Bono goes gaga over them. As does David Bowie.
Add to the list Beck, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne and Coldplay's Chris Martin.
Then there are the international music press and indie rock fans who've spent the past year fawning over Arcade Fire.
Now, the offbeat seven-piece outfit has landed two Grammy nominations - the latest sign they've made the leap from hipster darlings to mainstream rock fare. The recognition caps off a banner year for the Montreal music scene, dubbed the latest ground zero of rock.
Arcade Fire's Funeral is up for best alternative album, competing against The White Stripes, Franz Ferdinand, Beck and Death Cab for Cutie. Winners will be announced on Feb. 8 when the music industry gathers in Los Angeles for the annual Grammy bash.
"That's pretty awesome competition," said Alan Cross, program director at 102.1 The Edge and host of The Ongoing History of New Music.
The band was also nominated for the song Cold Wind, written for the finale of TV's Six Feet Under.
The recognition is a far, far cry from where the group stood just 12 months ago.
"At this time last year Arcade Fire was one of these curiosities that was achieving this strange critical mass through word of mouth," Cross said.
Formed by husband-wife duo Win Butler, originally of Houston, Texas, and Regine Chassagne, who was born in Haiti but raised in Montreal, the band has enjoyed a steady climb to the upper echelons of rock glory since releasing Funeral in the fall of 2004.
With lush, choral rock sounds and moody lyrics, Funeral generated huge word-of-mouth praise, working its way at breakneck speed through Internet chat rooms into the arms of tastemakers who quickly declared the album one of the year's best.
Radio has only recently caught on.
Live performances only heightened their stature as fans lapped up the band's orchestral stage act which, at times, has included over a dozen people on stage playing an array of instruments including violins, the xylophone and accordion.
"This is probably one of the most organic success stories that we've seen in recent years where we have an independent band who gathers all this notoriety through the Internet and word of mouth and some pretty incendiary live performances," said Cross.
"Arcade Fire, all the way through the year, has marched to their own drummer. They've done a very, very good job of balancing the art and commerce end of the music business."
To that end, the band threw industry tradition out the window, doing quirky things like naming four of the album's 10 tracks Neighbourhood. They are signed to Merge Records, a tiny label in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. They also give few interviews, choosing to let their music speak for itself - a nearly unheard of tactic given the promotional nature of the music business.
And with the mainstream recognition will come the inevitable hipster backlash.
"The truth is tons of record store clerks and first-year university students are going to find (the Grammy nomination) a horrible blow to them," said Aaron Brophy, managing editor at Chart magazine.
"But Arcade Fire is a legitimate mainstream band, resonating with the greater populous at this point."