Now, this isn’t technically a studio album and normally wouldn’t be eligible for a list like this, but any trip down memory lane in the noughties simply wouldn’t be complete without a mention of 2manydjs, the mercurial DJing alter-ego of Soulwax’s brothers David and Stephen Dewaele. Colliding a mixture of conventional remixes and incredibly inventive and often comical mash-ups of diverse artists, As Heard On Radio Soulwax pt.2 was the only official release commissioned in the long-running (and legally questionable) series of internet ‘bastard pop’ broadcasts and mixes that earned the Dewaeles a stellar reputation.
On this particular record, which is available to buy on CD but not housed anywhere on streaming services, Kylie met Kyuss, Dolly Parton met Royksopp, The Stooges met Salt ‘n’ Pepa and Destiny’s Child met 10cc in a highly entertaining and creative mega-mix of 45 songs squeezed into 30 tracks and just over an hour. Off the back of this reputation, the Dewaeles toured the world alongside their Soulwax Nite Versions project (see #142 in this list) for the best part of five years. While mash-ups and bastard pop now seem rather dated, it’s worth owning As Heard… for a physical artefact of a time when explicitly exhuming and manipulating music’s past seemed like the future.
A term as achingly trendy as ‘math-rock’ doesn’t even begin to describe what Battles do. Their music has always been so bugged-out that it almost defies categorisation, but as time has gone on, their debut album Mirrored seems to be becoming more and more influential on new bands entering the mainstream. Bizarre time-signatures, colossal yet complex drumming, and prodigious soloing all pushing the boundaries of what pop could be, Mirrored actually made experimental music fun, always knowing when to pull back from the brink of prog-rock excess as a result of a team ethos among the band members.
The brain-frying intro of ‘Race:In’, with spiralling washes of synth and frenetic, syncopated drumming from John Stanier, sets the tone for a breathtaking musical trip-out that makes you wonder why all pop music can’t show even a tenth of the ambition on display here. The bastardised glam-rock floor filler ‘Atlas’, the unquestionable highlight amid an already exceptional album, featured Tyondai Braxton’s digitised vocals sounding like a horde of pixies singing a playground song. Mirrored would be de-facto leader Braxton’s only album with Battles, and although the remaining three members have continued sporadically with two more quality albums since, nothing will ever be able to replicate the shocking originality of this puzzle-pop debut. (LISTEN)
Recorded over just two weeks and for just a few thousand pounds, Elephant has to be one of the most profitable rock albums ever made, selling millions around the world and sweeping awards ceremonies at the same time. Having previously stuck with their self-restricted palette of drums and guitar, Jack ‘n’ Meg introduced hitherto foreign elements, such as bass riffs and hints of keyboard, to expand their sound while retaining the critical raw elements. Self-conscious and vulnerable, sometimes painfully so (take the dramatic licence of ‘There’s No Home For You Here’, where White needs a mirror to speak to a girl), love is portrayed as a power struggle, where old-fashioned chivalry frequently loses out to raw, reckless passion, as seen in the delicate yet supremely powerful ‘I Want To Be The Boy To Warm Your Mother’s Heart’ or the sprawling ‘Ball And Biscuit’.
Fronted by the instantly recognisable riff of the Grammy-winning single ‘Seven Nation Army’ – long since adopted by sports fans as a terrace chant – it was an emotional tour de force set to the most adventurous music the duo had conceived of yet. A mixture of tenderness, eloquence and back-to-basics vitality that had been missing in much of the garage-rock revival of the early noughties, Elephant was the moment when an indie sensation became a global brand. (LISTEN)
After their career as dance act Sub Sub came to a devastating end when their studio burned down in 1996, destroying a completed album as well as £40k of gear, Manchester’s Doves quite literally rose from the ashes, with Jimi Goodwin and the Williams brothers Jez and Andy reinventing themselves with guitars rather than electronics. Their spectacular debut Lost Souls was a rock record that kept the spirit of dance music alive in its trance-inducing grooves and elongated structures, able to appeal to a much wider audience than they ever could before while acknowledging their past – its opening instrumental track, the gentle and mesmerising ‘Firesuite’, actually originated as the B-side to Sub Sub’s final single. In fact, the entire record at times seemed like a tribute to their home city’s rich musical heritage, boasting the raw musicality of The Smiths and the drug-fuelled hedonism of New Order.
But although it was claustrophobic and intense, with brooding soundscapes like ‘Sea Song’ and ‘Rise’ the most sombre moments, there was euphoria and redemption to be found amid the grimy, after-hours atmosphere created by Steve Osborne’s rich, layered production. This found expression in the cavernous, seven-minute break-up epic ‘The Cedar Room’, and the seductive melancholy of ‘Melody Calls’ and ‘The Man Who Told Everything’. Lost Souls was a slow-burning commercial success, got nominated for the Mercury Music Prize, and got the career of one of Britain’s greatest recent guitar bands under way. (LISTEN)
For their wittily-titled second album (referencing ‘the sophomore slump’, the American term for ‘difficult second album syndrome’), the now-defunct Grandaddy upgraded their dusty, country-tinged rock with flourishes of electronica, intelligently deployed throughout to make something truly distinctive. Sharing the same kind of thematic material and Y2K anxiety as Radiohead’s totemic OK Computer, The Sophtware Slump was an album populated by sad, broken robots (‘Jed The Humanoid’), displaced humans (‘Miner At The Dial-A-View’) and spoiled nature (‘Broken Household Appliance National Forest’), set to perfectly poised, heartbroken pop.
You would never suspect that its creator Jason Lytle, who steals the show consistently with his lonely, yearning vocals, recorded virtually the entire thing alone in a dusty barn in the middle of nowhere with only a cocaine habit to keep him going. The Sophtware Slump was a warning sign whose messages have only grown more prescient and alarming with time, detailing a near-future where progress and technology have only led to dislocation, disposability and alienation, which reminded us that mankind’s ability to invent often outstrips its wisdom to exist alongside those innovations. (LISTEN)
Having left fans and professional critics reeling from the success of his excellent debut The College Dropout, Kanye went one better and floored them with a knockout blow just a year later with Late Registration. He didn’t play around with a winning formula, choosing instead to take all the essential elements of its predecessor – the studio wizardry, the brilliant uses of strings and sampling, his distinctive and deceptively simplistic flow – and perfect them, to try to make The College Dropout seem like a first draft by comparison. Selecting bold samples from the history of black music, from Natalie Cole and Shirley Bassey to Bill Withers and Curtis Mayfield, he was inserting himself into the pantheon of greats.
This was the point at which Kanye became a superstar in his own right, with ‘Touch The Sky’ in particular representing a kind of victory lap, but he didn’t do it through self-aggrandisement alone as he still retaining the underdog qualities that made him so likeable on tracks like ‘Diamonds From Sierra Leone’ and ‘Hey Mama’, the latter dedicated to his mother. However, the likes of the tender yet angry ‘Heard ‘Em Say’ and the jazz-infused drum-loop based ‘Drive Slow’ also saw him make musical evolutions that provided clues as to the sounds he would adopt over the coming years. A legend had arrived. (LISTEN)
An artist for whom well-worn clichés like ‘quirky’ simply can’t begin to do justice, Joanna Newsom had arrived on the scene in 2004 with an accomplished and imaginative debut in The Milk-Eyed Mender, but few expected anything as breathtakingly original as what came next. Consisting of just five tracks over 55 minutes, with songs ranging from 7 to 17 minutes in length, Ys was fantasy-pop at its very finest, a self-enclosed alternate universe to escape to and immerse oneself in. Its recording and production process featured some of the most esteemed names and institutions in pop: Steve Albini recorded Newsom’s harps, her then-boyfriend Bill Callahan (Smog) contributed guest vocals, while Brian Wilson’s visionary collaborator Van Dyke Parks, responsible for arranging some of the Beach Boys’ best works, co-produced with Newsom and mixed with the help of Jim O’Rourke at Abbey Road.
But even with all these star names, her artistic vision was never compromised on this instantly timeless alternative classic. Despite the winding, labyrinthine arrangements, every detour and exploration on Ys felt necessary and never self-indulgent, with Newsom’s highly unusual and waif-like vocal style suiting the ornate arrangements perfectly. A magical kingdom that virtually defies accurate description – the quote “a medieval Kate Bush singing imaginary songs written by Hans Christian Andersen” is probably the closest anyone will get – Newsom gave us her career best at the age of just 24. (LISTEN)
One of the few British guitar debuts of the decade to actually live up to the hype, Silent Alarm has endured in a way that very few albums from Bloc Party’s revivalist contemporaries have over the subsequent decade. Mature and expansive beyond its years, it delivered on the promise of the group’s early EPs and was very quickly declared a modern classic. Lead singer Kele Okereke’s self-professed ambition to make a “technicolour” record that bridged the gap between indie and dance, where every track could be a single, led to an imaginative debut that paid homage to Bloc Party’s obvious influences while pointing a way forward for indie that can be heard in Alt-J, Friendly Fires and Foals. Paul Epworth’s spacious production and attention to detail rendered the four-piece’s melodies, rhythms and counter-rhythms in high definition – guitars shimmer and glisten, drums clatter in a frenzied whirlwind, and Okereke yelps with passion and urgency.
However, for every angular post-punk workout like ‘Helicopter’ and ‘Banquet’, there was an epic show-stopper like ‘So Here We Are’ or ‘This Modern Love’ aimed at the heart rather than the feet. Though it scanned as avowedly ‘indie’, Bloc Party’s dancefloor credentials were underscored by the subsequent release of a remix album (Silent Alarm Remixed). Though Bloc Party have continued to deal in excellent singles, they’ve never come close to replicating Silent Alarm’s intelligence and warmth on any subsequent album. (LISTEN)
The most surprising musical reinvention of the decade, by a distance, came from London five-piece The Horrors. Dismissed almost universally as a one-dimensional, cartoon-goth chancers in 2007 after their first album Strange House, two years later they turned in one of the most accomplished British guitar albums of the decade. Turning their gothic gloom into a billowing, psychedelic-rock drone, Primary Colours came across as The Cure playing My Bloody Valentine songs, which was actually an utterly logical musical transition rather than the result of an arbitrary change of direction. Created in Berlin under the tutelage of Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, the master of spine-tingling sonics, it was a thoroughly unsettling and sometimes nightmarish experience, like an LSD trip in the process of turning bad.
The likes of ‘Mirror’s Image’ and ‘I Only Think Of You’ built thick yet sharply rendered walls of distortion, but the production was so expansive and widescreen that Primary Colours never felt claustrophobic, even taking Faris Badwan’s dead-eyed baritone into account. The astonishing closing track ‘Sea Within A Sea’ was a blissful mixture of krautrock-oriented motorik rhythms and reverb-drenched shoegaze, and forced every music writer out there to acknowledge a totally unexpected metamorphosis that had delivered a minor masterpiece. Receiving a much-deserved Mercury nomination later that year, The Horrors have continued to go from strength to strength. (LISTEN)
With his band Sparklehorse, the late Mark Linkous engaged in the same kind of fantasy-pop as contemporaries like Mercury Rev and The Flaming Lips, his intensely vulnerable and affecting lyrics seeing the beauty and ugliness in the seemingly mundane. Though his ‘90s work is rightly celebrated, his third album It’s A Wonderful Life remains his crowning achievement. Tightening up the eclectic sprawl of previous album Good Morning Spider, Linkous channelled that creativity into more conventional, consistent structures. Bringing in outside collaborators for the first time, notably Dave Fridmann on production, as well as PJ Harvey, The Cardigans’ Nina Persson and a certain Tom Waits on backing vocals, Linkous crafted gossamer-thin soundscapes from mournful piano and crystalline acoustic guitar and wove a heavy payload of imagery from his troubled psyche into them.
As a result, graceful tracks like ‘Piano Fire’, ‘Eyepennies’ and ‘Apple Bed’ had the power to stun the listener into awed silence. Edgier, poppier songs came in the form of ‘Comfort Me’ and ‘King Of Nails’, giving sonic variety to the record and changing the pace at crucial moments. These strange and beautiful songs were too weird to be uplifting in any conventional sense, yet they were grounded in the most earth-bound sounds of any Sparklehorse effort up to that point. By far Linkous’s most direct and focussed work, It’s A Wonderful Life was the best album by one of the most underrated American songwriters of the last 25 years. (LISTEN)
One of the most memorable guitar debuts of the decade, Vampire Weekend justified the internet buzz that had surrounded them since 2006 with aplomb. A cross-cultural collision of a lot of ‘-pop’ prefixes – indie, chamber and Afro – they scanned like a product of their ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ times where hipsters move from one Hot New Thing to the next before an artist has even gotten a debut together. But the reason Vampire Weekend have lasted is simple: they have great songs. Although the songs were meticulously crafted and clearly the products of a tight, well-rehearsed musical unit, they just ripped through everything with such gleeful abandon that all traces of knowingness, arch irony and cynicism were blown away.
The bright, percussive production and syncopated basslines on tracks like ‘Mansard Roof’ and ‘Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa’, with African musical traditions treated with sensitivity and understanding, combined with Ezra Koenig’s charming lyrics about everything from grammar to architecture, make these tales of preppy New England privilege sparkle. The Afropop chanting, sharp guitars and Mellotrons of the riotous ‘A-Punk’ soundtracked movies, adverts and sporting events for years. Like an update of Paul Simon’s Graceland for the millennials, Vampire Weekend inspired a whole new wave of indie bands with the sounds of world music woven into its DNA. Accusations of cultural appropriation plagued them, both at the time and to this day. Which is a shame, because there were few instances of hedonistic guitar-pop being executed in a more skilful fashion than Vampire Weekend. (LISTEN)
In a decade when technological revolutions in pop happened more quickly than ever before, few incidents were as memorable as The Grey Album. A mash-up concept in which DJ and producer Brian Burton set a-cappella lyrics from Jay-Z’s The Black Album to re-tooled beats and music from The Beatles’ ‘The White Album’, the resulting 12 tracks were clamped down upon by EMI who attempted to halt distribution of the album on the grounds of copyright infringement – despite both Jay-Z and the two remaining Beatles giving it their blessing. It infamously begat ‘Grey Tuesday’, a 24-hour period of mass electronic civil disobedience when participating websites made the entire album free to download, a memorable middle finger to a copyright law structure lagging desperately behind the times.
Much more significant than that, however, is how enduring a vision The Grey Album remains – so many have tried similar experiments, but none of them were even close to being as good as this. The precision and craftsmanship involved were noticeable, with Burton’s ear for linking tracks up with each other, with results that were inspiring and revelatory rather than simply novel for their own sake, a problem that affected almost all mash-up projects. ’99 Problems’ with ‘Helter Skelter’? ‘December 4th’ with ‘Mother Nature’s Son’? Genius. Burton’s profile soared despite the illegality of the music, and made him one of the most sought-after producers in pop. (LISTEN)
After they were slated in some quarters for repeating themselves with their 1997 self-titled album, the somewhat diluted follow-up to ‘90s classic Dummy that had defined the fashionable term ‘trip-hop’ like nobody else, Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, Beth Gibbons and Adrian Utley vowed that they wouldn’t go over old territory again when they returned. Few could have imagined that it would take 11 years to happen, so when Third finally did arrive, the stakes were high for those who had put so much faith in their original output. Fortunately, this was a subtly different version of Portishead, one that chose pure, rough’n’ready musicianship over the polished loops and samples of their past, and in which no two songs sounded alike.
The skeletal, thumping beat behind ‘We Carry On’ spoke to a love of krautrock; the fleeting ‘Deep Water’ is a piece of nightmarish doo-wop played on ukuleles; the propulsive, insistent rhythm of ‘Silence’ spoke to something truly sinister. Best of all was the brutal cacophony of ‘Machine Gun’, which cleaved to a relentless, stuttering drum pattern and sounded like nothing else on this earth, a barrage of noise that might be a soundtrack to an alien invasion. Full of decaying analogue synthesisers, treated drum sounds and eerie electronics that provided the perfect space for Gibbons’ unearthly, stressed vocals to haunt, Third was a triumphant reinvention for one of Britain’s best electronic acts. (LISTEN)
Starting life as internet-dwelling digital noise terrorists, Canadian duo Crystal Castles eventually turned in one of the most influential debuts of the noughties, whose reverberations can still be detected nearly ten years later. Although it served as more of a clear-up operation for the first chapter of the band’s career than the result of one chunk of studio time – only three of the 16 tracks hadn’t been heard before – it was what Crystal Castles represented that was more important. Their synthesised sorcery proved to be extraordinarily versatile, varying between screeds of scrambled 8-bit feedback that sounded like 1,000 Game Boys being melted alive set to pounding house beats (‘Air War’, the brutal ‘Alice Practice’) and moments of surprisingly intense vulnerability on tracks like ‘Courtship Dating’ and ‘Vanished’.
To heighten the curiosity, it also revealed nothing about the band themselves. This was electro-punk as confrontational performance art, which forced you to have an opinion one way or the other. Frontwoman Alice Glass said as much at the time. “I like to piss people off… we want people to feel nauseous” she told the NME. Certainly, they had the desired effect when they supported Blur in 2009 during a boiling hot mid-afternoon set in Hyde Park, which I attended and remember as being the most divisive live spectacle I had seen. I was sold; virtually everybody else hated it. But they never abandoned pop just to make noise for the hell of it – a balancing act they would explore further on their next two records. (LISTEN)
Although his music under the moniker Four Tet is normally bracketed with IDM, Kieran Hebden has always displayed an ear for a conventional pop tune that has made his work much more accessible than that of some of his fellow laptop-artists. Bringing together elements of hip-hop, ambient electronica, jazz and folk and resolving them into alternately blissful and moody instrumental pieces, his third record Rounds was the best kind of experimental album: one that could offer something to everybody who came to it.
Perhaps this was the result of Hebden’s sister being invited to listen in to the recording process to tell him when he was getting “too geeky”, but the key to the record’s brilliance is the lack of fussiness in the arrangements, which unfurl and develop according to their own internal logic. As such, the blissful lullaby of ‘My Angel Rocks Back And Forth’ fits in the same musical tableau as the booming hip-hop beats of ‘As Serious As Your Life’ and ‘She Moves She’. The hyperspeed banjo strums of ‘Spirit Fingers’, in lesser hands, would be an irritant, but with Hebden it is both melancholy and transcendent. Rounds is a gorgeously understated yet cosy album to which a listener can retreat again and again – rarely has a purely electronic, instrumental record felt so warm and human. (LISTEN)
Having left the critics slavering with her 2005 mixtape-debut Arular, which was teeming with political energy, soundclashes and sonic invention, M.I.A. focussed on winning over the wider public with its follow-up. British-born but with Sri Lankan heritage, she again traded strongly on an outsider status to deliver a true melting pot of world music, digital noise and slick pop production, and her second masterpiece in a row. Reflected in the riot of colour on its front cover, Kala was of a piece with the whistle-stop tour of eclectic world sounds of its predecessor (it was named after her mother, where Arular was titled after her father) but this time refracted that through a pop prism, with the help of big names from the world of R&B and hip-hop, to make her intoxicating sonic cocktail more accessible.
The clattering sub-continental drumming and powerful basslines of back-to-back tracks ‘Bird Flu’ and ‘Boyz’ represented a lethal one-two combination, while the muscular dancefloor-filler ‘Jimmy’ featured prominent samples of Bollywood strings. Every track was a noisy, invigorating artistic success, with radical re-workings of rock classics like The Modern Lovers’ ‘Roadrunner’ for ‘Bamboo Banga’ and Pixies’ ‘Where Is My Mind???’ for ’20 Dollar’ showing the breadth of her appeal. The international class warfare of her massive hit ‘Paper Planes’, which sampled The Clash and featured booming gunshots and cash registers ringing, was the stand-out track and one of the most visceral party-starters of the decade. Though some felt it to be a victory lap for its acclaimed predecessor, Kala’s sound was again unique to M.I.A., and the point at which the rest of the world sat up and took notice. (LISTEN)
The UK has long had a rather curious sickness in its popular consciousness when it comes to ‘troubled stars’, with a bizarre symbiosis between the public’s insatiable appetite to see high-profile individuals take a fall from grace while simultaneously attacking media outlets for feeding us images and news that document those same declines. A nation of rubberneckers, we Brits just can’t seem to help ourselves. The late Amy Winehouse is the most prominent example of this phenomenon in recent memory, touched upon in the touching Amy documentary in 2015. But it’s worth remembering that, at the root of all the morbid fascination, was fantastic music.
In retrospect, Back To Black is irrevocably bound up with her personal demise – it’s difficult to hear ‘Rehab’ or ‘Addicted’ without thinking about it – but let’s try to remember it objectively. It won accolades for a slew of colourful, dignified and tuneful singles, but it was also a perfect transition from her debut, with all of the best aspects of her musical personality emerging not only intact but enhanced, polished by Salaam Remi and Mark Ronson’s classic production values. ‘You Know I’m No Good’ and ‘Me And Mr Jones’ were instantly timeless, inspired by Motown and ‘60s girl groups, and could have been made at any point over the last half-century. But it’s the spectral ‘Back To Black’, as intimate and vulnerable as the record’s simple artwork and detailing that pang of anxiety when you glimpse your old lover with a new beau, that stole the show. The second best-selling album of the 21st century in the UK, and the 13th of all time with figures of 3.58 million, Back To Black achieved a level of mass popularity that comes to vanishingly few. More importantly, it is a near-flawless musical document of one of the most talented voices of her generation. (LISTEN)
The result of a one-off collaboration between producer Madlib and rapper MF Doom, two of the most well-respected figures in underground hip-hop, Madvillainy was one of the most unique genre-specific albums of the decade. With 22 tracks squeezed into just over 46 minutes, it often felt like the sonic equivalent of an M.C. Esher illusion drawing, with the musical landscape shifting and twisting around the listener, with MF Doom’s extended vocabulary workouts leading you down unexpected paths and through trapdoors that took repeated listens to fully unpack.
While economy was vital in the structure of these vivid thumbnail sketches of sound, invention was an even more important watchword for the duo, as they adopted a commercially unfriendly approach with obscure lyrical flows and an almost complete lack of choruses. Seminal production techniques used by Madlib, using a smorgasbord of samples ranging from highbrow sources like world music to mass pop-culture references like ‘Street Fighter’ sound effects, met a thoroughly avant-garde lyrical flow from Doom that created a thrillingly unresolved tension throughout. Critics and bloggers absolutely loved it, with Madvillainy still holding the 10th highest Metacritic score of all time (93%), but more importantly it was clearly of a genetic lineage tying it to classic mainstream hip-hop albums of years gone by – in many ways, it felt like the last of its kind before the digitised production of modern hip-hop became prominent. More than ten years later, the world still awaits an official follow-up. (LISTEN)
Ten years on, Return To Cookie Mountain now seems like an inspirational wellspring for all manner of subsequent indie acts who have chosen to make something more sensual, cerebral and challenging than your standard guitar, bass ‘n’ drums rock template – Foals, The Maccabees and Wild Beasts in particular. Incorporating an actual drummer and bassist into their line-up for the first time meant that TV On The Radio’s sound was sturdier, capable of withstanding the weight of their complex musical ideas, in comparison to their slightly messy debut Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes which was made with a drum machine.
In-house producer and multi-instrumentalist Dave Sitek, in league with the compelling songwriting of vocal duo Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe, built these elongated tracks from loops and grooves that successfully fused soul, electronica and indie in some pretty stupendous musical concoctions, but even more noteworthy was how likeable it was. Most experimental musical experiences like Return To Cookie Mountain are usually merely impressive. But tracks ranging from the relatively conventional ‘Wolf Like Me’ to the disjointed, sighing funk of ‘I Was A Lover’, the twisted doo-wop of ‘A Method’ or the sprawling love-letter to urban decay ‘Dirtywhirl’ were made human through inventive arrangements and Adebimpe’s ability to communicate all types of emotion. Return To Cookie Mountain is an enduring, thrilling monument to TVOTR’s vision for what the ‘rock anthem’ can be. (LISTEN)
Formed at the Glasgow School of Art and heading up the second wave of British post-punk revivalism in the noughties, Franz Ferdinand presented themselves as the full package, a brand to consume, right from the start of their career. Everything from their claims to have never picked up guitars before, their sharp suits and sharper cheekbones, right down to their stylish, angular sleeve designs taking their cues from World War I-era propaganda and Bauhaus minimalism. The NME, of course, loved them at first sight, but Franz were to be no flash-in-the-pan as they delivered one of the classic guitar debuts of the noughties, packed with lethally sharp guitar hooks and knockout choruses inspired by bands like Gang Of Four, Talking Heads and Blondie.
Tales like ‘The Dark Of The Matinee’ and ‘Auf Achse’, of shyness and confidence, of finding the romance and drama in the mundane, contrasted with glamorous yet relatable tales of Saturday night braggadocio like the spectacular ‘Darts Of Pleasure’. They were intelligent and spectacularly flamboyant, yet accessible and resolutely non-elitist at the same time, a balancing act they’ve found much more difficult to achieve on subsequent albums. Franz Ferdinand also contained the band’s signature tune, the immortal indie dancefloor-filler ‘Take Me Out’, whose exhilarating amphetamine-rush intro, deceleration and release stands as one of the best songs about sexual tension ever. Clocking up platinum sales figures on both sides of the Atlantic and scooping the Mercury Music Prize, 2004 belonged to Franz Ferdinand. (LISTEN)
Tags: 2000s, classic album, Ed Biggs, feature, noughties, staff lists, The Top 200 Albums of the 2000s
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