This page brings together two close relatives: post-rock, with its long builds and its habit of leaving the singer out, and the math rock bands that chop rhythm into odd meters and sudden stops. Both grew out of American and British underground rock around 1990, and both owe more to progressive rock and krautrock than their indie surroundings might suggest.

The short version

Post-rock puts texture and atmosphere ahead of riffs and verse-chorus songs. Guitars become tools for sound, run through delay, distortion, loops and alternate tunings; the bass often holds a drone; the studio is treated as an instrument in its own right. Vocals are often absent, or used as one more layer: spoken word, found samples, murmured lines. Math rock shares the experimental streak but points it at rhythm, with shifting meters such as 7/8, 11/8 and 13/8, guitar tapping, loop pedals and drummers who often lead the band. Many groups in both camps are wordless. The names that define the scene are Slint from Louisville, Tortoise from Chicago, Godspeed You! Black Emperor from Montreal, Mogwai from Glasgow and Sigur Rós from Reykjavík on the post-rock side, and Don Caballero and Battles on the math rock side.

How a joke and a review became genres

The word post-rock is usually credited to the British critic Simon Reynolds. He used it in a March 1994 Mojo review of “Hex” by Bark Psychosis, and in The Wire that May he described the idea as “using rock instrumentation for non-rock purposes”. The records he had in mind were already around: Talk Talk’s “Spirit of Eden” and “Laughing Stock”, and Slint’s “Spiderland”, recorded in Chicago in August 1990 and released by Touch and Go in March 1991, after the band had already split. The Guardian’s David Peschek later called “Spiderland” the “ur-text for what became known as post-rock”, and it is also counted among the forerunners of math rock. Spin’s Will Hermes summed up its sound as mid-1970s King Crimson gone emo.

Math rock got its name in a less solemn way. According to Matt Sweeney of the band Chavez, it started as a joke about a friend who sat through his band’s music without reacting and then pulled out a calculator to score the song. The pioneers usually listed are Polvo, Don Caballero, Slint, Bitch Magnet, Bastro and the Japanese duo Ruins, and several of them disliked the label. The German reference works describe math rock as rooted in progressive rock, and the English ones trace it back to King Crimson, Yes and Rush, naming King Crimson’s “Red” and “Discipline” as seminal records.

Chicago became the first post-rock capital. Tortoise, formed there in 1990 by Doug McCombs and John Herndon, with drummer and engineer John McEntire from 1991, mixed krautrock, dub, minimalism and jazz into a largely wordless music. Their 1996 album “Millions Now Living Will Never Die”, came out on Thrill Jockey in January, opened with the 20-minute “Djed” and was The Wire’s record of the year in its 1996 critics’ poll. A few hundred miles east, Don Caballero formed in Pittsburgh in 1991 around drummer Damon Che, the only constant member; the founders meant to add a singer but stayed wordless once paying gigs came in. The critic Steve Huey credited Che’s sudden shifts of time signature with mapping out the path his bandmates followed.

The second wave of post-rock made the long crescendo its trademark. Godspeed You! Black Emperor, formed in Montreal in 1994, issued “F♯ A♯ ∞” on Constellation in August 1997 as an LP of 500 hand-packaged copies; Kranky released an expanded CD in 1998. Mogwai, formed in Glasgow in 1995 by Stuart Braithwaite, Dominic Aitchison and Martin Bulloch, released “Mogwai Young Team” in October 1997 and later started its own label, Rock Action. The band reached number one on the UK Official Albums Chart dated 4 March 2021 with “As the Love Continues”. Explosions in the Sky, formed in Austin, Texas, in 1999, play wordless rock; AllMusic’s Mark Deming calls their sound moody and “crescendo-heavy”, and the band scored the 2004 film “Friday Night Lights”.

Not every band here is wordless. Sigur Rós, formed in Reykjavík in January 1994, sings in Icelandic and in Vonlenska, a set of vocal sounds without meaning that the band uses as another instrument; Jónsi sings in falsetto and plays guitar with a bow. Their 1999 album “Ágætis byrjun” brought international acclaim, and “( )” in 2002 is sung entirely in Vonlenska. In Japan, Mono formed in Tokyo in 1999 and spent years recording with Steve Albini in Chicago, while toe, founded in Tokyo in 2000, is listed among the prominent Japanese math rock groups. Battles closed the circle in New York in 2002: Ian Williams, formerly of Don Caballero, founded it, with former Helmet drummer John Stanier behind the kit, and “Mirrored” came out on Warp in May 2007.

I explain where the first term came from, and why so many bands rejected it, in my article What Is Post-Rock?; the odd meters and the calculator joke get their own space in What Is Math Rock?

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The bands in this guide

Ten bands from Louisville, Chicago, Pittsburgh, New York, Austin, Montreal, Glasgow, Reykjavík and Tokyo. Each card opens the band’s page and its album guides.

Some of these bands are linked by people as well as by sound. Slint guitarist David Pajo later played on the Tortoise album “TNT”, and Ian Williams carried the math rock thread from Don Caballero straight into Battles.

Elsewhere on Prog Atlas

The prog roots of this scene live in other sections of the site. King Crimson is the band most often named as a source for math rock, through “Red” and “Discipline”. Yes and Rush are listed among its roots too: Classic Rock’s Paul Lester heard Bill Bruford “inventing math rock” on the Yes track “Five Per Cent for Nothing”. On the post-rock side, the German bands Can, Neu! and Faust are named as a widespread influence on the first wave, motorik beat included. Ruins, Tatsuya Yoshida’s duo, appears among the math rock pioneers and sits in my RIO & Avant-Prog section. Closer to our time, Manchester’s Oceansize drew on post-rock and math rock and traced its own beginnings to a Mogwai concert; singer Mike Vennart put it plainly: “Without Mogwai, there wouldn’t have been an Oceansize.” London’s Black Midi folded math rock into a mix that also takes in progressive rock, post-punk and avant-jazz.

Where to start

I would start where both genres begin, with “Spiderland” (1991): AllMusic’s Mark Deming counts it among the most singular and important albums of the 1990s, and Pitchfork placed it 12th in its 2003 list of the decade’s best. For the Chicago sound, “Millions Now Living Will Never Die” (1996) is the album that turned Tortoise into a post-rock icon for critics; AllMusic’s John Bush called it “evocative, beautiful music”. On the math rock side, “For Respect” (1993) is the Don Caballero debut on Touch and Go, and “Mirrored” (2007) shows where Ian Williams took the idea next. For the long-form second wave, “F♯ A♯ ∞” (1997) placed fourth in The Wire’s 1998 critics’ poll, and “Ágætis byrjun” (1999) won the first Shortlist Music Prize in 2001 and was the first Sigur Rós album with keyboard player Kjartan Sveinsson. From Japan, “Hymn to the Immortal Wind” (2009) puts Mono alongside a 28-piece chamber orchestra, and “The Book About My Idle Plot on a Vague Anxiety” (2005), the toe debut, is the record on which AllMusic named the drums “the star of the sound”.

Related scenes

The heavier neighbour of this page is Experimental & Post-Metal. The krautrock that fed the first wave is in German Progressive Rock & Krautrock, and the 1970s space rock that the German reference works also list among post-rock’s sources is in Psychedelic & Space Rock. For odd meters with more chaos and fewer rules, try RIO & Avant-Prog.

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