Best Breakthrough: My Morning Jacket

On their audacious new album, Evil Urges, My Morning Jacket veer between funk-metal grooves, Nashville crooning, classic-rock guitar heroics and more — sometimes all in the same song. The album, out June 10th, is the latest evidence that MMJ are aiming higher than almost any other band of their generation. And if their music is increasingly hard to categorize, that's the point, according to frontman Jim James. "People looked at Radiohead when they started, and were like, 'Oh, Brit-pop rock band,'" says James. "Now they're just fucking awesome, awesome weirdos. You can't put a label on them, and that's what I hope has been happening with us. Whether you love us or hate us, we're not any one type of band."

James names Björk, Pearl Jam, Wilco and Radiohead as MMJ's "big-brother bands." "There are parts of our band that are tied to roots," he says. "And there are also parts where we want to experiment." On the Louisville, Kentucky, quintet's first few albums, they leaned harder on their rootsy side, creating haunted, reverb-soaked Americana that led many to assume that MMJ were some kind of Southern-rock throwback (that sound was also influential enough to create its own micro-genre, with both Band of Horses and newcomers Fleet Foxes embracing it). Everything changed with 2005's spacey Z, which reinvented the band from scratch with songs ranging from the ethereal "Wordless Chorus" to the British Invasion pop of "What a Wonderful Man."

MMJ have always drawn fans from the jam-band world, and they retain that scene's commitment to unpredictable live shows; their sets combine headbanging energy, too-accomplished-to-be-indie guitar solos and covers that range from Dylan to Prince. "I've gotten tired of normal rock & roll sounds," says James. "My ultimate goal is to hopefully turn people on to different types of music."