Best of Boston

2015 Best Band

Speedy Ortiz

The commonwealth’s next great rock ’n’ roll band? That’d be Speedy Ortiz, a quartet secretly amped on pop but swinging its guitars with a raw, righteous roar. The new Speedy album, Foil Deer, gives the same goosebumps you got back in college when you first heard Pavement and Helium. At the front: Sadie Dupuis, a former UMass Amherst poetry MFA who was raised on Top 40 R & B, sang in a children’s choir that toured internationally, and has admitted to asking herself, when writing a verse, “What would Fiona Apple do?” The bandwagon is boarding…now.