The 25 Best Rock Songs of the Last 25 Years

Here are the 25 best rock songs of the last 25 years.

While 2000 did not mark the turn of the century, nor the millennium (those counts start at 2001), it did signal a new era.

The first decade was marked by the apex of nu-metal releases, among a more than worthy crop of like-minded peers, the emergence of modern hard rock (largely inspired by the thumping mid-tempos of Metallica‘s ‘Black Album’) the upward momentum of pop-punk and the rise of the emos.

The decade that followed (2010-2019) found many of the previous decade’s new styles fizzling out (nu-metal) or going full blown pop (emo). And although this timeframe doesn’t quite have the list of utterly dominant hit songs, it’s where we began to find our next generation of festival headliners and arena-filling contenders.

And as for the 2020s? Well, we’re halfway through and rock appears to be coming back in a big way. There’s been loads of reunions, re-establishing some of the biggest bands of the early 2000s on the world stage while exciting younger artists seem to be finding a faster track to success.

What it means that, as trends come and go and as new generations start seeking out music for themselves, rock is reliably there.

Cutting down a quarter century’s worth of rock songs — tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands — to just 25 was every bit as challenging as it sounds. So, as you scroll through the list below, you may find yourself wondering where some truly big and iconic songs were. For every song you want to see in here, just imagine which one you’d have to take out in its place. Tough, huh?

There’s also some artists who walk the line between rock and metal. Don’t flip out when you don’t see Tool or System of a Down here — we’re saving them for the metal version of this list!

Okay, here they are — the 25 best rock songs of the last 25 years.