The 21 Best Drummers in Music Right Now

Bill Stevenson was at the top of his game near the end his career’s Q1, on The Descendents’ first comeback album, Everything Sucks. The 1996 LP had a quickness to it that moved with the help of Bill Stevenson’s acerbic fills. He set a precedent of quality not only for the many pop-punk bands who would ape his lightning-fast style. Now, as the drummer for the reunited Black Flag project FLAG, Stevenson’s acknowledging his own inheritance.

As the drummer behind the dark-hued post-punk trio Grass Widow, Lillian Maring weaves clever, modular, frenetic beats through strange and often unbalanced song constructions. About as understated as it gets these days, Maring seems to have more up her sleeve than she often lets on.

Grass Widow "Milo Minute" from Aubree Bernier-Clarke on Vimeo.

There’s a fluidity to drumming that the majority of drummers pass over for more mechanical approaches, especially as more music trends toward sequence dependency. Cale Parks manages to round out even the most rigidly composed tunes of Yeasayer's catalogue with his control of dynamics and tone. He’s been touring with a really strange setup with the Brooklyn group for a year now, but is best known for the post-rock-jazz infusion he gave to Polyvinyl indie stalwarts Aloha. He’s also insanely prolific, having done time in the revolving experimental post-punk clique of Chicago bands that included both post-Cap Kinsella iterations, Joan of Arc and Owen. That’s not to mention touring with White Williams, playing with Pit er Pat and Love of Everything, and putting out a couple solo records.

There’s a running joke among musicians that drummers, despite their rhythm, can’t count. Try telling that one to Dave King, the drummer in Minneapolis out-jazz group The Bad Plus. King’s been making sense of the numbers game for years in a way more math-rock nerds should be paying attention too. Also, he’s in a band with Greg Norton from Hüsker Dü called The Gang Font. In both cases, it’s not always about what he plays—it’s about what he manages to leave out.

A descendent of the school of drumming Moe Tucker brought to The Velvet Underground, championing texture and mood over drive, Georgia Hubley's been behind the toms with Yo La Tengo for the last 29 years, alongside her husband Ira Kaplan. Despite a rigid consistency in her career, Hubley's certainly not one to not be pinned to one specific approach. She's been known to step out from behind the kit, but it's her signature loose-spoked style that keeps the band rolling forward.

He may not be the flashiest or the most technical, but goddamn if he’s not the most consistent. Stanier first flashed on metalheads’ radars in the early ‘90s when he anchored Helmet, and later the Mike Patton supergroup Tomahawk (this year too!) But nothing stood out like his work on the 2007 Battles LP Mirrored. Quick, strong, and methodical, Stanier gives solid bedrock to nebulous melodies and alt-rock freakouts alike.

There was a time in the late nineties when punk bands all riffed on the same model. But when Tom and Mark pulled Travis out of The Aquabats to replace Scott Rainer in Blink-182, things took a virtuosic turn. Travis took a pretty-boy-gone-bad attitude to drumming, making damn sure everyone knew he was around with his sky-high stick heights and ink-soaked, constantly bare torso. It’s still hard to miss a Barker beat anywhere, whether in Blink-182, The Transplants, or Box Car Racer.

Anyone who has seen a Lightning Bolt show will attest to the four-limb frenzy that is Brian Chippendale. He’s a freakish Frankenstein’s monster of jazz, punk, and breakbeat players, all smashed into a hellish mask. Despite not being like a metal drummer, Chippendale’s beats pulverize the listener in the same way, hulking like derailed freight trains that stop for no one in sight.

As much as a speedy drummer is impressive, there’s something equally inspiring about one who stretches the space between strokes ad nausea. Adrienne Davies, the drummer for post-metal drone wizards Earth, manages to keep tempos as slow as syrup while varying the beats enough to catch the ear. It’s hypnotic to watch Davies draw monster tones out of her kit, the plodding tempos inspiring a kind of rhythmic meditation.

When Freese released his second solo record in 2009, you could buy a limited edition for $1,000 that included the opportunity to get drunk with him “and cut each other’s hair in the parking lot of the Long Beach courthouse.” It was this kind of humor that helped translate his chops into those early years with The Vandals. When he matured a little and broke out with A Perfect Circle, Freese proved he was more than just a beat machine—the dude had style. So by the time he toured with Nine Inch Nails, there was nary a drummer less phased by microphone stands flying at his head, via Trent Reznor’s massive biceps/angst. He recently became a permanent member of Ohio New Wave legends Devo. There isn’t a drummer who can appropriately wear, quite literally, as many hats as Freese.

Few drummers do so much with so little as well as Greg Saunier. Behind a minimal three-piece kit, Saunier wrenches out insanely catchy and odd grooves that are as mind-bending as they are engaging. There’s nothing as fun—or as loud—as a Deerhoof riff. Having just joined up with Sean Lennon for a jammy new band, Mystical Weapons, Saunier’s pedigree is only getting longer.

Any drummer who’s spent any amount of time trying to play in unison with another knows just how hairy that can get. That’s what makes the tandem pairing of Dale Crover and Coady Willis in The Melvins so exceptional. As if Crover alone wasn’t enough, Melvins asked Willis of The Murder City Devils and Big Business to join the band the back in 2006, incorporating dual-drummer status into their music in a way that’s both mind-melting and reasonable—this never seems like a waste.

Behind the kit for Nile, Kollias manages to absolutely lay waste to anyone who even thinks they are in the same arena as he. He might not be the certifiable fastest drummer of all time, but there’s no one who uses intense speed as musically as Kollias does. Any visual documentation of him appears to have been sped up. And at times he just appears bored. But the skill is just undeniable—try and keep up.

The only drummer on the list who makes a habit of playing traditional grip, Brian Chase makes being in a dancey art-punk band look almost too dignified. Within the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and the cadre of other outré performance outings Chase has negotiated, he’s always displayed an ear for the odd yet accessible potentials of the drums. Never overbearing, but never understated either, Chase does something with percussion.

Few people make deep grooves appear as effortless as The Professor. When the drummer for a rap group—The Roots here, obviously—becomes the face of a band with an emcee as aggressive as Black Thought, that’s speaking volumes to the skills of the man behind the kit. And though he’s so much more than just a drummer—producer, DJ, audiophile—it’s his laid-back drum-n-bass assertions that make Questlove so admirable. He and his band surprised pretty much everyone when they joined up as the house band for Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. But whatever doubts die-hard The Roots fans had about the pairing were erased as Quest led the band into a new era of exposure and prolificacy.

Fans are flabbergasted to find out Chris Bear didn’t use a kick drum at all on Grizzly Bear’s breakout 2006 opus Yellow House or on that album’s tour cycle. The fact this was unnoticeable amidst the huge and varied percussion sounds he got from a two-piece kit speaks to his creativity and skill. As he’s added drums to his setup as time has gone on—a kick drum for Veckatimist, a rack tom for Shields—Bear’s stayed as controlled and tasteful as the calculating hand patterns across Yellow House.

Something about Greg Fox’s whirlwind spaz-jazz drumming is just so zen. So as much as the psych-hued leanings of his Guardian Alien project speak to what makes Greg’s non-stop grooves so great, it’s the peace he projects while playing that makes it more than inspiring. Now helming the kit for New York’s freak-jazz staple Zs, Fox displays a kind of joy that the darkness of his stint in Liturgy just didn’t allow. Dude is all over the map, but there’s a through-line here.

After doing time in Sleater-Kinney and Stephen Malkmus’ Jicks, Janet Weiss has nailed down a potent insistence to her drumming that balances out the bluster of her current projects Wild Flag and Quasi. The joy she emanates on stage is hard to match, as she doesn’t let just how cool she is get in the way of having a time of it. There’s a purity to Weiss’s drumming that doesn’t exist in a lot of rock ‘n’ roll effrontery out there—she embodies the spirit of the craft.

In his current project Death Grips, Zach Hill has somehow managed to meld the psychic freakouts of his past projects to the deep incendiary grooves of crusty trip-hop. In any performance setting, no one quite does what Hill does. Actually, I’m not sure anyone else can. He dissects beats in spaces and speeds that human precision doesn’t seem capable of. Endurance, oddity, technicality—these are words that describe Hill only to the extent that words can.

Look, there are dozens of drummers in the thrash, punk, and metal worlds who could be on this list. But not a single one of them converges in the center nor matches the intensity and musicality of Ben Koller—you can sing his drum lines! It’s also arguable that Converge’s turn to more ferocious, faster tracks had to do with Koller leaving his grind band Force Fed Glass in the late nineties to join the Boston mainstays—their previous drummer, John DiGiorgio, was driving things in a decidedly groove-metal direction. The fact Koller drums for metal super groups United Nations and All Pigs Must Die, among stints with Cave In and his psych group Acid Tiger, shows he’s more than just a fluke. Koller is a powerhouse.

No other drummer has made such seamless transition from viral vid wunderkind  to clinician to relevant performance drummer quite like Tony Royster Jr. As Jay-Z’s live drummer, Royster flashes a certain precision and stadium skill that just can’t be matched. There’s a level of talent, style, achievement, and humility to an artist like this that’s hard to ignore.