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R.E.M.
R.E.M., formed in Athens, Georgia in 1980, is widely credited as one of the foundational bands of American alternative and college rock, building a devoted following through independent college radio airplay years before the band achieved mainstream commercial success. Guitarist Peter Buck's jangly, arpeggiated guitar style and frontman Michael Stipe's often deliberately mumbled, difficult-to-decipher vocal delivery on the band's early albums gave R.E.M. a distinctive sound that influenced a generation of subsequent alternative and indie rock guitarists and vocalists. The band's 1991 album Out of Time and its hit single "Losing My Religion" marked R.E.M.'s definitive commercial breakthrough into mainstream popularity, a shift that came after more than a decade of steadily building critical acclaim and college radio success without major commercial radio crossover. R.E.M.'s decision to formally disband in 2011, while still commercially and critically viable rather than continuing past a natural creative endpoint, was relatively unusual among major rock acts, and the band's three-decade career bridging college radio's underground scene and full mainstream commercial success established a template that numerous subsequent alternative rock bands have followed.
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Radiohead
Radiohead's 1997 album OK Computer, exploring themes of technological alienation, consumerism, and modern anxiety through increasingly experimental art-rock arrangements, is widely regarded as one of the most significant and influential albums of the 1990s, moving well beyond the more straightforward alternative rock of the band's earlier hit "Creep." The band's 2000 follow-up Kid A represented an even more dramatic stylistic departure, incorporating electronic and ambient influences that surprised and initially divided fans and critics, before the album went on to become widely reassessed as one of the most artistically ambitious major-label rock releases of its era. Radiohead's 2007 self-release of In Rainbows using a "pay what you want" pricing model, letting fans decide how much, if anything, to pay for the digital album, became one of the most widely discussed experiments in alternative music distribution and directly influenced subsequent industry conversations about digital pricing models. The band's willingness to repeatedly abandon commercially successful sounds in pursuit of new artistic directions, similar in spirit to Miles Davis's genre-shifting jazz career, has made Radiohead one of the most consistently critically respected rock bands of the past three decades, with an influence extending well beyond the alternative rock genre they originally emerged from.
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