• News

• All

Dec 11, 2009 Deerhunter By Mark Redfern Photography by Wendy Lynch Redfern

Under the Radar‘s Best of the Decade Issue will be hitting stores on December 18th. The cover features five notable indie musicians from different bands all photographed together. Every day this week we have been revealing a different cover artist building up to today’s reveal of the final cover.

The Best of the Decade Issue features Under the Radar‘s Top 200 Albums of the Decade and all five of the cover artists have at least one album somewhere on the list.

We’ve already revealed that the first four cover artists are of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes, Devendra Banhart, Bradford Cox (of both Deerhunter and Atlas Sound), and Jenny Lewis (of Rilo Kiley, and also an accomplished solo artist). Today we reveal that the fifth and final cover artist is Ben Gibbard (of both Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service).

The Best of the Decade Issue also includes interviews with other great artists on our Top 200 Albums of the Decade list, including Animal Collective’s Avey Tare, The Dears’ Murray Lightburn, The Decemberists’ Colin Meloy, Elbow’s Guy Garvey, Feist, Grizzly Bear’s Ed Droste, Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock, Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce, Super Furry Animals’ Gruff Rhys, and Tegan & Sara.

As well as the Top 200 of the decade, the issue also includes Under the Radar‘s Top 50 Albums of 2009 list.

A lot of great music this past decade has been forged in Brooklyn, and has been imported from Sweden, Canada, and Scotland, and so we have articles on each of those scenes that incorporates interviews with many of the artists involved in the scenes. We conducted group photo-shoots in Scotland and Sweden with some of the leading indie musicians of those two countries, and did a series of new photos of Brooklyn-based musicians. For the Sweden article we spoke to such artists as The Cardigans, Love Is All, Peter Bjorn and John, Dungen, and Taken By Trees. For the Scotland article we interviewed members of Camera Obscura, The Delgados, Franz Ferdinand, and Frightened Rabbit. And for the Brooklyn article we talked to such artists as Grizzly Bear, Liars, Yeasayer, The Drums, Cymbals Eat Guitars, Devendra Banhart, The Antlers, and The National.

The issue also includes the article “A Decade of Indie: The Rise of the Outsiders.” What does the term “indie rock” even mean anymore? That question and others are examined in the article, with input from the likes of The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne, Pixies’ Black Francis, Death Cab for Cutie’s Chris Walla, Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle, Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock, The Decemberists’ Colin Meloy, Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox, Superchunk’s Mac McCaughan, Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, and Pavement’s Scott Kannberg.

Finally, the issue features Under the Radar‘s 7th annual Artist Survey, in which we emailed some of our favorite artists a few questions relating to the last decade and asked them for a list of their best albums of the decade. The Best of the Decade Artist Survey section includes interviews with Camera Obscura, The Dodos, El Perro Del Mar, Final Fantasy, The Hidden Cameras, The Horrors, The Invisible, Ladytron, Sondre Lerche, Jamie Lidell, Loney Dear, Los Campesinos!, Mew, Midlake, Okkervil River, Stars, Telekinesis, The Twilight Sad, and Vivian Girls.

Pick up an issue starting December 18th.

www.deathcabforcutie.com