, no one should expect rock to dominate music again. Generations of listeners have been conditioned by computer-synthesized voices and metronomic beats, and streaming algorithms continually compile the tastes of the masses. The AI will undoubtedly regurgitate what gets the most clicks.
Rock will likely remain a minority preference – but perhaps that’s for the best. Every time rock became too mainstream, polished, or pretentious, it self-corrected, falling from its pedestal with punk in the ’70s, thrash in the ’80s, and grunge in the ’90s. Its best chance for survival in the 21st century—sustainable survival—is to stay apart, to stay careless and intuitive and imperfect, to display its humanity. Being hard, chaotic work and finding beauty in it.
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