When Arctic Monkeys’ debut album broke first week sales records in January 2006, fuelled by a classic No.1 single and a reputation as an internet sensation, it briefly seemed as if the music industry might be on the brink of a populist revolution. The prodigiously young, outrageously confident Sheffield group made the biggest impact on British pop since Oasis a decade before, their first album a universally proclaimed classic before it had even been released. Building a fearsome reputation as a live act on the back of massive local support which snowballed through MySpace and an unofficial bootleg collection of demos, Alex Turner and his bandmates were a unique cultural phenomenon that briefly threatened the integrity of the whole music industry’s modus operandi. Snapped up by prestigious indie label Domino, they bypassed the entire system on their way to the top of the charts.
It helped, of course, that Whatever People Say I Am… really was worth all the hype. Like a combination of the taut, teenage riffing of The Undertones and the tales of working class, kitchen sink drama of their Sheffield ancestors Pulp, Arctic Monkeys were the complete package and yet still retained the effervescent, slightly amateurish rough-around-the-edge charm of many great debuts. As well as their undeniable musical discipline, Turner’s songwriting held the key. Placing himself in a lineage of great British pop songwriters, from Morrisey and Mark E Smith to Jarvis Cocker and Damon Albarn, he wrote about his surroundings and what he knew.
I would personally argue that Arctic Monkeys have gone on to better themselves Whatever People Say I Am… with their 2013 masterpiece AM, but in terms of sheer cultural impact, nothing else in British music has reverberated as much as their debut. They became the biggest band in Britain virtually overnight and swept the Brits and Mercury Music Prize alike, and have kept their place at the top table for more than a decade and four more albums, despite becoming a very different kind of rock band. But more than any specifically musical legacy, Arctic Monkeys reignited regionalism and the DIY aesthetic in British indie. (LISTEN)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLKWwSHpUr4
Getting people to dance to political songs has always been a tough sell, but Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam made it seem like the most irresistible and logical idea in the world. Her intoxicating debut album was all things to all men (figuratively speaking), extremely accessible yet totally reflective of Maya’s background and childhood political and musical influences. Dedicated to her father Arul Pragasam (the title was his political code name during his involvement with the Sri Lankan Tamil militant movement), Arular was heavily steeped in themes of conflict and revolution, and the confrontational attitudes of hip-hop and punk rock. Crucially, she decided not to browbeat the listener with her messages, disguising them like a sugar-coated pill in riotously fun beats and samples.
Working with a range of cutting-edge producers based in different disciplines – Richard X (pop), Diplo (dancehall), Cavemen (indie) and Switch (house) – Maya delivered a kaleidoscopic and unique vision for future pop by tying together all manner of specialist world genres, ranging from reggaeton, Dirty South crunk and dancehall to Brazilian baile funk, hardcore rap and slinky steel drums. From the favela trumpets of ‘Bucky Done Gun’ to the South American rhythms of ‘Amazon’ and the disco samples of ‘Sunshowers’, everything on Arular was welded to concrete-cracking beats and flurries of synthetic noise. Her background with Diplo on their much-loved Piracy Funds Terrorism mixtape series meant she was able to marry her distinctive London / Sri Lankan patois to ghetto music from New York to Rio to Kingston in a truly big-tent approach.
While message boards debated endlessly as to whether Maya was just a cynical opportunist, co-opting genuine struggles for her own ends (“I’m armed and I’m equal / more fun for the people” went one lyric on ‘Bucky Done Gun’), what couldn’t be denied was that she at least raised awareness. More importantly, the music was insanely fun and could be enjoyed on a purely physical level – if you wanted, it was just as politically switched on as the pious left-wing hand-wringing from Bono and Bragg, and it made Arular the outsider art-pop statement of the decade. (LISTEN)
In one of the most prophetic incidences of album titling, Shawn Carter’s sixth album The Blueprint was a complete statement of his own aesthetics and significantly raised the bar for hip-hop at the turn of the millennium, and one which hardly anybody has subsequently been able to emulate, let alone beat. With a certain Mr. Kanye West on the production team, The Blueprint was both slickly produced and accessible to a mainstream audience, yet ranged from street-level tales to the achievement of lifelong dreams of luxury, equally at home in the penthouse or on the pavement, all without resorting to the usual preening, hubris and ostentatious displays of bling that often accompanied the gangster rap paradigm. Instead, its production values and choice samples paid homage to ‘70s and ‘80s soul without ever ripping it off, giving the album an instantly timeless quality.
From the triumphant victory lap of opener ‘The Ruler’s Back’, Jigga put in an imperious display from start to finish, his distinctive flow long since perfected over five previous albums and now being deployed to put all others in his field to rights, with his lyrics allegedly all laid down in just two days and without needing to write any of them down, as if he was channelling some kind of divine rap spirit. Contained in The Blueprint’s lean, muscular 64-minute frame were peerless examples of age-old hip-hop tropes that had long needed life breathing into them. There was the diss track (the Doors-sampled ‘Takeover’, which triumphantly laid his beefs with Nas and Mobb Deep’s Prodigy to rest with barbs like “Hey little soldier, you ain’t ready for war”); the player’s hymn (the lush string-swept ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’); the rap ballad (‘Song Cry’, ‘Never Change’).
Bobby Blue Bland’s ‘Ain’t No Love In The Heart Of The City’ was co-opted almost wholesale but seemed like a sensitive, intelligent update on one of the cornerstones of soul. Ending with the surprisingly vulnerable ‘Blueprint (Momma Loves Me)’, Jay-Z succeeded in underscoring the braggadocio of his genre with something genuinely heartfelt. With the exception of Eminem cropping up on ‘Renagade’, Jay-Z has the microphone all to himself for the album, making it the most concentrated and expansive doses in his discography. He has probably explored other facets of his personality in more depth on other albums, but as a holistic view of one of the most compelling rappers in history, it can’t be beat. Among the very greatest hip-hop albums ever, The Blueprint didn’t simply demand respect, it took it from you regardless. (LISTEN)
Widely considered to be his magnum opus, it now seems incredible that people once thought Sufjan Stevens was going to make a concept album about all 50 American states. He had gotten the ball rolling in 2003 with the excellent Michigan (see #61 in this list), deviated with the sparse, acoustic Seven Swans the following year, and then gotten back on track with 2005’s Illinois. He’s never returned to the ‘states albums’ conceit, but at least he left it on a high. At 22 tracks and 74 minutes in length and with virtually every instrument recorded and produced by Stevens himself, Illinois is epic in every way.
The album is studded with references, both explicit and subtle, to the history, geography, attractions and traditions of the northern state, alongside or mixed in with themes that were already familiar to Sufjan’s fans – his childhood memories, personal anxieties and his Christian faith. The array of instrumentation was similarly diverse, from the sparsest of acoustic laments to flurries of choirs, brass sections, synthesisers, Wurlitzer organs, strings and sleigh bells used to bring these ideas to life. Such vast themes were stitched together with Stevens’ gentle, unforced falsetto, what comes across is a kind of twee but genuinely affecting sense of communalism, of Stevens drawing together disparate characters (both real and fictional), ideas and references together under one roof. While all these descriptions might sound weighty and portentous, everything about Illinois was refreshingly uncluttered and rendered in high detail by Stevens’ informal prose style.
Sometimes, he used the geography and history as jump-off points for flights of fancy or ruminations on grander themes. ‘The Seer’s Tower’ uses the iconic Chicago building to rue the atomising effect that capitalism has on established communities. Best of all, the emotional gut-punch of the astounding ‘Chicago’, which addresses the sense of relocation and starting anew that’s central to the national myth of America, which many fans cite as Stevens’ finest individual moment. Elsewhere, he was able to look the pure evil of mass murderer ‘John Wayne Gacy, Jr’ straight in the eyes by avoiding ham-fisted judgmentalism. That meticulous attention to detail, which infused every aspect of the record’s lyrics, music and presentation, was what made Illinois one of the most beautifully executed albums of individual genius in modern pop history. (LISTEN)
After an immensely enjoyable but chaotic debut (see #66 in this list), James Murphy went about crafting the electronic piece de resistance that LCD Soundsystem’s fans suspected they had in them. When it arrived, Sound Of Silver was instantly and unanimously declared a masterpiece and, unlike a lot of electronic albums that are heralded in this manner, the reputation has stuck. Consisting of nine tracks but playing like a rock experience, it was a modern dance music odyssey paradoxically because it wasn’t trading in groundbreaking techniques, instead intelligently updating the tried-and-tested sounds that had gone into the evolution of dance – Brian Eno, with the epic sweeps of his work with Bowie and the polyrhythms of his collaborations with David Byrne, was only the most notable influence.
It helped, of course, that Murphy’s production and songwriting was totally inspired throughout, and was a cut above the funny hipster adventures of his debut. The erudite ‘North American Scum’, with its ‘sorry not sorry’ attitude to his country, was a prime example of this evolution in his snarky sense of humour, but Murphy was also capable of being genuinely emotionally affecting on the sumptuous mid-album epics ‘Someone Great’, with its pulsing beats, flickering synths and liquid rhythms and whose bittersweet lyrics dealt with the fallout of loss, the monstrous ‘All My Friends’ which played like a noughties update of Bowie’s “Heroes”, and the clattering ‘Us v Them’.
Elsewhere, there were more purely dance-orientated thrills, in the shape of the simmering electronica and ghostly house-piano stabs of opener ‘Get Innocuous!’, the delirious ‘80s funk of ‘Time To Get Away’ and the polyrhythmic delight of the title track. The emotionally exhausting suite of songs ended with the show-stopping torch song ‘New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down’, Murphy’s ambivalent tribute to his home city. This was machine music rendered by humans, bringing the required emotional warmth to make Murphy’s compositions truly come to life. Sound Of Silver was a perfect dance-rock album by a lapsed punk devotee, festooned with career-best highlights from one of the most influential and distinctive figures of the decade. (LISTEN)
The party record of the decade, Daft Punk fans had to wait a frustrating four years for the French duo to follow-up their seminal 1997 debut. When Discovery did finally arrive, it initially split opinion, but for those who fell in love with it instantly (including this writer) it would have been worth even an eight year wait. It marked a shift from the pure Chicago house-inspired sound of Homework to a much more commercial pop and disco-influenced template, reversing the formula of Homework that sold dance music to the rock kids. Some short-sighted people accused them of selling out, but Daft Punk were doing something far cleverer and quietly subversive than that.
From Romanthony’s first vocodered cry of “one more time!”, the predominant emotion on Discovery is pure, unrestrained ecstasy. One of the most recognised pieces of music of the decade came with Daft Punk’s signature anthem, ‘Harder Better Faster Stronger’, famously repurposed for Kanye’s ‘Stronger’ in 2007. ‘Crescendolls’, ‘High Life’ and ‘Superheroes’ discover massive energy from what are essentially seconds-long loops, a formula which would be headachy and anodyne in most hands but absolutely transcendent in theirs, aided by bright, crystal clear production. But in amid the joyous house workouts, there were moments of chill-out bliss like ‘Something About Us’ and ‘Veridis Quo’, or the sighing, sentimental beauty of ‘Digital Love’. Daft Punk recognised that burnout is a risk in a record of such glorious energy peaks, and are careful to let the listener mentally recover.
“We care less now than we used to about what critics say about our music… the healthy thing is that people either loved it or hated it,” said Thomas Bangalter in 2001. He and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo recognised that division was better than consensus when it came to publicity, and subtly gave a middle finger to the snobs. Discovery was an alternate universe, a fantasia in which ‘70s bubblegum pop and AOR, as well as mid-‘80s MTV-based pop, were reimagined as the coolest pop music eras in history. The duo took all the classic guilty-pleasure points of those genres and assembled them into context-free delights, in the way that Daft Punk had experienced the music they had loved as children. Rarely has music so obviously machine-crafted displayed such a human heartbeat.
Backing up the album’s four singles were gorgeous, animé-inspired videos that, together, told a story – an idea that was developed into the movie Interstella 5555. It was also this era that marked the first appearance of the Daft Punk ‘robots’, taking the logic of Kraftwerk one step further when it came to disguising their identities. Absolutely everything about how Discovery was presented, from sounds to visuals, was the product of immense care and love. It helped that, five years later, Daft Punk reimagined the vast majority of songs from Discovery when they launched the iconic ‘Pyramid of Light’ tour, a sensory overload where they mashed up and cross-pollinated their back catalogue, which made many initial cynics revisit this album and see it in a better light. From that point on, Daft Punk’s reputation grew in their absence, and the world-conquering pop titans we know today were born. In truth, that story really started here. (LISTEN)
It’s strange to think of the xx as a noughties phenomenon, because their influence has obviously been felt in the ‘10s. Released at almost the very end of 2009, their debut album xx was an extremely slow-burning success that sold in modest but consistent numbers on both sides of the Atlantic for over two years. The manner of that success also defied industry logic: xx had no radio hits – its exposure came primarily through media licensing arrangements, a process accelerated by their Mercury Music Prize win in 2010 – and its most recognisable song is a two-minute instrumental, ‘Intro’, played over 147 million times on Spotify.
Consisting of producer Jamie Smith and co-lead singers Oliver Sim and Romy Madley-Croft, representing a classic boy/girl chemistry front of stage, and a second guitarist Baria Qureshi (who was dismissed by the band shortly after recording and didn’t feature in the lengthy world tour that accompanied the album), xx was the most economical yet emotionally powerful album of the decade. Consisting of simple but perfect indie-pop songs whose production values were influenced by electronica, it was nocturnal bedroom music that created the illusion of space. The image evoked by the opening seconds of ‘Intro’ is so clearly one of twilit, sprawling cityscapes and suburbs, and it’s this musical fragment that holds the key to explaining xx’s appeal – imagined spatial freedoms for a generation that pays crushingly exorbitant rents for shoebox apartments in crowded cities across Britain and America.
That atmosphere is replicated throughout xx in a carefully crafted and honed set of songs, from the sub-bass frequencies of the percussion-free ‘Fantasy’, the chimes that herald ‘VCR’, the sheer, glacial beauty of ‘Crystalised’ and ‘Shelter’ and the hormonal rushes of the album’s musical centrepiece ‘Infinity’ that climaxes like it might break out of the speakers entirely. While polished and clearly produced with exquisite care, with no superfluous moments whatsoever, the songs paradoxically have an intimate, unembellished and under-thought quality that makes them sound like impromptu demo versions, and this was Smith’s great achievement as a producer. For their part, Madley-Croft and Sim were equally inventive – they were not heroic, posturing lovers in these songs, more like shy teenagers staring at the floor when muttering their breathy vocals to each other, exploring their feelings tentatively, leaving the listener feeling like an eavesdropper on a private conversation.
An artful use of silence and space in the pursuit of lucid, majestically minimalist pop, xx was the last truly great album of the noughties. Its Mercury triumph was an increasingly rare example of the judging panel doing music lovers a great service: illuminating an album that was initially made for its creators alone but which went on to sell over 200,000 copies and inform a whole new generation of British musicians. (LISTEN)
Having reached international fame with OK Computer, their second consecutive masterpiece, and characterised the alternative rock explosion in the ‘90s like no others, Radiohead began the new millennium with arguably the boldest and most famous musical volte-face of all time by releasing Kid A. Eschewing conventional song structures and focussing more on texture and sounds instead of mere loud/quiet alt-rock dynamics, it could scarcely have been more different from its predecessor.
Thom Yorke’s lyrics were assembled through cut-up phrases stuck back together at random, with seemingly mundane phrases (“where’d you park the car?”) juxtaposed with stark or violent imagery (“this isn’t happening / I’m not here” on the lilting ‘How To Disappear…’, which becomes “this is really happening” on the pounding, frantic ‘Idioteque’). Those words were couched in a fluid, shifting musical bed that was capable of being cacophonous yet calm, conscious yet dreamlike, boldly experimental yet undefinably familiar. Kid A painted an alarming worldview that was the only true link to OK Computer – that post-millennial existential dread that civilisation is running out of future, with the natural world at the mercy of rapacious dog-eat-dog capitalism as its primary theme.
“But… where are all the guitars?” exclaimed many in disappointment, with only a handful of people recognising immediately just what a revolutionary thing Radiohead had done. Many declared it a commercial suicide note, more still dismissing them as having disappeared up their own arseholes. Very slowly, the tide of opinion turned, so that by the end of the noughties Kid A was universally hailed as the most influential album of the decade, with seemingly every aspect of it presciently predicting the course both the music industry and wider culture would take. Furthermore, it provided Radiohead with a cunning escape hatch from their own career – at a point when many other alt-rock acts were looking to them for leadership, they ducked the question altogether and simply became themselves again.
With the wider industry still at the height of the CD era, Kid A was years ahead of its time, with all aspects of its presentation and roll-out designed to subvert and shun the mainstream industry’s model (something they would do again later in the decade with In Rainbows). No singles or music videos were made – instead, clips of the album’s music were set to short animated ‘stings’, featuring the seemingly cute but creepy ‘bear’ characters from Stanley Donwood’s artwork. The way many experienced it – going online to check out the reviews, to listen to it and debate it with others – presaged internet fan culture as we know it today. Kid A was a perfect demonstration of what truly great artists do after they have achieved fame – use their platform to challenge their audience’s expectations, rather than mollify them. (LISTEN)
Looking back, you’d be forgiven for thinking The Strokes had been sent down to Earth by some divine force to save mankind from a fate worse than Travis. In 2001, at a time when the guitar music scene had grown almost completely stale, dominated by increasingly watered-down and corporate replicas of Nirvana, Radiohead and U2 in the wake of the alt-rock boom of the ‘90s, Is This It was an antidote, with its creators hitting the reset button on rock and sending it back to 1976. Julian Casablancas and co. were presented as a classic ‘band as gang’ – just look at the back cover of the artwork.
They looked like the Ramones, sounded a bit like The Stooges, Television, The Velvet Underground and Blondie, and their debut was 11 ruthlessly economical slices of New York street cool. With all the songs recorded in single takes all in one room, and with the sounds of the guitars and bass leaking and being picked up the studio microphones designated for Fabrizio Moretti’s drums, Is This It had a compressed, explosive sound. With absolutely no extraneous instrumentation or studio trickery to be heard, everything about it sounded like the result of a tight, disciplined musical unit spontaneously cracking the songs out live in the studio, confident that’s all they’d ever need, and the stylish lo-fi production gave it a DIY aesthetic that placed it in a proud lineage of indie music stretching back decades. Never has such genius been made to sound so easy.
Its impact was seismic: immediately, it caused a sea change in popular music, shifting the zeitgeist from DJs and nu-metal back to skinny jeans, guitars and tiny rock venues. ‘Last Nite’ remains an immortal indie-disco staple, but that was just one part of a consistently dazzling collection that contained no peaks because it had no troughs, a debut album that dreams are made of. Casablancas’ lyrics perfectly encapsulated the effervescence of youth that comes with innocence, of confidence not yet trammelled down by bitter experience, and yet with a hint of sadness in the knowledge that these moments are fleeting.
The sleek, emotional ‘Hard To Explain’ perfectly nails down the sense of aimless rebellion and ennui of teenage life (the repeated drawl of “I don’t it see that way”); the euphoric climax of closer ‘Take It Or Leave It’, the melodic, anthemic clatter of ‘New York City Cops’, the disarming lo-fi attitude of ‘Barely Legal’ and ‘The Modern Age’, the rattling ’60s garage rock of ‘Someday’… every moment was one to be treasured. Though they may have seemed aloof and a bit too cool for school, The Strokes had an undeniable new-wave catchiness that alternative rock had forgotten.
But, quite aside from it being a flawless, photogenic, effortlessly cool and instantly timeless rock classic, it was what Is This It represented that gives it its lasting significance more than a decade later. Timing was the key: it was a gateway album for an entire generation of fans and musicians alike, tearing up existing plans and laying down a blueprint based on the simple joys of melody and rhythm, and opened the floodgates for a host of other great new guitar bands on both side of the Atlantic, many of whom feature on this list. The effect was like capturing lightning in a bottle – Is This It was a pop culture ‘moment’, a snapshot of history changing, never to be repeated. To blame The Strokes for never having replicated its success is wrong-headed, to simply misunderstand how popular culture works. (LISTEN)
Montreal six-piece Arcade Fire dealt in a kind of baroque power-pop that, on the surface, was downbeat and massively apocalyptic but offered an emotional pay out, a dividend for those prepared to invest their energies. Released in September 2004, word of this incredible new band spread slowly at first, then like wildfire throughout 2005 as their reputation for riotous and dramatic live performances burgeoned. But what made Arcade Fire stick in people’s memories was the incredible craftsmanship and conceptual songwriting behind Funeral – and, despite three brilliant records they’ve released subsequently, they’ve never quite matched the incredible power of their debut, which was that rarest of things in the 21st century: a rock album that sounded entirely original.
What was presented to the listener on Funeral was not, strictly speaking, groundbreaking. Anthemic indie to fill arena-size spaces and festivals had been around for many years, but what was novel was the power and conviction of its delivery, combined with the relatable subject matter. It’s an album ostensibly about death – three of the band had lost close members of their families in the 14 months before its release – but that alone does not explain its emotional power. It is also an album about hope, even in the darkest of moments, and of family, community, the cleansing and restorative power of catharsis. After the mourning process of any funeral comes the wake, a chance for loved ones to reminisce and come together, and it is this aspect that Funeral represents: a collective humanity that comes through in the bleakest of situations.
Everything about Funeral, from the atmosphere to certain vocal inflections from Win Butler and the response vocals from his wife and bandmate Regine Chassagne, seemed comfortingly familiar, so much so that you could hear what might come next, but what was revelatory was how often one was surprised by the directions they took. It was emotional without being ‘emo’, and indeed showed up the vast majority of that sub-genre for the illiterate, angst-ridden garbage that it is. So many have subsequently tried to imitate Funeral, or harness its devastatingly effective dynamics for their own ends, but few have even come close.
The powerful word and image association of ‘Tunnels’ (“sometimes we remember our bedrooms / and our parents’ bedrooms / and the bedrooms of our friends / and then we remember our parents”), the first of four tracks with the prefix ‘Neighborhood’ on the album, providing a massive and complex psycho-geographical space in which the album takes place. Opening with a diary-like intimacy, the band keeps upping the ante until it explodes into cinematic widescreen, driven by a post-disco drumbeat that struggles to keep its exuberance under control. It’s a breathtaking moment, leaving every hair on your skin standing on end, and is the perfect encapsulation of Arcade Fire’s ethos and emotional heft.
The distortions of memory and the passage of indeterminate amounts of time reinforce that heft, and mean the listener can project their own experiences on to it. Take ‘Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)’: the power cut represents physical chaos but also emotional upheaval (“the power’s out in the hearts of men”), reflected in the driving, clattering drum pattern and Butler’s impassioned yelps of “I went out into the night / I went out to pick a fight / with anyone”. The sweeping drama of ‘Crown Of Love’, which breaks into a gallop at the end seemingly as a direct physical result of the sonic swelling over its first four minutes, and the incredibly grandiose choral sing-along ‘Wake Up’, served as mid-album highlights.
The album’s best moments were left for its closing sequence, with the pure catharsis of ‘Rebellion (Lies)’ as its penultimate track. Even in the album’s darkest hour there’s still a light, but you can’t tell if Butler’s raging against it (“sleeping is giving in / no matter what the time is”) or rushing towards it as a source of comfort (the repeated refrain of “come on hide your lovers / underneath the covers”). Chassagne’s voice offers a Greek-chorus-like aspect to it as she counters “Lies! Lies!” to Butler’s chorus “…it’s alright”. Sarah Neufeld and Owen Pallett’s gorgeous string arrangements, underpinning the track and responsible for its climax, steal the show. Just as that emotional onslaught comes to an end, Chassagne takes over vocal duty for the haunting, spectral closer ‘In The Backseat’, her quiet cries of “my family tree’s / losing all its leaves” leaving the listener awestruck and emotionally poleaxed.
Encompassing the American wanderlust and psychedelia of The Flaming Lips, the brooding dystopian settings of classic ’90s albums like Dog Man Star and OK Computer, the sonic majesty of shoegaze and the melodicism of garage-rock revival bands like The Strokes, it was a Canadian collective that registered the best album of the noughties. Emotionally rich and life-affirming; beautiful yet harrowing; empowering and yet keenly aware of its small place in a vast world: Funeral is not just the greatest original artistic statement of the 21st century, but one of the most devastatingly humanistic statements in all of pop music history. (LISTEN)
Tags: 2000s, classic album, Ed Biggs, feature, noughties, staff lists, The Top 200 Albums of the 2000s
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