Your favorite band name (goes here)

I feel like I'm pretty decent at bestowing song titles and album names. But I've never been very good at coming up with band names.

The best ones seem to have sprung up organically, or as inside jokes, or as "so obvious you missed it" gerunds or plural nouns.

Like, how did NO ONE ever think of "The Killers" before 2001?

Regardless, the good ones already seem taken, and that includes (in my opinion) the single best band name in rock, off the market since 1976:

The Cure.

I mean, that's effing brilliant. Impossibly simple, brutally elegant, stunningly appropriate. A perfect noun that begs absolutely no predicate. "What are you listening to?" "The Cure." Boom.

Here are some of my other favorites, by category. (To clarify, just because I like the band's name IN NO WAY suggests that I also endorse their music, or any of their members.)

30 RANDOMLY EXCELLENT NAMES

--The Cure
--Dire Straits  
--Digital Underground  
--A Perfect Circle  
--New Order  
--Queens of the Stone Age  
--Dropkick Murphies  
--The Olivia Tremor Control  
--Queen  
--Big Wreck 
--Built to Spill  
--A Tribe Called Quest  
--Red Red Meat 
--Our Lady Peace
--The Velvet Underground    
--Dexys Midnight Runners   
--Mastodon  
--Wolfmother  
--Sonic Youth  
--Guided by Voices  
--Creedence Clearwater Revival  
--The Tragically Hip  
--Phantom Planet  
--They Might Be Giants  
--Asleep at the Wheel  
--Collapsis  
--The Magnetic Fields  
--Soul Asylum  
--Masters of the Hemisphere  
--Veruca Salt

13 FAVORITE MACABRE NAMES: 

--... And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead 
--Massive Attack 
--Murder by Death
--Death From Above
--Stabbing Westward 
--HIM (His Infernal Majesty) 
--I Love You But I've Chosen Darkness 
--Type O Negative 
--Urge Overkill 
--Primal Scream
--Megadeth 
--Cradle of Filth 
--Widespread Panic

10 OTHER FAVORITE "THE" NAMES (where "the" is implicit or explicit): 

--The Cure
--The Killers
--The Clash 
--The Cult 
--The Replacements 
--(the) Pixies 
--The Church 
--The Police 
--The Buzzcocks 
--The Mighty Mighty Bosstones 

4 FAVORITE "AND THE" NAMES: 

--Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds 
--George Thorogood and the Destroyers 
--Jason and the Scorchers 
--Elliott and the Untouchables 

3 FAVORITE FAKE BAND NAMES: 

--Cold Slither ("G.I. Joe") 
--Dingoes Ate My Baby ("Buffy the Vampire Slayer") 
--Spinal Tap ("This is Spinal Tap")

3 FAVORITE LOCAL BAND NAMES: 

--The Verna Cannon
--Hurt Reynolds 
--Opposable Scum 

2 FAVORITE GIMMICK NAMES: 

--Kathleen Turner Overdrive 
--Me First and the Gimmie Gimmies 

What are some of your favorite band names? Or, if you've invented some clever ones of your own, can I have permission to use them for future projects?

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