If You Liked Bon Iver, Listen to These Next

The War on Drugs have been making sprawling, highway-ready rock music for fifteen years, and A Deeper Understanding is the record where everything came together. Adam Granduciel writes songs that feel like they're always just about to arrive somewhere, and the production — synthesizers bleeding into guitar, vocals buried just far enough in the mix — gives the whole album the texture of a memory you can't quite place. It's bigger than Bon Iver, louder, more propulsive, but the emotional scale is identical: these are songs about longing and loss that feel cinematic without being manipulative. If you've only heard Lost in the Dream, this one is better.

Sharon Van Etten spent the first decade of her career making intimate, devastating folk records. Then she moved to Los Angeles, started therapy, went back to school, and made Remind Me Tomorrow — a synth-heavy, propulsive album that sounds nothing like her earlier work and is somehow more emotionally raw than any of it. The production is bigger, the arrangements are stranger, and Van Etten's voice has never sounded more in control. It shares Bon Iver's willingness to bury the most personal thing in the most unexpected production choice. The kind of record that sounds wrong the first time and essential by the third.

Sufjan Stevens made his name with orchestral, maximalist folk albums about American states. Then his mother died — a woman who had largely been absent from his childhood, who struggled with addiction and mental illness — and he made Carrie & Lowell, which is fifty minutes of acoustic guitar and voice and grief so specific it feels intrusive to listen to. There are no flourishes, no orchestrations, no concept. Just Stevens asking questions about a person he barely knew and loved anyway. It is the quietest thing on this list and the most devastating. If For Emma, Forever Ago is the Bon Iver record you return to most, this is the natural next step.

Before The National became the band that soundtracked middle-aged melancholy for a generation, they made Alligator — a scrappier, angrier, more urgent record than anything that came after. Matt Berninger's baritone is the same, but the band around him is louder and less polished, and the songs have a restlessness that Boxer refined away. "Mr. November" is one of the great album closers of the 2000s — Berninger screaming "I won't f*** us over" over a guitar that sounds like it's falling apart. If you came to The National through Boxer or Sleep Well Beast, go back to this one. It's where they figured out what they were.

Andy Cabic's self-titled debut is one of the most quietly perfect folk records of the 2000s and almost nobody knows it exists. Recorded in San Francisco in 2004, it sits in the tradition of Californian folk — warm, unhurried, rooted in melody rather than cleverness — and it sounds like it was made by someone who had nothing to prove and everything to say. If you want to know where Bon Iver sits in the broader conversation about American folk music, Vetiver is one of the records that provides the context. The DrifterList pick on this list: the one most people won't have heard, the one most likely to become a favourite.

Sam Beam recorded this debut in his bedroom in Florida in 2002 on a four-track cassette recorder. The lo-fi quality isn't a choice — it's just what happened when a man with a good voice and a guitar sat down and made something without overthinking it. The songs are whispered, biblical, and strangely comforting. There's a directness to the imagery that should feel naive but doesn't — Beam is a former film professor and the economy of his writing is not accidental. For Emma, Forever Ago owes a significant debt to this record. If Bon Iver is the album you put on when the night gets quiet, this is what you put on after that.

José González is a Swedish singer-songwriter of Argentine descent who makes music on a nylon-string guitar that sounds like it's coming from somewhere very still and very far away. Veneer is his 2003 debut — eleven songs, mostly finger-picked, mostly quiet, including a cover of The Knife's "Heartbeats" that is so different from the original it took a while for people to realize it was the same song. González doesn't fill space. He leaves room for everything the music doesn't say, and that restraint is what makes the album feel so much bigger than its running time. The international discovery on this list, and the one most likely to send you down a rabbit hole.

Jeff Buckley drowned in the Mississippi River in 1997 at 30. Grace, released three years earlier, was his only studio album. It contains his version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" — not the original, not the Shrek version, but the one that most people who love that song are actually thinking of — and nine other songs that range from Led Zeppelin-influenced hard rock to whispered a cappella to something that has no genre name. Buckley's voice is one of the great instruments in recorded music, capable of registers and expressions that most singers spend entire careers reaching for. If you think you know this album because you know "Hallelujah," listen again. The rest of it is just as extraordinary.