The city’s best rock sanctum sits on St. Claude and has lived a few lives, most recently pivoting from Carnaval Lounge to its current incarnation: a windowless bar filled with taxidermy and an Ice Age mural out front. Recently, the club broadened its bookings a bit, welcoming weirdo electronic acts like Dan Deacon alongside New Wave shoegazers like Hotline TNT. Purists can rest easy: It’s still NOLA’s best bet for punk, death metal, and sludge.

What started as an art project in a Bywater backyard has become one of the city’s most unique music venues. Equal parts concert space and hands-on exhibition, Music Box Village is also, well, a village: wooden and metal houses that double as playable instruments. When you’re not making the music, an impressive range of local and touring musicians will, from Animal Collective to the venerable Preservation Hall Jazz Band.

This Marigny dive embodies the best of the New Orleans bar scene: cheap drinks, worn carpets, chaotic veers from bounce to drag to rock. But for its lack of frills, the Hi-Ho has surprisingly good taste. You might walk into a raucous dance party by local legend DJ Soul Sister, the yearly heavy metal Creepy Fest, or one of those “I was there first” shows—the club has been a launchpad for critical darlings like Japanese Breakfast, How To Dress Well, and Mannequin Pussy.

Deep in the rapidly gentrifying Bywater, BJ’s still channels old New Orleans—an eternally and uncompromisingly gnarly watering hole for crust punks, withered regulars, drunk parents, and brooding hipsters. Sneak past the lazy guard dog, pay for your beer in cash, shimmy around the pool table, and take in local jazz, bluegrass, folk, and psych-rock bands (plus hyperlocal selections from the well-curated jukebox).

The venues at the heart of New Orleans’ DIY scene tend to be abandoned Navy yards or decrepit Family Dollar stores, but for a fixed and legal address, there’s always Okay Bar. The St. Claude gem is full of surprises: surprise shows, surprisingly good food, random couches in surprisingly big rooms you might describe as “Lynchian.” Lineups cover the bases from bounce to bluegrass to drum ’n’ bass to the Heat Wave Ball, the annual dance party that only plays records from 1957 to 1974.

Nearly every night, this French Quarter club makes good on its promise to “Make Decatur Rock Again.” The cavernous space looks like how Edgar Allen Poe might design a bar: red upholstery, low arches, brick everywhere. Run by the management team of the beloved Lower Garden District dive The Saint, Santos is the Quarter’s go-to for strong drinks and punishing guitar—local acts on their first or 500th show, punk and metal showcases, or folk stewards like Bill Callahan.

Not much changed when the beloved St. Bernard dive bar Sidney’s was reborn as Holy Diver—except that the music bookings improved exponentially overnight. Here, at one of the newer additions to New Orleans’ alternative scene, you can catch punk, indie, and hardcore acts sharing bills with primo local bands, or sneak upstairs for a round of pool or pinball amid red neon lights and walls of graffiti.

Kitty-corner from its eponymous Uptown streetcar tie-up, the Carrollton bar and music club has been serving drinks since 1893, Prohibition be damned. The wooden barroom is more living history than relic, in no small part due to its eclectic music booking. You’ll find your share of traditional New Orleans music here, but also folk singers and scruffy rockers, especially as Uptown’s vibrant DIY scene has reshuffled in the Station’s direction after recent venue closures.