100. The Hold Steady – Boys And Girls In America (2006) (Vagrant)

Right from the opening bars, which see Craig Finn drop a Jack Kerouac quotation straight into the mix of ‘Stuck Between Stations’, Boys And Girls In America was a drug and booze-fuelled road-trip of an album, with 11 triumphant yet reflective paeans to youth, aimless decadence and friendship. Fist-pumping choruses and rock radio power-chords – very unfashionable in 2006, remember – were the order of the day. Whether they were actually enjoying those good times right now (‘First Night’), or reflecting on them years later (‘Massive Nights’, ‘Chillout Tent’), or even just on the hungover mornings after, The Hold Steady lived out all their Bruce Springsteen fantasies on the biggest of canvases. (LISTEN)

99. Super Furry Animals – Rings Around The World (2001) (Epic)

Having spent half a decade blurring musical boundaries on the legendary British indie Creation Records, who had indulged pretty much all of their creative whims, Welsh cult heroes SFA unexpectedly found themselves on a major label. With cutting edge technology at their disposal for the first time, they backed themselves to make something that would both push their own creative boundaries and be accessible to the public – and the result was their third utterly transfixing album in five years. Ranging from electro-country rock (‘Run! Christian, Run!’) and sub-bass trip-hop (‘(A) Touch Sensitive’) to smooth AOR (‘Juxtapozed With U’) and spangled glam-rock (‘(Drawing) Rings Around The World’), revolving around the stunning four-part centrepiece ‘Receptacle For The Respectable’, it was also the first album ever to be released on DVD, with videos commissioned for all 13 tracks. Picking up the Furries’ first ever Mercury Music Prize nomination, Rings Around The World was yet another idiosyncratic triumph. (LISTEN)

98. Regina Spektor – Soviet Kitsch (2004) (Sire)

Lumped in with the nascent anti-folk movement of the early noughties, the almost complete dominance of piano on Regina Spektor’s songs actually made her feel like a traditional singer-songwriter. Soviet Kitsch, her third album but the first with a major label budget at its disposal, kept the idiosyncratic twists and turns of 2002’s occasionally brilliant Songs but streamlined and moulded them into compounds that could attract crossover potential. Sonic curios, like the shifting drumstick-only rhythm and garbled observations of ‘Poor Little Rich Boy’, the punky ‘Your Honor’ and the flight of fancy ‘Us’, sat well alongside the hushed piano beauties of ‘Carbon Monoxide’ and the strangely uplifting ‘Chemo Limo’. Soviet Kitsch was a beguiling portrait of an artist in transition, with Spektor’s distinctive and unorthodox vocal style complemented by her formal classical musical training and broader, more informal pop tastes. (LISTEN)

97. My Morning Jacket – Z (2005) (ATO)

Working with English indie production legend John Leckie may have initially seemed like an odd move for Jim James, the creative fountainhead of My Morning Jacket whose prog-rock explorations had always felt rooted in the dusty expanses of Americana rather than British gloom. On Z, which came out to universal rave reviews and became an international success in late 2005, James explored his solid pop-orientated songwriting to much greater depths than before. It has long since become a masterpiece, a physical manifestation of his own personality more than any other MMJ album, becoming a go-to journalistic shorthand for any album that seeks to meld genres with each other. Built primarily on the reference points of Neil Young and The Band but with shades of more contemporary artists like Red House Painters and the fantasy-pop of The Flaming Lips, they used electronics and canyons of reverb to push their impassioned country-soul to new musical and emotional parameters, ending in the sprawling, space-rock peaks of ‘Dondante’. (LISTEN)

96. Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest (2009) (Warp)

Spontaneity isn’t always the key to creativity, and bigger doesn’t always mean better. Every single note on Grizzly Bear’s third album Veckatimest had clearly been placed, performed, revised and agonised over with immense care and precision, and it was one of the most talked-about indie albums of 2009. The intermeshing guitars and vocals of Ed Droste and Daniel Rossen, the quartet’s two frontmen, were the most prominent aspects of a smooth, efficient musical machine – exemplified on their stunningly beautiful signature tune ‘Two Weeks’, which was absolutely everywhere on adverts, TV shows and background music for the next couple of years, and on the psychedelic jazz-folk of ‘Southern Point’. But for all the stacked instrumentation and close harmonies, and the bigger budget at their disposal at Warp Records, there was an alchemy at work on Veckatimest that made these sonic vistas so expansive and open. Grizzly Bear had the ambition to push themselves, but their vision and arrangements never overshadowed the songs themselves. (LISTEN)

95. The Coral – The Coral (2002) (Deltasonic)

Nearly four years of bedroom rehearsals, in their Merseyside hometown of Hoylake paid off when it came to The Coral, one of the most accomplished guitar debuts of the decade. Produced by the Lightning Seeds’ Ian Broudie, it was pretty much a complete manifesto for The Coral’s ‘anything goes’ blueprint: a bubbling cauldron of Nuggets-esque psychedelic garage rock, soulful ‘80s indie, jaunty shanties and Britpop with sprinklings of polka, Russian folk, surf guitar and Ennio Morricone soundtracks. Its aesthetic may have been to magpie the best parts of the past – all the way down to the album’s collage artwork – but it presented an intriguing possible future for British indie at the same time. Fuelled by the ubiquitous single ‘Dreaming Of You’, The Coral became an instant hit, going Top Five as well as landing a Mercury nomination. A refreshing blast of psychedelic colour to revive what had been an increasingly monochrome British guitar scene. (LISTEN)

94. Idlewild – 100 Broken Windows (2000) (Food)

After the riot of colour, melody and lo-fi punk of their debut Hope Is Important, Idlewild’s second proper album 100 Broken Windows captured them in transition to the R.E.M.-influenced power-rockers they would soon become. Using a much broader emotional palette than before – ‘Let Me Sleep (Next To The Mirror)’, ‘Idea Track’ and ‘The Bronze Medal’ were obvious signs of progression and increased discipline – Idlewild were still able to pack searing hooks into enjoyable, accessible punk nuggets, such as on the four UK Top 40 singles ‘Little Discourage’, ‘Actually It’s Darkness’, ‘These Wooden Ideas’ and ‘Roseability’. Even when Roddy Woomble’s lyrics were slightly obtuse and self-important (“don’t be real / be post-modern”), they were delivered with such charm that the musical structures were able to support the ideas. Two years later, Idlewild would reach the peak of their popularity with The Remote Part, an even more focussed and emotional effort, but if you want to hear this brilliant cult band at their very finest, with one foot still in the college rock that endeared them to so many to start with, then 100 Broken Windows should be your first stop. (LISTEN)

93. The Mars Volta – De-Loused In The Comatorium (2003) (Universal / Gold Standard Laboratories)

Consisting of two fifths of the defunct At The Drive-In – Cedric Bixler-Zavala and Omar Rodriguez-Lopez – The Mars Volta represented a pretty extreme but nevertheless logical leap forwards from the sharp, intricate post-hardcore of their old band. De-Loused In The Comatorium was the first of more than half a dozen records, and remains their most thrilling – a concept album about a character named Cerpin Taxt, who enters a week-long coma after overdosing on a mixture of morphine and rat poison, soundtracking his fevered dreams over lengthy, contorted passages of music. Sonically, it took the raucous hardcore of ATDI and infused it with the prog-rock of King Crimson and the freeform jazz experiments of ‘70s Miles Davis, which allowed Bixler-Zavala and Rodriguez-Lopez to explore the influences of their childhood. De-Loused In The Comatorium was like a musical rendition of a Salvador Dali painting, disobeying rules of structure and form and reducing genre boundaries to an absurdist blur, and as a result it stands up to endless listening. (LISTEN)

92. Elliott Smith – Figure 8 (2000) (DreamWorks)

Following his Oscar nomination for Good Will Hunting’s ‘Miss Misery’, a raised profile and a major label deal gave Elliott Smith’s music a more professional sheen but didn’t detract from the unique beauty of his songs. Arriving at a turbulent period in his life, after a couple of years of increased drink and drug use and a failed attempt at rehab, Figure 8 was the fifth and sadly final album to be released in Smith’s lifetime, but one that spread his talents over the most varied range of musical styles and arrangements yet. His recent move from New York to the West Coast seemed to open up his music, with the bright, multi-tracked arrangements paradoxically dovetailing with the often extremely bleak subject matter of his lyrics. Observe the beautiful ‘L.A.’, in particular, in which Smith observes the fine distinction between liberation and isolation. It was his most far-reaching album yet, and a permanent reminder of what could have been. (Sidebar: the honky-tonk piano on ‘In The Lost And Found’ is the same one that McCartney played at Abbey Road studios on ‘Penny Lane’ – which thrilled Beatles fan Smith no end). (LISTEN)

91. Lambchop – Nixon (2000) (Merge)

Hailing from Nashville, the beating heart and nerve centre of country music, it was distinctly odd that Lambchop’s sumptuous fifth album made no impact whatsoever in their homeland but was lapped up by the British music press. A blend of delicate, soulful country and Southern-flavoured indie rock powered with Kurt Wagner’s affecting (but never affected) lisp-singing that often breaks into falsetto, Nixon was an instant classic in some eyes. Detailing the minutiae of the mundane in a tender, self-deprecating and fundamentally humanistic way – from the drama of breakups to drunken neighbours and late summer evenings – Wagner took the ‘music of the people’ aesthetic of pure country and added layers of complexity. With gospel choirs, lap steel guitar and occasional trumpets lightly adorning the arrangements of brushed snare drums and shuffling bass, particularly on the undisputed highlight ‘Up With People’, Lambchop delivered the kind of singular, career-defining highlight that many bands spend an entire career trying to make. (LISTEN)

90. Basement Jaxx – Rooty (2001) (XL)

Taken from the name of the regular club nights Felix Buxton and Simon Ratcliffe used to hold in a small bar in Brixton, Basement Jaxx’s second album expanded upon the dancefloor-orientated sound they established with their impressive 1999 debut Remedy and took it in an even more commercially friendly direction, creating one of the best British dance records of the new millennium in the process. A sprawling, multi-coloured universe of diverse samples and global styles, deployed by Buxton and Radcliffe like they came as second nature, and crammed into under 43 minutes, Rooty was the pinnacle of Basement Jaxx’s artistic achievements. The globetrotting, carnival vibe flitted from Paris to Miami to Rio in a heartbeat, with massive radio hit ‘Romeo’ providing them with the signature song they’d been craving since the mid ‘90s. Added to this all-time classic, the rowdy NY house of ‘Where’s Your Head At?’, psychedelic soul of ‘Broken Dreams’ and filtered, samba-tinged house of ‘Jus 1 Kiss’ made it the party album you didn’t want to end. (LISTEN)

89. Cat Power – You Are Free (2003) (Matador)

Every great artist releases one album that encapsulates the public’s perception of them, which often sticks long after the artist in question has evolved or changed musical direction. For Chan Marshall, a.k.a. Cat Power, You Are Free is that album. An understated, beautiful record built primarily from lonesome electric guitar plucks and piano that can incorporate contributions from grunge idols like Dave Grohl and Eddie Vedder, it’s an album of paradoxes and contrasts: confident yet vulnerable; poetic yet introverted and awkward; sounding ramshackle yet built from bold, sure artistic strokes. The pounding centrepiece ‘He War’ and the gaunt rock song ‘Shaking Paper’ were capable of sitting next to fragile yet devastatingly powerful moments like ‘I Don’t Blame You’, ‘Evolution’ and the heartbreaking ‘Names’, full of observations of childhood friends whose lives have hit the buffers. Marshall has only made three albums of varying quality in the subsequent 13 years, and You Are Free doesn’t look like being toppled any time soon as her greatest moment. (LISTEN)

88. Eminem – The Marshall Mathers LP (2000) (Aftermath / Shady / Interscope)

The Slim Shady LP may have made him a household name, but it was The Marshall Mathers LP that catapulted him to the rank of global superstar, a cultural phenomenon that reached all the way to Congress. Coming out just 15 months after that breakout record, it relied upon the same outsider appeal of its predecessor, but it was more autobiographical and drew from personal pain this time around, as if Marshall Mathers was stepping out from behind his cartoon persona to show the world who he really was. Lyrically dextrous and thrillingly transgressive in his outlook, tracks like ‘The Way I Am’ and ‘Criminal’ shone a light on the malevolent and hypocritical aspects of American society, while party boosters like ‘The Real Slim Shady’ leavened the mixture. It’s hard to imagine a terrifyingly violent track like ‘Kim’ being green-lit for a major label blockbuster now, and you can make your own minds up about whether the large amount of misogynistic lyrics on the album are acceptable under artistic licence or not, but critics have never been divided on TMMLP’s status as one of the biggest and best hip-hop albums of the decade. (LISTEN)

87. Arctic Monkeys – Favourite Worst Nightmare (2007) (Domino)

Acting quickly to consolidate the record-breaking success of their debut the year before, Arctic Monkeys demonstrated a subtle, but nevertheless profound, evolution in their trademark sound that seems miraculous nearly a decade later. Though fans rushed out to buy it in their droves, many initially criticised Favourite Worst Nightmare for a lack of immediate and obvious hooks. But, as all the greatest artists do, Alex Turner had simply used his platform to challenge his audience rather than placate them, and with repeated listens it yielded great treasures despite it being a noticeably moodier and harder record. Tight, boxy and angular in places, such as the rabbit-punch of ‘Teddy Picker’, and influenced by sparse chamber-pop on the likes of ‘Only Ones Who Know’ or ‘505’. The highlight, though, was Turner’s wry wordplay on ‘Fluorescent Adolescent’, notching up yet another Top Ten hit for the Monkeys. Making a mockery of the ‘difficult second album’ syndrome by not overthinking it, and not succumbing to hubris, Favourite Worst Nightmare was the sound of a group digesting their influences and becoming comfortable in their own skin. (LISTEN)

86. No Age – Nouns (2008) (Sub Pop)

Following a feverishly received EP/singles compilation Weirdo Rippers the year before, L.A. noise rock duo No Age translated local success as part of their hometown DIY venue The Smell into national exposure with their debut album proper. Armed only with guitar and drums, Dean Spunt and Randy Randall buried a collection of razor-sharp, simple melodies in swathes of twitchy, taut and effects-drenched guitars in full-on attack mode. More riff-driven and ambitious than what they had done before, Nouns made them the toast of the indie world for a short time, with user-friendly tracks like ‘Eraser’ built from chunky slashes of acoustic guitar, or the giddy rush of ‘Cappo’, rubbing against blasts of fuzz-laden glory, on anti-anthems like the superb ‘Teen Creeps’. Fertile with layers of sound to the point of overload, it was incredible how No Age managed to cram so many ideas them into an economical collection of a dozen tracks lasting just 31 minutes. (LISTEN)

85. Glasvegas – Glasvegas (2008) (Columbia)

What is it about a Scottish accent that makes great pop music even better? Who knows, but songwriter James Allan intuitively knew this basic truth when he formed Glasvegas, producing a handful of early singles and a debut album so brilliant you might have mistaken it for the work of a laboratory project to create the perfect guitar-pop album. Phil Spector-esque girl-group harmonies? Check. Guitars blown up to Velvet Underground / JAMC levels of distortion? Check. Wounded yet anthemic vocals? Check. Glasvegas was 41 minutes of glorious terrace-chant choruses and amphetamine rushes of drums that paid homage to the entirety of pop history, amplifying the drama and grandeur in everyday existence.

The sequence of emotional gut-punches in the opening trio of ‘Flowers & Football Tops’, the soaring ‘Geraldine’ and the aching regret of ‘It’s My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry’ would be enough for any album, but Glasvegas continued to stick the knife in with the icy ‘Stabbed’, set to Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, and the wrecking ball of ‘Daddy’s Gone’, and all done without a trace of cynicism. Having attended their early gigs and seen the utter devotion among their fanbase, you could tell: here, finally, was a British band to give your heart and soul to. Their subsequent career has been marred with misfortune, costing them a genuine shot at the title of being the true heirs to Oasis that the country has been looking for all this time, but, for a brief, all too fleeting moment Glasvegas threatened to be the biggest and best band in Britain. (LISTEN)

84. Bright Eyes – Lifted, or, The Story Is In The Soil, Keep Your Ear To The Ground (2002) (Saddle Creek)

While the indie cognoscenti hailed Conor Oberst for 2000’s prodigiously talented Fevers And Mirrors, his reputation went nationwide on its even more epic follow-up two years later. With a small army of session musicians at his disposal in addition to his trusted lieutenants, Oberst set about making his magnum opus with Lifted…, intricately produced, musically diverse and consistent throughout. The roughly recorded acoustic cut ‘Waste Of Paint’ is a career high, while the darkly ominous ‘Don’t Know When But A Day Is Gonna Come’ and the melodic, chiming indie of ‘Lover I Don’t Have To Love’ stand out even among such distinctive and exquisite songwriting. Oberst’s talent is to be literate, insightful and yet deeply personal at the same time, never alienating the listener despite no small amount of wide-eyed sincerity that many have since failed to emulate. It all builds to a cathartic, post-9/11 appeal for calm in the denouement of ‘Let’s Not Shit Ourselves (To Love And To Be Loved)’, where Oberst and his band pull out all the stops for a 10-minute encore. Lifted… represents his personal apex, the second instalment of a career-defining run of three great Bright Eyes albums that Oberst hasn’t been able to match subsequently. (LISTEN)

83. Queens Of The Stone Age – Songs For The Deaf (2002) (Interscope)

Having won over the critics with their darkly psychedelic breakthrough Rated R two years earlier, QOTSA dealt with winning over the public with their third album Songs For The Deaf, which remains one of the most raw and powerful rock records of the decade. With none other than Dave Grohl on drums (the experience of recording with QOTSA led him to bin a whole Foo Fighters record and release the quickly thrown-together One By One later in 2002) and Screaming Trees’ Mark Lanegan adding extra guitar, there was a fearsome, primal power to the likes of ‘Song For The Dead’ and ‘First It Giveth’. Interspersed with bursts of radio static amid the sun-scorched desert rock explorations as the listener is taken on an imagined road trip through Middle America, Songs For The Deaf had a visceral, outlaw quality to it that QOTSA themselves struggled to re-capture until 2013’s excellent …Like Clockwork. It also contained the group’s signature song, the creepy, delirious rockabilly blunderbuss of ‘No One Knows’, and became the band’s first million-seller. (LISTEN)

82. Sleater-Kinney – The Woods (2005) (Sub Pop)

Bringing the curtain down on their first era before they went on a nine-year hiatus, The Woods was certainly Sleater-Kinney’s most sonically ambitious statement to date. The choice of Dave Fridmann as producer, whose name was more associated with lysergically-tinged alternative rock acts like Mercury Rev and The Flaming Lips than straight-ahead post-hardcore punk, was seen as a risky gamble by many. However, you only needed a cursory listen to ferocious tracks like ‘Jumpers’ and ‘The Fox’ to understand the logic behind their thinking. With a cavernous, booming bass sound generated through Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein’s guitars, The Woods sounded absolutely massive and yet was totally in keeping with Sleater-Kinney’s founding aesthetics. Unlike the short bursts of furious, melodious fem-punk energy that had made their reputation ten years earlier, tracks on The Woods frequently ran over four minutes in length, and, in the case of the show-stopping ‘Let’s Call It Love’, 11 minutes. It felt so much like the terminal point in a long musical journey for one of the most consistently brilliant guitar bands of the last 20 years. Thankfully, Sleater-Kinney are now back and recording again, but The Woods had been seen by many as the perfect musical epitaph. (LISTEN)

81. Low – Things We Lost In The Fire (2001) (Kranky)

The second of two Low albums to be produced by the great Steve Albini, Things We Lost In The Fire was the end point in a series of almost imperceptible evolutions in Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker’s sound. Albini’s trademark production added an almost reverential gravitas to the duo’s sparse, spectral musicianship, but shafts of light often penetrated the funereal gloom – the glistening melodies of ‘Sunflower’ and ‘Like A Forest’ and the power-chord driven ‘Dinosaur Act’ being the very best. New instrumentation such as trumpets, strings and samples folded themselves neatly into the songs’ structures – the striking ‘In Metal’ featured the tiny cries of Parker and Sparhawk’s baby daughter. In a decade in which popular culture moved faster than ever before, Low were a reminder that the best things are there to savour, and that it’s often only in stopping and looking around that you can see the wide-eyed beauty in life. Low’s unrelenting quest for purity has lasted more than 21 wonderful albums and EPs spanning more than two decades, but there has never been a more perfect expression of their vision for music than this. (LISTEN)

80. Beck – Sea Change (2002) (Geffen)

Inspired by the breakdown of his nine-year relationship with his fiancé, Sea Change could not possibly have been further from the indie/hip-hop mish-mash image that Beck had cultivated throughout the ‘90s. Heavy sampling and post-modern shape-throwing were out, live instrumentation and straightforward, personal storytelling were in, and almost all of the album’s suite of 12 studies in loneliness and emotional devastation were written in the space of a week. But it turned out that Beck could do simple and emotional just as brilliantly as bold experimentation, and Sea Change’s downbeat and often solemn atmosphere seemed to fit in perfectly to America’s post-9/11 national mood. Some tracks work themselves out into a kind of resolution or sense of moving on (‘Lost Cause’ in particular), but some are cries for help (‘Guess I’m Doing Fine’) or teetering on the brink of collapse (‘End Of The Day’, ‘Sunday Sun’). It was a mood he successfully revisited for 2014’s Grammy-winning Morning Phase, and its stature has grown exponentially since its release. (LISTEN)

79. The Go! Team – Thunder, Lightning, Strike (2004) (Memphis Industries)

Few things in 2004 were as refreshingly, thrillingly original as The Go! Team’s multi-coloured debut Thunder, Lightning, Strike. A genre-hopping, nostalgia-filled patchwork of sampling and live instrumentation was nothing new post-Odelay, but where Ian Parton and his garage-bound crew excelled was how tremendously fun they made the experience. Old TV cop shows, ’60s girl-group singles, trashcan percussion loops, cheerleader chants and twangy guitar chops, all mixed together by a production team that sounded like they might be suffering from a serious case of attention deficit disorder, switching moods and throwing in new elements seemingly every minute. Surely music with so many origins couldn’t possibly sound new, but it did. In a decade where lo-fi recording became a kind of fetishized lifestyle choice for some indie acts, it was great to hear something homemade recorded out of necessity, by people who had to get their music out one way or another. The seemingly constant re-issuing of ‘Ladyflash’, the song The Go! Team will always be remembered for, as late as 2006 eventually became tiresome for those who had been in on the ground floor, but it meant Thunder, Lightning, Strike became part of Britain’s sonic wallpaper for years. (LISTEN)

78. MGMT – Oracular Spectacular (2008) (Columbia / RED Ink)

Coming off like a college-bedroom project meeting big budget production, Oracular Spectacular was one of those brilliant moments where the stars align and all the hype turns out to be worth it, Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden’s debut as MGMT (they had previously made an album under the name The Management) was a kaleidoscopic marvel. Gracing every sub-genre they touched with their sense of playfulness and humour – from the R&B stoner haze of ‘Electric Feel’ to the ginormous, New Order-esque hit single ‘Kids’ and the Bowie/Flaming Lips cross ‘Weekend Wars’ – it was a runaway success, and a presence on the Billboard albums chart for more than two years. The post-modern hit ‘Time To Pretend’, listing the well-worn rock star clichés with a cynical sigh, showed the world that they were very different kinds of stars, greeting warily the superstardom that was rushing towards them. Though they deliberately alienated most of that fanbase with its follow-up Congratulations, a rather more difficult album that they probably needed to make to retain their sanity, Oracular Spectacular is one of the most brilliantly singular cross-over moments in indie of the new millennium. (LISTEN)

77. The Cribs – Men’s Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever (2007) (Wichita)

Having put in the hard yards with their first two albums, Men’s Needs, Women’s Needs, Whatever was the watershed moment for The Cribs, the point at which they soared when so many of their British post-Libertines counterparts from 2004 (The Futureheads, Razorlight, Maximo Park, etc.) were faltering or fading into irrelevance. Selecting Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos for production duties was a masterstroke – he left The Cribs’ songwriting and arrangements alone, but buffed out the group’s more shambolic musical tendencies to make something just a little cleaner and radio-ready. Added to that are a number of more American new-wave influences, from Weezer to The Cars, giving everything just that extra layer of professionalism. Side one of Men’s Needs… reads like a concentrated greatest hits: the razor-sharp riff of ‘Men’s Needs’; the middle finger to their contemporaries ‘Our Bovine Public’; the fully-rounded melodic glory of ‘Moving Pictures’ are among the best British indie tracks of the decade. Into side two, we get brilliant experimentation in the form of ‘Be Safe’, featuring a spoken-word part from a certain Lee Ranaldo from the group’s heroes Sonic Youth, and the elegiac acoustic moment ‘Shoot The Poets’. A perfect mixture of left-field guitar pop and excoriating punk wit, The Cribs delivered one of the best British guitar albums of the decade. (LISTEN)

76. Richard Hawley – Coles Corner (2005) (Mute)

When Arctic Monkeys inevitably strolled to the Mercury Music Prize in 2006, Alex Turner’s famous first words were “Someone call 999 – Richard Hawley’s been robbed”. It was Coles Corner to which he was referring, Hawley’s fourth studio album and one that had finally made the mainstream wake up to his extraordinary songwriting talent. Named after a landmark in Hawley’s native Sheffield where old and new lovers would meet in the ‘50s and ‘60s, Coles Corner was unapologetically retro, giving off the impression of a man inhabiting his dusty record collection of Hank Marvin, Johnny Cash and Scott Walker LPs. Crucially, however, this collection of timeless and achingly beautiful songs, marshalled by Hawley’s rich baritone, had real heart to go along with the vintage instrumentation and production. The lush, cinematic sweep of the title track and ‘Born Under A Bad Sign’, the Americana stylings of ‘Just Like The Rain’ and the brooding, majestic ‘The Ocean’ were just the very best moments in a wonderful collection that the listener can get hopelessly lost in. It’s incredibly rare for modern-day artists to pull off such a retro sound, but his disarming intimacy, his genuine care for such old-fashioned sounds, and total lack of bombast in his execution made Coles Corner the defining moment in Hawley’s long career. (LISTEN)