Nirvana Again?

Alt-rock radio is also adapting. For years, stations were bogged down in a Puddle of Mudd, devoting their playlists to an endless stream of interchangeable mook-rockers and post-grunge moaners. But now influential outlets like Los Angeles' KROQ and San Francisco's Live 105 are gleefully spinning the new music. ''You're seeing a return to the purest sense of the alternative format,'' says Live 105 music director Aaron Axelsen.

Even militantly hard-rocking stations like New York's K-Rock are getting on board; anyone who tuned in one recent Saturday afternoon caught Korn's ''Got the Life,'' followed, improbably, by Franz Ferdinand's ''Take Me Out.'' ''There's a conscious effort at K-Rock to expand horizons,'' says station DJ (and former MTV VJ) Matt Pinfield. Some stations in the Midwest and South are lagging, but it's just a matter of time before they catch on. ''You call some guy in Indianapolis and tell him about Modest Mouse, he's got no clue,'' says Epic's Barnett. ''But every week that we sell another 40,000 albums, more people are gonna know.''

For Brandon Flowers, two bands changed everything. The 22-year-old singer was an unknown aspiring rock star in Las Vegas when he first heard the White Stripes and the Strokes -- and immediately began to dream big. Just a couple years later, Flowers' band the Killers has a deal with Island, a rock-radio hit (''Somebody Told Me''), and a debut CD that moved an impressive 23,000 units in its first week. ''I think we owe so much to the Strokes and the Stripes,'' says Flowers. ''The world had been gasping for new bands.''

The current alt-rock glasnost can be directly credited to that pair of alt-rock Gorbachevs. The Strokes' and White Stripes' raw, underproduced hits succeeded in breaking down the airwaves' Bizkit barrier and helped convince the world that cool rock could matter again. ''I hope we've done our part in making things more open,'' says Strokes drummer Fabrizio Moretti. ''There's a certain mold that's set according to what radio and record labels dish out, and hopefully we broke that mold.'' As Interpol frontman Paul Banks puts it, ''They generated a lot of excitement about new music, and that started the ball rolling.''

Just how far it will travel remains unclear. Despite his double success, Death Cab and Postal Service singer Ben Gibbard cautions against too much excitement. ''We're not talking millions of records quite yet,'' he says. ''We're talking hundreds of thousands of records. No one's gonna put Isaac Brock or Ben Gibbard on the cover of Time magazine like they did with Eddie Vedder. Nobody outside of our cultural niche knows who we are if we walk down the street.''

But that could be a good thing. Unlike with other alt-rock movements, personalities aren't the point, and the current crop of bands are united more by artistic adventurousness than by a particular look or sound. That diversity has industry-ites suggesting the trend will last longer than, say, the mid-'90s ska boom. ''That's what's causing this movement to happen,'' says Matt Smith, music director of Los Angeles' KROQ. ''It's not one particular sound. I would hate to classify it.'' Which is perhaps the biggest problem facing 2004's new-alternative bands. What do you call a movement that encompasses everything from the Shins' '60s-influenced pop to Franz Ferdinand's '80s-style dance rock? Well, if ''Seth Cohen rock'' doesn't take (and we're pretty certain it won't), Shins frontman James Mercer has another suggestion. ''It's fun-grunge,'' he says. ''I think we should call it funge.'' We'll keep working on it.

(Additional reporting by Liane Bonin and Karen Valby)