Recent advances in quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods have the potential to revolutionize computational materials science, a discipline traditionally driven by density functional theory (DFT). While DFT—an approach that uses quantum-mechanical modeling to examine the electronic structure of complex systems—provides convenience to its practitioners and has unquestionably yielded a great many successes throughout the decades since its formulation, it is not without shortcomings, which have placed a ceiling on the possibilities of materials discovery. QMC is poised to break this ceiling.