It's hard to dig deep and find some good music in the more modern era, especially if one has been spoiled growing up in those eras of great music, but it's out there.
Yeah, good stuff. Check out MTB's first four albums, if you want. Recommended.
There are also many older bands to discover and check out, as I'm sure you've done already... But every time I delve deep, I seem to always find something I enjoy, at least some tracks of an artist. Usually.
I discovered a whole bunch of new music by looking at the various members that played in bands. For example, Ollie Olsen played drums on an early UH album and I know that he went on to play with Elton John, so I explored the early discography of his and found that the first couple of albums were absolutely brilliant. Based on the radio play at the time, I would never have listened to those albums at all without that connection.
The same with producers. Some producers can make any band work, eg. Gus Dudgeon was great with Elton John and then later on with bands such as Audience, Fairport Convention and Lindisfarne. All brilliant imo.
Another way that I used to use to discover bands was to research the record labels. For Example, I liked Deep Purple In Rock on the Harvest (EMI) label. When searching through records, I discovered other bands such as Barclay James Harvest and Marc-Almond on the same label that I may never have listened to. The Vertigo label had some really great experimental bands that most people have never heard of.
And then lastly, album art also plays a part in exploring music. Over the years I have bought a lot of records based solely on the cover art (with some real lemons in between). Roger Dean is a great example. Besides the early greats such as Yes and Uriah Heep, he also did album covers for bands as diverse as Lighthouse, Gentle Giant, Budgie, Osibisa, Gun and more recently, Black Moth.