The 200 Best Albums of the 2000s
From M.I.A. to Four Tet, Kanye West to Joanna Newsom—and the many sides of Radiohead, too—here are the albums who defined the decade
When Radiohead’s Kid A came out on October 2, 2000, many people headed to a brick-and-mortar record store and handed over $16 in cash to buy the album on CD—and if they wanted to listen to it on the go, they popped that CD into a Discman. When the same band released In Rainbows in 2007, many of those same people headed to the internet and paid whatever they wanted, then listened to it on a computer file on their phone. Yet as the album became untethered from the physical world, it still remained the benchmark form for artists who aimed to make a lasting statement.
These artists included upstarts like Kanye West, Arcade Fire, and M.I.A., who expanded the realms of hip-hop, indie-rock, and pop (respectively) with their seismic early records. The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and TV on the Radio brought New York rock back to the fore, while British acts Four Tet and Burial explored the underside of electronic music. Animal Collective and Joanna Newsom let their freak flags fly to stunning effect. Broken Social Scene, Grizzly Bear, Sufjan Stevens, and Fleet Foxes expanded the indie-rock palette as LCD Soundsystem and Hot Chip made the dancefloor sweat. And speaking of Radiohead: They lived several musical lives throughout the decade, ranging from icy techno to acoustic lullabies, mirroring a time of flux and infinite possibility. So even as technology continues to advance—and we perhaps gain the ability to beam music directly into our brainstems—these are the 200 albums from the 2000s that we will still have on repeat.
A true sleeper phenomenon, Jay Reatard’s breakout record is still creeping up on critics and fans well after its release. Blood Visions is a crossover in the best sense of the term, stealing the raucous energy and attitude of punk, the melodies of power pop, and the rough ingenuity of bedroom recording. Reatard (née Jay Lindsey) uses everything at his disposal to make symphonies of the simplest parts: an impassioned yelp, an acoustic guitar, flying-V riffs, bitter (and occasionally violent) lyrics. All it took was a little bit of actual singing and mixing some melody in with the bile for him to stand up and be counted; but like the album’s cover, he’ll be covered in blood during the counting. –Jason Crock
Listen: Jay Reatard: “My Shadow”
“The modern-day composer refuses to die.” So said your parents’ very own modern-day composer Frank Zappa (quoting Varèse), and though countless haters will try to convince you otherwise, originality is always possible. Deerhoof are a case in point: the Bay Area quartet makes music that’s punk, but pop; noisy but pretty; thoroughly composed, but explosively performed. Apple O’ caught them at the tipping point between their noisier early days and the comparatively delicate art-pop of all of their records since. Like many of the best bands of the decade (Animal Collective, LCD Soundsystem, the Knife), Deerhoof makes immediately identifiable music with seemingly scores of imitators—yet, nobody else has managed to produce anything quite like “Sealed With a Kiss,” or the Ravel-esque “The Forbidden Fruits.” If musical hybrids fell like low-hanging fruit in the ’00s, Apple O’ was a ripe, early masterpiece. –Dominique Leone
Listen: Deerhoof: “Panda Panda Panda”
Listen to any random track from Akuma No Uta, and many influences pop to mind—Earth, Motörhead, Stooges, Blue Öyster Cult, Fushitsusha. But listen to the entire album in one long, rapturous sitting, and it’s hard to imagine it being made by anyone but Boris. Charging, smoke-filled, and raw, it’s the tonal opposite of Nick Drake, whose Bryter Layter album cover is recreated on the front. But just as Drake was devoted to gentle sounds and downbeat moods, Boris are obsessively committed to fuzzy riffs and heavy rhythms, whether deployed in long, shivering drones or fiery, chugging blasts. The album’s centerpiece, the swaying 12-minute jam “Naki Kyoku,” actually begins in a reflective mood not far from Drake’s melancholia. But, as on the rest of Akuma No Uta, Boris takes that inspiration and burns it away, leaving a trail of smoke rings that clearly spell the band’s name. –Marc Masters
Listen: Boris: “Naki Kyoku”
With the kind of crackling analog warmth a lot of listeners wish they got from Animal Collective, Yeasayer’s debut record established a demilitarized zone between some formerly opposite impulses: paranoid post-punk yelps and psychedelic, harmonized chants, noodly guitar riffs and ambient keyboard washes, electronic and acoustic instruments working in harmony. The end result is impossible to categorize, which in modern times of rampant pigeonholing might just be one of the best compliments you could give. –Rob Mitchum
Listen: Yeasayer: “Sunrise”
The four-volume set The Disintegration Loops came with an unusually compelling backstory: veteran multimedia artist William Basinski, attempting to digitize tape loops he’d made years ago, found the magnetic material in an advanced state of decay, which caused bits of music to disappear with each pass over the tape heads. So the sounds, hypnotic and magnificently textured in their own right, were literally falling apart and vanishing into the air as the pieces progressed, resulting in music that feels heavy with sadness and loss even as it feels spectral and weightless. Adding another layer of poignancy, the distressed tapes were transferred to digital around the time of September 11, and the Brooklyn-based Basinski created a DVD version of the project, setting the crumbling music to a static video he shot of smoldering Lower Manhattan, an image also used for the CD covers. Born of an unlikely convergence of time, place, and circumstance, The Disintegration Loops has lost none of its overwhelming beauty in the intervening years. –Mark Richardson
Listen: William Basinski: “Dlp 1.1”
The solemn strings that open “Love Comes to Me”—the first track on The Letting Go—indirectly echo the sumptuous opening of Schubert’s String Quintet in C Major, one of the most ethereal pieces of music ever written. Arranged by Nico Muhly, who is quickly becoming indie rock’s unofficial house composer, they signal the album’s feeling of grave finality, implied by the title and reinforced everywhere on the album, from the contented sigh of Will Oldham’s singing to the far-away backing vocals of Dawn McCarthy, who drifts in and out of the album seemingly at her own will. Drained of tension, suffused with wisdom and bottomless sadness, and graced by weary resignation, The Letting Go feels like the calm certainty of someone who has glimpsed the beyond. –Jayson Greene
After an awkward stage that lasted more than a decade, Pulp emerged in the 1990s as the oversexed life of the party. By the end of the decade, they were on the hellish taxi ride home. We Love Life picked up where This Is Hardcore left off, shaking off the hangover to face whatever comes next. Jarvis Cocker squints against the sunlight, going figuratively back underground on “Weeds” and literally underground to a river that flows beneath the city on “Wickerman.” His road to happiness is littered with death, sadness, heartbreak, and confusion, but there’s still room for a joke, and we get Pulp’s best on “Bad Cover Version.” The rest of the group and producer Scott Walker create a sumptuous atmosphere for Cocker’s journey toward a new life. He finally arrives there on the majestic closer, “Sunrise,” a rousing farewell for one of the most original bands of the last 30 years. –Joe Tangari
Listen: Pulp: “Bad Cover Version”
If New Weird America had actually existed, “This Is the Way” would have been its national anthem. The credo opens Devendra Banhart’s first proper and only essential album and immediately delivers attitude and confidence, declaring Banhart’s prerogatives as an individual (beards, sharing, nostalgia, nature) and his aspirations for overcoming the mundane and mute. Sure, Banhart picks his tinny guitar gingerly and offers his plain words politely, but he’s just a shepherd delivering a proclamation wrapped in sheep’s clothing: “We’ve known/ We’ve had a choice/ We chose rejoice,” he closes, rejecting everything but the brambly, uncertain path ahead. The songs that follow are guileless and spirited, as equally dependent on wry winks (“This Beard Is for Siobhan”) as uncloaked sentiments (“Autumn’s Child”). Michael Gira’s spartan production and strong editing distill the power of Banhart’s vibrato and vision while giving the songs the space such oddball beauties deserve. Simple and elegant, Rejoicing remains the jewel of the nebulous moment it led. –Grayson Currin
The world won’t listen. Four years after Art Brut (went for) broke, way too many bands are still doing it wrong. Turning their blandness up to 11 and hoping they’ll blend in enough to be anthemic. Expertly borrowing the styles of their heroes—whether that’s the Velvet Underground, Gang of Four, or, hell, the Shaggs—but sorely lacking the spirit. What spirit? Any spirit. Or playing it cool behind the microphone, as if on the off chance someone might hallucinate they have charisma. Like The Modern Lovers for a generation weaned on The Blue Album, Art Brut’s hugely fun debut projected frontman Eddie Argos’ Pulp-like wit onto ironically serious songs about art, girls, and endearingly personal neuroses—I still don’t get all the Italian references. For those about to form a band, they salute you. –Marc Hogan
Listen: Art Brut: “Formed a Band”
Sometimes it pays to know who you are: Air have mined their little vein of electronic music so fastidiously over the last decade that they’re now the de facto gold standard of new-age Gallic pop. Despite that standing, their carefully manicured and occasionally over-polite music tends to be respected by critics rather than revered. This might explain why Talkie Walkie slipped by relatively unheralded; with its baroque arrangements, shivery arpeggios, hushed vocals, and meticulous attention to other micro-sized details, Talkie Walkie remains a quiet masterpiece. Like Beck’s Sea Change, another occasionally maligned Nigel Godrich production, this is an acquired taste that impresses in slow drips rather than showy bursts. As opening trifectas go, though, they don’t come much lovelier than “Venus,” “Cherry Blossom Girl,” and “Run.” –Mark Pytlik
Listen: Air: “Venus”
Having completed the transition from acoustic bedroom folk to intricately orchestrated Beatlesque pop with 1998’s XO, Elliott Smith took a more understated approach with 2000’s Figure 8. Not quite as intimate as his earliest records and not quite brash and bombastic like its immediate predecessor, Figure 8 marks a subtle refinement of Smith’s songwriting skills. Figure 8 is notable for its confidence and its discipline—neither of which is a particularly flashy trait. But with this surer footing came deeper expeditions into the timeless gestural language of big-C Classic rock, making Figure 8 one of Smith’s most accessible and enjoyable records. –Matt LeMay
Listen: Elliott Smith: “Son of Sam”
Listen to Jamie Lidell’s earlier records—his aptly-titled solo debut Muddlin Gear or his Super_Collider work with Cristian Vogel—and you hear a playful yet restless Jack-of-all-trades trying to find his voice. Fast forward to 2005’s Multiply, and he’s found it: As Mark Pytlik notes in his Pitchfork write-up of the album, Multiply is most definitely reverential to its antecedents, and they’re often worn proudly on the sleeve of each track. Whenever Lidell makes a not-so-subtle gesture towards his R&B forefathers, he does so with a healthy amount of polite disrespect—Multiply is seasoned with enough electronic chicanery seamlessly integrated into the mix to remind folks that the record was in fact sharing discography space with equally individual talents like Aphex Twin and Squarepusher. And whether he’s vamping and squiggling like a young eager-to-impress Prince on “When I Come Back Around” or crooning like a heartbroken old soul on the album’s show-stopping closer “Game for Fools,” there’s no mistaking that Multiply is first and foremost a remarkable statement made by a remarkable artist. –David Raposa
Before he would construct dream-pop anthems out of John Hughes’ celluloid teen angst, Anthony Gonzalez (and then-bandmate Nicolas Fromageau) gave us this behemoth of sound. Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts is the biggest M83 record, leaving listeners—those poor flattened souls—pancaked in its wake. But for all of that weight, the distorted guitar-and-synth walls of run-to-your-grave epics “America” and “0078h” (which always seemed to me just as post-rock as they were shoegaze), there was real warmth to the album. The slower-paced, ethereal qualities of “In Church” and “On a White Lake, Near a Green Mountain” hinted at the romance of future M83 tracks. –Joe Colly
Listen: M83: “Gone”
On The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid, Adam Wiltzie and Brian McBride create a deep pool of drone so heavy that its gravity pulls in sounds around it, swallowing them whole. The band was having a bit of a laugh at its own expense with the self-deprecating album title—this was their seventh record of impossibly thick, slow ambience, and here they expanded their palette of timbres and stretched out over two full CDs to let each piece breathe as deeply as possible. Intense patience is a hallmark of any great drone music; Wiltzie and McBride have patience in spades and bring a designer’s detailed touch to every sound they make to craft an ambient opus that’s as welcoming as it is esoteric. –Joe Tangari
The Thermals’ third full-length is a cautionary tale about the dangers of a totalitarian, theocratic regime, and it could only have sprung from anger and frustration with the George W. Bush administration. The lyrical gravitas of religious iconography and damn-the-man slogans gave the Portland pop-punk band renewed purpose, but it could have been just more hot air if it wasn’t married to such incendiary riffs, sexy, throbbing basslines, and urgent, earnest melodies. Most recent protest music is pedantic and plodding, but with the Thermals’ joyously sloppy delivery and imaginative (and not-so-literal) storytelling, they revitalized the genre for a new generation. –Rebecca Raber
Scarface aficionados might question Facemob’s sole New York-focused Def Jam record as a representative of the artist’s best work. But if The Fix proves anything, it’s that Scarface is a world unto himself, the rare rapper whose utter musical weight, gravitas, and gravitational pull is so strong that an entire city’s aesthetic bends in his direction when he deigns to subsume it. What is so unique about The Fix is that, from a macro view, it doesn’t sound anything like a 2002-era corporate New York rap record, despite Kanye West’s perfect soul basslines and Neptunes guest production spots; Scarface’s lyrics are unchanged, the same stories from the South Side of Houston, the same engagement with the same drug game, the same unyielding honesty and unwillingness to sacrifice ideals. –David Drake
Listen: Scarface: “On My Block”
While the electronica push of the late-1990s was considered an epic fail well before 2000, it did accelerate the conversation between rock and electronic music. Over the next decade, the sequencer would become a common sight on rock stages, and a legion of DJs (especially the French) responded in kind by infusing house-music juggernauts with the hyper-distorted wallop of power chords. Daft Punk and Justice reveled in gloriously superficial properties of rock, the Aqua-Net, and motivational platitudes. But Vitalic was almost punk, going at his ring-modded synths and acid squelches as if they were his first Sears-catalog guitar. His peers want to inspire you, but sometimes, you worry Vitalic is trying to kill you. –Brian Howe
Listen: Vitalic: “My Friend Dario”
There’s a fine line when it comes to precociousness. Preteen geniuses? Adorable. Deeply cynical, shockingly self-aware 19-year-olds? Kind of a downer. Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner is the exception that proves the rule. He cuts the Holden Caulfield figure perfectly, moping around Sheffield and observing the Chav life. The Monkeys initially won freakishly enthusiastic acclaim for their clenched-fist stomp, raucous guitar attack, and sodden attitude on songs like “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor.” But what endures are the weary ballads. “Riot Van” is so elegant and detailed about the perils of the boys in blue it almost insists on soundtracking an Irvine Welsh novel. “When the Sun Goes Down” is scarily well-written—the type of song that sounds a million years old the moment it begins. Even the jaunty “Fake Tales of San Francisco” is drooling bile. Sometimes growing up too fast ain’t so bad. –Sean Fennessey
Listen: Arctic Monkeys: “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor”
Ben Jacobs had to use words. Crafty and clever as his earlier works were, he had more to say this time, and so he started writing pop songs—intricate and busy songs that balanced on a hair his OCD and his ADHD, but songs that were catchy and wondrous as well. He started to sing (and sister Becky pitched in). He wrote about temp labor, old vinyl, amino acids, and, oh yeah, girls. That was the best bit: Now he could sing about girls and crushes and love. In true British fashion, he brought a modest persona to rainbow-shredding music that charm the heart and overclocks the brain. There’s joy in every byte of his tunes: the joy of gazing at girls, and gazing at light-emitting diodes, and telling the world how glorious they both are. –Chris Dahlen
Listen: Max Tundra: “Lysine”
The world ends not with a bang or a whimper, but with a party. Between 2001 and 2003, Andrew Bird doused his Bowl of Fire, moved to a farm, and fell through the stylistic looking glass into a weird world entirely his own. The Mysterious Production of Eggs is the greatest statement to leak out of that world onto a record. Sheets upon sheets of plucked and bowed violin are joined by his singular whistle and painterly voice to frame homicidal personal ads, tales of children’s brains measured for defects, and musings on the long odds of biology. It’s thoroughly original, from the gentle lilt of “Sovay” to the tidal rush of “Fake Palindromes,” the eerie murk of “A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left” and the Ravel-quoting bounce of “Skin Is, My.” When it all caves in, Bird will be there to play amidst the rubble, and you should join him if you can. There will be snacks. –Joe Tangari
Listen: Andrew Bird: “Fake Palindromes”