The 20 Best Music Side Projects

The dream of the '90s is alive in the Gorillaz. Although the "band" was formed in 2000, the animated electro hip-hop supergroup was a direct reaction to the rise of quirky burgeoning technology, the futuristic fusion of artistic countercultures, the pop-art provocateurs in mass media (the animated characters were created by Jamie Hewlett of Tank Girl comic fame), and an almost whimsical disdain for homogeny. Comprised of Damon Albarn from Blur, Dan "The Automator" Nakamura, Miho Hatori from Cibo Matto, and members of Tom Tom Club (another side-project band), the Gorillaz not only crushed genres and ideas of what a successful pop artist could be through their music and animated elusiveness, but became so famous that they represented a new kind of sonic superhero that side-projects throughout the '00s idolized and idealized.

If the illuminati truly exists and Jay-Z is hip-hop's mystical maharajah, Jack White is sitting on a slithering throne of three-eyed indigo snakes as the monochromatic monarch of the Kingdom of Rock. Probably because he is an all-powerful and all-seeing being, White has worked on many successful side-projects, including unequivocal blues-rock outfit The Raconteurs with Brendan Benson. But, as was discovered with the White Stripes and White's abstruse relationship with drummer Meg White, the enigmatic animus of the symbolically-inclined Third Man Records owner starts to lift its shadowy veils when counterbalanced with some divine feminine anima. Fur and leather-swathed glamgoth tomboy Allison Mosshart from the Kills became White's faultless female foil for the sexed-up, smoke-six-packs-a-day sludge-rock of The Dead Weather, something so viral that it seems Robert Rodriguez or Quentin Tarantino would make a young protagonist solely to be listening to it.

Broken Bells, the combination of James Mercer's earnest tenor and Brian "Danger Mouse" Burton's experimentally eloquent production was forged in 2004 at Denmark's Roskilde Festival after mutual musical accolades were exchanged. While the pair individually dabble in the emotion-conjuring arts, Broken Bells may be the most cinematically-transcendental with songs like "The Ghost Inside" and "The High Road" twinkling moodily like somber scatterings of stars dying slowly in an inky atmosphere.

Nick Cave, merely by himself, is an alchemical warlock; his most proficient magical music skills include weird vibes and the darkest of arts. With Grinderman, Nick Cave is ever more ferocious. He's a torrid beast of bewitched benevolence, a shapeshifter ready to rip the souls with bloodied canines from bodies of those that don't heed the morbid messages of fairytales. He's the harbinger of haunted metal-blues and dreamless skies so midnight blue that you can't see the monsters at the other end.

What came first with Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke: the actual acid trip or the mind so kaleidoscopically lucid that it just always seems that way? As Yorke ages, his music has become a tripped-out mélange of sci-fi afropop, a mind-bending experiment in psychotropic synesthesia, and perhaps, a polished sonic dancefloor for his seemingly intrinsic interpretative dance skills. While Radiohead sometimes weeps computer-generated tears and artificial angst, Atoms for Peace is an impossible to label high-vibrational sort of affair. The band—made up of veterans like Nigel Godrich, Flea, and Joey Waronker—was so labeless that at their inception, the live shows marquees where they played were often emblazoned with mere question marks.

Heavyweight hardcore punk rockers, The Bronx, are actually Angelenos who, on any given night, will drench club floors with the blood, sweat, and anonymous fluids of their fans, probably fueled by copious amounts of tequila and street cart carne asada. To pay homage to their Los Angeles comeuppance in the underground punk world and to challenge themselves musically, The Bronx decided to create an authentic-sounding mariachi band called Mariachi El Bronx—complete with bedazzled costumes and reverential reworkings of classic Mexican melodies.

"Look out Hollywood, here I come." Fleet Foxes' Joshua Tillman sings that line plaintively on "Funtimes in Babylon," the first song from Father John Misty's Fear Fun. This title is sublimely well-crafted, a reflection of the perfectly-imperfect freak-folk funhouse Tillman creates as his dreamy, drugged-up shadow self. Unlike his previous melancholic incarnations of austere, wrist-cutting incantations, Tillman's spaced-out alter-ego is so earnestly depraved that we can't help but get sucked into the shimmering, yet inevitable downward spiral that a crash-course in hedonism eventually yields.

Rarely does low self-esteem work out so well for those crippled by it, but in the side-project subterfuge of sardonic, sound-sparse Sebadoh, the "most sensitive boy in indie rock" Lou Barlow finally got to play the music he couldn't write for Dinosaur Jr. Apparently, Barlow was too "intimidated" by J. Mascis to contribute anything, so he secretly started Sebadoh (a nonsense word sometimes uttered by the shy singer) with Eric Gaffney. With eleven albums spanning through the late '80s and '90s, Sebadoh became the quintessential indie rock band for that era, musical underdogs that managed to take the bones they were given and create a lopsided, ramshackle fortress of sound to protect their introverted kingdom.

If the art-deprived minions of post-apocalyptic earth were to open a time capsule full of music from the '00s and then try their hand at the sound themselves, it might have echoes of the Divine Fits. An indie echelon featuring Britt Daniel from Spoon, Dan Boeckner from Wolf Parade, and Sam Brown from New Bomb Turks, the Divine Fits may well be self-indulgent aggregates of their own individual sonic powers over the last decade. But in this case, that decadence has turned into powerful songs full of a dark electricity that loom in lightning bolts of precise percussion.

“We the lions. You the cheetahs.” It wasn't just a battle of coasts, but a battle of choices. In the late '90s, when hip-hop was finally breaking into the monetarily-inclined mainstream with songs about murders, mansions, and baby mamas, socially-conscious underground hip-hop impresarios like Mos Def and Talib Kweli were changing the conversation one freshly-literate lyric over full-flavored jazz riff at a time. Black Star didn't try to bring shine to the streets by paving the gutters with Bentley hubcaps; they brought it with old-soul guru greatness and old-school musical manifestations truly indicative of the people rather than desired personas.

Like a slippery-hot tribal orgy being sucked into a bass-heavy wormhole in the middle of cosmic chaos, The Creatures featuring Siouxsie Sioux and her sonic soulmate Budgie from Siouxsie and the Banshees were a duo simultaneously ahead of its time and summoning the simmering genetic stew of pure life-force. The Creatures itself happened just as organically as our embryonic origins. While Siouxsie and the Banshees were recording 1981's Juju, the goth-pop goddess and her feral percussive mastermind crafted a sound so unique that they decided to take the music they had written into a separate project. Over two decades spanning from 1983 to 2003, The Creatures slowly-trickled out four studio albums that became mostly-ignored modern masterpieces of primal exotica art rock.

Dormant, a volcano seems like a mountain, a topographical respite for slowly falling snow. But just as Bon Iver's Justin Vernon creates a labyrinthine forest of lyrical poignancy around his hushed musical peaks and valleys, so does a volcano, bubbling up beneath the surface until the fever breaks. These are mossy moods rather than fully-structured songs and Vernon's Volcano Choir side-project with Collections of Colonies of Bees sounds like what the collective unconscious has described (or desired) Bon Iver to be, only in this case it's true. He is a flame-wielding druid creating beautiful sparseness in a space where no one else dares to exist.

Fearless lovers of futuristic funk-swag walk down urban streets of psychedelic lucite to the internal soundtrack of an invisible, infinite bass groove. This is the kind of vibe Rocket Juice & the Moon throws down. Nothing is too precious and present for the prodigal pop minds of Damon Albarn from Blur, Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Tony Allen, talented drummer for Fela Kuti. This phenomenal posse, three mind-altering musicians, gather on an Afropop playground to do exactly—that sans pretension or profit, this group pursues other p's: pleasure and play.

The Postal Service were electronically twee way before the world was electronically tweeting. Often admonished by the hipper-than-thou brigade of bratty young music critics, the saccharine-sweet indie electro-pop supergroup comprised of Ben Gibbard from Death Cab for Cutie, Jimmy Tamborello from Dntel, and Jenny Lewis from Rilo Kiley were collaborative pioneers of their sonic era, proving that artists didn't have to be hopped up on heroine and jamming in a mold-ridden garage to make good music. They could do it all through the nearly-antiquated United States Postal Service and the decades-old success of their only album to date, 2003's Give Up, proves that.

Minutes after running through the sprinklers on a late summer afternoon, you hop onto a tire swing under a tree, glittery cascades of light peeking through the leaves. A rush of air swoons over you as you jump ceremoniously from mid-air onto the soft grass below you. This fleet of scenarios represents what it feels like to listen to Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij and Ra Ra Riot's Wes Miles side-project Discovery. The auto-tune friendly electronic project sounds exactly like youth and joy without all the jaunty pretense of Vampire Weekend or the love-is-blind blog buzz of Ra Ra Riot.

Virtually anything indie-rock poster boy Bradford James Cox of Deerhunter does could be deemed as an instant success. There's a vainglorious swell to both Cox's persona and art that makes him magnetically-alluring, like the highest peak of a fire you know you shouldn't touch, but reach for anyway. Under the childhood-established moniker of his solo project, Atlas Sound, Cox's sonic seduction and enchanting egomaniacal washes of sound are more transcendent, burning through the ether of construct into something intrinsically subconscious and organically otherworldly.

The communal nature of collaboration makes it harder to find true side-projects in the hip-hop world, except for the dime-a-dozen rock bands with unfathomably awful rap-rock pieces on the side. Blakroc—a one-two punch combo of indomitable blues-rock duo The Black Keys and a powerful pastiche of hip-hop collaborators—is nothing like those early '00s ear stabbers. Considering the Black Keys regularly name Wu-Tang Clan as one of their biggest influences, it makes sense that they could transition so easily into making music with the likes of Raekwon, RZA, and Ol' Dirty Bastard. It helps that Rock-A-Fella Records co-founder Damon Dash curated an admirable group of well-respected urban poets like Q-Tip, Mos Def, and Ludacris to join their ranks. While there are no obvious stand out moments with Blakroc—probably due to mutual respect all around—the marked thing about Blakroc is that they don't suck.

Possibly one of the largest side-projects of all time, Quakers is a 35-piece hip-hop collaboration featuring a healthy nugget of the underground hip-hop community, all ready to hit you straight to the dome with funky basslines, grisly horns and murky undertones. Signed to Stones Throw and dubbed one of Gilles Peterson's BBC Radio Best of 2012, some of the artists associated with Quakers include Dead Prez, Aloe Blacc, and Katalyst.

Supremely stylish socialite, Dev Hynes, has almost single-handedly redefined the meaning of a side-project with his slushy, sexy synth-pop as Blood Orange. Once a part of Test Icicles, Hynes started performing under the moniker of Lightspeed Champion, but made a dramatic shift when Lightspeed Champion went on “indefinite hiatus.” This hiatus was what led the popular songwriter and producer to Blood Orange and a sound so soft it hearkens back to the '80s days of furs and lace, drunken adventures on New York City transit, and lying in bed all day smoking hashish.

Release your finger from your nose. Eyes dilate, the body tightens, your veins feel like cold fire, and the synapses in your brain start popping and connecting. Your spinal column begins to unlock, a robotic snake slithering over the activation button on each chakra. You begin to dance in pockets of darkness, hands weaving around flashing lasers. Pure cyberpunk hedonism like this is generally a game of youth, but New Wave veterans Martin Gore of Depeche Mode and Vince Clarke of Erasure managed to make a straightforward techno album under the moniker VCMG that sounds like the future breathing down the neck of the past instead of the other way around.