I generally chose to leave the proto-post-rock bands off this list because including them would mean we’d have to stretch it back another ten years and fifty tracks, but leaving Slint off would be like not inviting Dave Mustaine to the Metallica alumni party. Slint’s Spiderland came out in 1991, so three years before the term post-rock was ostensibly coined, yet the entire blueprint is there: interlocking guitars, epic builds, a lot of 90-degree angles. For years, seemingly every post-rock band’s guitars and drums were recorded the way Brian Paulson recorded the ones here, and the band’s stretched-out songs and quiet/loud dynamics were seminal, in the literal sense: Spiderland gave birth to things.
