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The 100 Best Albums of the 2000s

That something vital to pop discourse might be lost if full-length albums disappear should give pause as we dive headfirst into the 21st century’s gangly, awkward teenage years.

The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

Blame it on Shawn Fanning, the tanking economy, American Idol’s shaping of the pop market, or the way the mainstreaming of “indie” music resulted in increasingly insular, niche-oriented consumers: The biggest talking points about albums in the 2000s is the precipitous decline in sales and how record labels’ hemorrhaging profits impacted the way we interact with music. Perhaps the trend was part of a greater cycle, and the current singles-driven market will shift in favor of LPs after a few years. Given what a phenomenal decade the aughts were for singles, plus the advent of iTunes and file-sharing options, it’s understandable that consumers gravitated toward individual tracks. But the quality of the proper studio albums released over the last 10 years was anathema to the drastic plummet in sales: Limited attention spans or otherwise, audiences short-changed some exemplary music.

Like many of the decade’s finest films, the best albums of the decade shared a preoccupation with subverting conventions of narrative, plumbing the depths of society’s collective memory, blurring the lines between the personal and the political, and exploring the mechanics of how we construct personal identity. From the shameless escapism of the first 20-odd months of the decade, to post-9/11 disaffect and alienation, and then to a tempered, guarded sense of optimism, the best work of artists like OutKast, TV on the Radio, M.I.A., the White Stripes, Madonna, and Animal Collective served as a cultural barometer, reflecting the broader zeitgeist and the trends that informed collective beliefs and perceptions. Put more succinctly, the best albums of the decade did exactly what pop art is supposed to do. That something vital to pop discourse might be lost if full-length albums disappear should give pause as we dive headfirst into the 21st century’s gangly, awkward teenage years. Jonathan Keefe

Editor’s Note: Head on over to The House Next Door to see # 101 – 250.



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

100. Aimee Mann, Bachelor No. 2

Initially released through her website after she was dropped by Interscope, Aimee Mann’s finest hour both heralds the dawn of the music industry after new media even as she keeps her sound classic. Jon Brion’s production richly fleshes out the Bacharach-tinged melodies (and Bacharach’s occasional collaborator Elvis Costello co-wrote “The Fall of the World’s Own Optimist”), but the real star here is Mann’s witty, caustic lyrics. The album opens with Mann coolly asking a would-be suitor what his return policy is (“When you fuck it up later, do I get my money back?”), perfectly coupling Mann’s gorgeous, unforgettable melodies with her knack for a charming cynicism. Jimmy Newlin



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

99. Sinéad O’Connor, Faith & Courage

Christianity got a bad rap this past decade, and with the far right co-opting Jesus’s message and using it as an oppressive tool to control women, gays, blacks, Latinos, and science, it certainly earned its reputation. So it’s easy to forget that, in gentler, wiser hands, religion can be a tolerant and empowering device. Ten years ago, Sinéad O’Connor did just that with Faith & Courage, challenging the patriarchal pillars of her faith and proving that it’s possible to be spiritual and optimistic and still have a healthy amount of rage. Sal Cinquemani

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The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

98. Clipse, Lord Willin’

Kanye West may have definitively proved that backpack and gangsta rap can converge on a shared mainstream plane, but Clipse had been working on subverting the ties between those two since their first album, giving their lyrics an almost geeky focus on the specific commerce of drug dealing. Seasoned with just the right amount of guest appearances and snarky brio, these songs are clever and expressive while still resolutely single-minded. Production by the Neptunes, who honed their craft with exquisitely wafer-thin stagger-step beats, didn’t hurt. Jesse Cataldo



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

97. Bat for Lashes, Two Suns

Natasha Khan is unabashedly melodramatic and her music is at turns spacey and cavernous, but you never get the sense that you’re dealing with a flake. The Pakistan-born beauty’s sensuality tethered her sophomore effort, Two Suns, to something earthly and tangible. It helps that both the album is slightly more grounded than 2007’s Fur and Gold and that, by the end of the decade, pop music was inching closer to the fringe (the tribal “Two Planets” would make Kanye a fan if he isn’t already). PJ Harvey and Kate Bush are obvious points of reference, but Khan etched out a heady, haunting spot in the pantheon of female singer-songwriters that’s truly all her own. Cinquemani



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

96. Gorillaz, Gorillaz

As Gorillaz, Blur’s Damon Albarn hides behind characters invented by Tank Girl creator Jamie Hewlett, and in a way, you could say the music itself is a living, breathing comic book. Albarn’s influences span garage, pop, and hip-hop (rap interludes have found their way into the most celebrated singles, from “Clint Eastwood” to “Feel Good Inc.), and while the overall mood is downtrodden, it’s never sullen like Blur; like a cyberpunk movie, it’s futuristic and wistful all at once. That’s also thanks to the tight production work. A harmonica, a whistle, and a drum loop is all it takes to make even a low-key head-bopper like “Tomorrow Comes Today” ecstatic. Paul Schrodt



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

95. The Knife, Silent Shout

Putting a decidedly modern spin on the concept of “danse macabre,” Swedish duo the Knife pushed well beyond the set boundaries of dance music on their chilling sophomore album, Silent Shout. While much of the decade’s dance music leaned on its synthetic origins as a means to create an icy, detached remove, Silent Shout rejects that impersonal approach. Instead, the album teems with palpable menace, tapping into the violence found in the disconnection between society’s crippling dependence on technology and deep human emotions of fear, rage, and regret. Keefe

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The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

94. Goldfrapp, Felt Mountain

Released in 2000, Goldfrapp’s debut was either a signpost of trip-hop’s impending second wave or the last masterpiece to come out of a movement that began a decade earlier. Sadly, it seems it was closer to the latter, signaling the end of the genre’s creative peak. But oh what a lofty peak Felt Mountain was. Namesake Alison Goldfrapp’s voice is at turns evocative of Shirley Bassey, Portishead’s Beth Gibbons, and any number of French-pop chanteuses from the ’60s, while Will Gregory’s lush, orchestral arrangements swing effortlessly between vaudeville and something from Rosemary’s Baby. Cinquemani



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

93. Hot Chip, The Warning

People tend to remember this album for its hits: the stone-cold Party Jam “Over and Over” and “(Just Like We) Breakdown” and its monumental DFA remix. But the album tracks are all aces too, representing the band’s most successful attempt to reconcile its opposing poles: weepy, white-boy soul and dorky prankster disco. Just listen to the title track, a cooing lullaby flush with skittering subliminal percussion and twinkling ascending synths and a lyric that endears and takes the piss in equal measure. Sly, wry, and persuasive, it sneaks up on you slowly before smacking you upside the head with a perfectly nursery-sized synth rush. One punch and you’re floored. Dave Hughes



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

92. Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere

Cee-Lo squeals on the opening track of St. Elsewhere as if he were a jack unleashed from his box, courtesy of the gorgeously propulsive force of Danger Mouse’s winding backbeats. The funkiest and most spontaneous of pop records, about hot topics as wide-ranging as suicide and receiving good head, Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere libidinously slaps Cee-Lo’s bizarrely infectious and soulful vocals atop Danger Mouse’s cool experiments in sound to create a marriage of styles that isn’t perfect so much as perfectly fun. Ed Gonzalez



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

91. The Shins, Chutes Too Narrow

The Shins’s debut, Oh, Inverted World, was a pleasant enough set of anti-rock songs that evoked 1970s AM radio, but despite what Zach Braff’s Garden State claimed, it was far too mellow to really change any lives. Follow-up Chutes Too Narrow, on the other hand, explodes with twee exuberance: Opener “Kissing the Lipless” starts with a Neutral Milk Hotel punk-folk strum before moving toward a shrieked, psychedelic chorus. Chutes’s songs are delightful, but they’re also jagged, making for one of the most interesting about-face sophomore records in recent memory. Newlin

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The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

90. Erykah Badu, Worldwide Underground

Upon the release of Santogold’s debut album, Touré anointed her America’s first “post-black” artist. Erykah Badu hews closer to the soul of what she proudly calls “my people,” but no recent singer has more defiantly and fascinatingly refused racial or aesthetic categorization. Worldwide Underground is a rapturous riff on the music that inspires it, full of flabbergasting digressions that deepen upon further listens, like the 11-freaking-minute-long “I Want You,” a pulsating pant akin to an extended orgasm every bit as hot as Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You Baby.” Schrodt



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

89. Radiohead, In Rainbows

When it was released (pay what you want OMGZ!!), a lot of commentary on this record focused on how it was Radiohead’s most accessible work in years, which tells you a lot about how far the band has managed to move the goalposts of accessibility. After a decade’s worth of provocations and obscurantist (if also frequently genius) experimentation, even an album bookended with the flanged, ultimately compromising minimalism of “15 Step” and the shuddering, forbidding “Videotape” seemed like inviting in comparison. Especially as it included the band’s most generous ballad since The Bends in “Nude.” It wasn’t full of their biggest ideas, but small can be beautiful too. Hughes



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

88. M. Ward, Transfiguration of Vincent

Transfiguration of Vincent is inveterate recycler M. Ward’s most enjoyable collage: gorgeous Ry Cooder-esque guitar work, haunting vocals reeking both of Portland fog and Delta dust, and shuffling bluesy songs that dance from the ditch to heavens. There’s also an imagining of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” as a plaintive lullaby. The album is as disciplined as a graduate thesis while being as wild as a hootenanny, which has always been Ward’s special skill, but it’s never as perfectly rendered as it is here. Ward may be correctly tagged as a sepia-toned regurgitater, but damnit is he ever good at singing like a ghost. Wilson McBee



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

87. Missy Elliott, This Is Not a Test

Though the album didn’t really live up to its war-meets-blaxploitation cover art, Missy Elliott came off like the Ntozake Shange of hip-hop on This Is Not a Test!, waxing poetic on the state of the genre on the first couple of tracks and then sounding like a 21st-century post-feminist on songs like “Toyz” and “Let Me Fix My Weave.” Because in times of war and exploitation, sloppy sex, self-gratification, and good hairpieces are what truly matter. Cinquemani

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The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

86. The National, Alligator

The decade’s ultimate example of a “grower,” the National’s third album Alligator was released to relatively little exposure in the spring of 2005. The record was a kind of a phenomenon by the end of the year, though, after the band won fans the analogue way while on a semi-infamous tour with Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, and most of the listeners who were at first put off by Matt Berninger’s moody baritone eventually found it to be a voice of poetic power. Thus, “I’m a birthday candle in a circle of black girls” is the kind of lyric that, taken out of context, appears a dark joke, but set against the landscape of Alligator’s white-collar desperation it becomes the “I am Spartacus” of the drunk man’s cubicle. McBee



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

85. Songs: Ohia, Magnola Electric Co.

Jason Molina’s last and best work under the Songs: Ohia moniker, Magnolia Electric Co . fittingly opens with the nearly perfect “Farewell Transmission,” an aching distillation of the album’s air of routed sadness. The resolute bleakness presented by Molina reaches some of its deepest points on Magnolia, his voice crackling with despair, lonesome notes arcing coldly into infinity. Even the songs he doesn’t sing—like the Merle Haggard-inflected “Old Black Hen,” and Scout Niblett’s perfectly off-key “Peoria Lunch Box Blues”—ache with that same transposed sorrow. Cataldo



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

84. Ryan Adams, Heartbreaker

With collaborations with Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, and Emmylou Harris on his résumé, Whiskeytown’s Ryan Adams was already established as pretty hot shit in the alt-country scene when he cut his first solo album in 2000. But Heartbreaker has all the sass and brilliance of a great debut and every minute—from the just-gone-electric Dylan howling of “To Be Young (Is to Be Sad, Is to Be High)” to the extraordinary ballad “Come Pick Me Up”—rings with promise. Adams’s later output has been spottier, but Heartbreaker announced one of the decade’s finest songwriters. Newlin



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

83. Joanna Newsom, The Milk-Eyed Mender

Joanna Newsom may have gone from dressing like an elf and dating Bill Callahan to posing in Vogue and dating Andy Sandberg, but the power of her bizarrely beautiful debut has not receded one iota. The music here is among the decade’s most adventurous, from the archaic style of lyrics to the plucking of harp strings to the infant-like warble of Newsom’s unique vocals. Unlike a lot of freak-folk that was popular during the same time period, though, there is some real meat beneath Newsom’s fairy-world razzle dazzle, partially proven by the fact that songs off Milk-Eyed Mender have been covered by people like Final Fantasy, M. Ward, and the Decembrists. McBee

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The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

82. Damian Rice, O

Not to take anything away from Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, whose lilting, emotive Irish folk-pop elevated the otherwise pedestrian love story of Once, but Damien Rice and right-hand woman Lisa Hannigan covered the same territory on Rice’s debut record, O, with far greater depth. Documenting each phase of a doomed relationship, from its lust-fuelled origins to its crushing, death-wish aftermath, O is a heady meditation on the nature of romance, with Rice and Hannigan demonstrating a real mastery of melody, arrangement, and dramatic scope. Keefe



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

81. Kristin Hersh, Learn to Sing Like a Star

I had never listened to Throwing Muses when I first heard Kristin Hersh’s Learn to Sing Like a Star, my first foray in what became a love affair with her and Tanya Donelly’s music. Hersh does not tread lightly: “Put a rock into my brain,” she sings unceremoniously at the beginning of “Nerve Endings,” one of many songs that deal with the singer’s personal psychodrama (a kind of living performance art). It’s hard not to love if you grew up listening to the Top 40 versions (Fiona Apple, Alanis Morissette), but like Apple’s own Extraordinary Machine, Learn to Sing also counts among Hersh’s most accomplished musically: Acoustic guitars and swooning strings give “In Shock” and “Ice” thrilling, lived-in texture. Schrodt



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

80. The Cardigans, Long Gone Before Daylight

Sexual politics are fascinatingly evoked in telephone calls, horse races, and war on the Swedish group’s fifth album Long Gone Before Daylight. “You’ve been aiming at my land/Your hungry hammer is falling,” Nina Persson sings without any hint of cheekiness on “You’re the Storm,” which could be the soundtrack to Neve Campbell’s character in When Will I Be Loved—a vixen who’s also a slave to her vagina. The subdued music, almost country, puts Persson’s potent heartache front-stage, where it belongs. Schrodt



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

79. Goldfrapp, Black Cherry

It may not have started the electro-pop revolution, but Goldfrapp’s second album made disco and new wave revivalism cool again. Of course, without Debbie Harry, there would be no Alison Goldfrapp, but without Black Cherry, there might be no Annie, Little Boots, or Sally Shapiro—what with its sleek, airbrushed synths and artfully braindead lyrics (“Touch my garden…all day long”). But the grumbling bassline of “Strict Machine,” the group’s enduring club classic, proves that even though they’ve since steered away from the dance floor, no one worships it with as much sheer force as Goldfrapp. Schrodt

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The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

78. Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man, Out of Season

It might’ve seemed ill-fitting that the Portishead frontwoman would go on to record a folk record. But Beth Gibbons was always miscast as a grunge goddess—her lyrics are more elegiac than angsty—and she’s perfectly at home in the warmth of these songs, which are more straightforwardly tinged with the jazz that influenced Portishead’s first two albums (Gibbons is a dead ringer for Billie Holiday on “Romance,” another example of her remarkable tonal range). These songs offer a more direct, almost umbilical connection to the singer’s inner consciousness and deep despair. Schrodt



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

77. Loretta Lynn, Van Lear Rose

Forty years into a career that had already earned her legendary status, Loretta Lynn finally released an album on which she sounds comfortable. Her rough-and-tumble narratives and feisty, powerful vocal performances fit perfectly into producer Jack White’s stripped-down aesthetic, making for a harmonious and critically dense match between form and content. White’s authenticity fetish sometimes results in over-reaching, but on Van Lear Rose, he managed to come up with an album that stands as career-best work for both himself and for the woman he’s called “America’s greatest songwriter.” Keefe



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

76. Panda Bear, Person Pitch

In a decade that brought us a plethora of great ambient records, Person Pitch reigns supreme for its nerdy sense of repetition, overlapping textures, and grandiose symmetry, but also for its surprising bursts of soulfulness. Even in the Badalamenti-style dread that closes the magisterial “Comfy in Nautica,” Noah Lennox’s influences are almost impossible to detect: From the Beatles and Nina Simone to Aphex Twin and Kylie Minogue, he creates a highly personal, kaleidoscopic vision from the album’s shape-shifting triumphs small (“I’m Not”) and large (“Good Girl/Carrots”) to evoke a dreamer traveling through life and experiencing its wonders and horrors high off the sense of possibility. Gonzalez



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

75. The Hold Steady, Boys and Girls in America

If the Hold Steady were only about their stuck-in-your-head melodies paired with arrangements that sound like a classic-rock radio station exploding, Boys and Girls in America would still be one of the most deliriously enjoyable albums of the last decade. Craig Finn’s drunken grumbling about literature, rock, and an expanding cavalcade of fictionalized losers with curiously epic names like Charlemagne and Hallelujah cements it as one of the greatest. With some obvious nods to Springsteen and Thin Lizzy, Boys and Girls is an absolute firecracker of an album that sounds like the world’s greatest cover band trying to do their influences one better—and coming really damn close. Newlin

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The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

74. Vampire Weekend, Vampire Weekend

A year ago, my Slant colleague Dave Hughes nicely summed up the racket over Vampire Weekend’s debut by calling it “the best album about which to have stupid, pointless arguments in 2008,” and as the heated discussions about colonialism, preppiness, and cultural appropriation renew their engines amid the release of the band’s follow-up, it’s worth remembering that the original fire-starter still sounds fresh, smart, and engaging. Some people may never be able to get over the considerable stumbling blocks to enjoying this record, but for the rest of us, Vampire Weekend are simply responsible for one of the most enjoyable slices of clean, mannered guitar-pop this side of Orange Juice. McBee



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

73. Sigur Rós, ( )

Its threshold for suspension of disbelief may be uncommonly high for a pop record, but Sigur Ros’s ( ) makes up for its pretentious gimmickry with its nearly peerless degree of songcraft. With their subversion of traditional notions of “pop” and their insistence that meaning is the sole domain of the individual listener, the band may be the ultimate one-trick pony. And ( ) is perhaps the finest execution of that trick, an uncommonly beautiful song cycle that offers no limitations on possible interpretation. Keefe



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

72. Aaliyah, Aaliyah

From the time she was a teenager, Aaliyah had a distinct talent for collecting talented producers (R. Kelly, Timbaland, Missy Elliott) and labels (Jive, Virgin) like furniture. And on Aaliyah, she was able to use those collaborations to create her own sound, a smoldering, sophisticated, and decidedly adult R&B. She lets Timbaland guide, not hijack, the album (he only produced three tracks, one of them being the standout lead single “We Need a Resolution”), but what’s most memorable today is the voice of Aaliyah herself, who had long ditched teen coquettishness for a slinking sexiness (“We can be like Bonnie and Clyde”) that only hinted at the full-blown artist she might have been. Schrodt



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

71. LCD Soundsystem, Sound of Silver

Because my hopes of making a case for Brian Eno’s Another Day on Earth as one of the most tragically underrated triumphs of the last decade were dashed, I come to Sound of Silver—so lovingly indebted to both Eno and David Byrne’s experiments in sound—with a bit of a wounded heart. It’s a less personal and risky record than Eno’s, but the marriage of James Murphy’s playfully summersaulting dance-rock beats to his intriguingly, almost pathologically detached vocals (he sounds like the cagey little brother of Art Brut and Zooropa-era Bono) still stuns, especially on the haunting wonder of “Someone Great.” That song alone is enough to mend a wounded heart. Gonzalez

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The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

70. Jill Scott, Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Vol. 1

With Who Is Jill Scott? Words and Sounds Vol. 1, the Philly soulstress simultaneously posed the titular question and answered it. She is a poet. She is a singer. She is a lover. She is a fighter. She is a woman. Aside from being the best R&B debut of the decade (and one of the best R&B albums of the last 10 years, period), it also produced one of the decade’s sexiest lyrics: “Love slipped from my lips/Dripped down my chin/And landed in his lap/And us became new.” Cinquemani



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

69. Radiohead, Hail to the Thief

Hail to the Thief may be the red-headed stepchild of aughts Radiohead albums, but there are plenty of rock records that wish they could be so disrespected. The truth is that had this album been released by any other band, it would have been a watershed event, and even now, its prescient anger (“2 + 2 = 5” is a spine-tingling prediction of the Bush administration’s illogic and criminality) and disjointed, cavernous rawk (“There, There” and “A Punch Up at a Wedding” could have been blueprints handed to the Brooklyn indie heroes of recent vintage) make it as good a representative of the decade’s efforts in art-rock as any of the more notable Radiohead albums appearing elsewhere on this list. McBee



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

68. The White Stripes, White Blood Cells

Scooped up in the weird garage-rock revival of the early aughts, which entangled any band pushing across the slightest element of grit, White Blood Cells showed something different, inhabiting a deeper, weirder focus, blowing up blues tropes to a massive level. Yet all this was conveyed with a continued sense of strange minimalism, the willfully simple drum beats, the slim, messy compositions, skipping the Led Zeppelin influence, a seemingly mandatory ingredient of blues revivalism, and heading straight back to the source. Cataldo



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

67. Patrick Wolf, The Magic Position

The Magic Position was a decisive move away from both the avant-garde indie-rock of Patrick Wolf’s debut and the slightly more accessible but still dour Wind in the Wires. The first words on the album, “It’s wonderful what a smile can hide,” might sound cynical, but Wolf goes on to ask “Don’t you think it’s time?” with all the wide-eyed optimism of someone ready to embark on life for the very first time. Wolf would venture back into darker territory on The Bachelor, which reprised and even perfected some of the narrative themes and structures he began exploring here, but Magic is, from start to finish, nothing short of magical. Cinquemani

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The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

66. TV on the Radio, Dear Science

Following up the moody and muddy Return to Cookie Mountain with the lush, polished Dear Science helped further cement TV on the Radio as one of the most exciting rock bands on the planet. Dave Sitek’s production is cleaner and tighter than on the band’s earlier work, but the grooves here are no less adventurous or exciting. Still, TVOTR is a vocalists’ band: Kyp Malone’s growl brings not sexy but fucking back on the gritty “Red Dress,” while Tunde Adepimbe’s range-defying vocals shine like a diamond from the ecstatic opener “Halfway Home” to the gorgeous “Love Dog,” which melds Brian Eno-looping with Curtis Mayfield-falsetto. Newlin



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

65. Miranda Lambert, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

The most singular artist to emerge from Nashville since the Dixie Chicks exploded onto the scene a decade earlier, Miranda Lambert solidified her status as a country music legend on-the-make on her outstanding sophomore album, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Boasting the depth of thematic coherence and critical fecundity rarely found on country records, Ex-Girlfriend’s whip-smart balance of traditional know-how with genuinely progressive pop smarts raised the bar for all contemporary country acts and, just as significantly, allowed Lambert to develop an artistic persona of exceedingly rare complexity and intelligence. Keefe



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

64. The Shins, Oh, Inverted World

Thinking about how this album sounded before Natalie Portman got her sexy paws around its neck and nearly killed it for you may be too much of a challenge, but try anyway: Those Brian Wilson-worthy melodies that move around the brain with mathematical precision and effortless charm, the unpolished accompaniment, James Mercer’s nervous vocals like a sheltered monk who just discovered his world-altering set of superpowers. It was the album you took pleasure rooting for, shoved it in the face of every sensible music fan you knew until it no longer needed your help and it was just out there taking care of itself, and you were another dope among millions, bewitched by the power of pop. See? There, I did it. McBee



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

63. Hercules and Love Affair, Hercules and Love Affair

Hercules and Love Affair was a brilliantly conceived and calibrated re-contextualization of some of the most idiosyncratic and impressive yet overlooked facets of the last couple of decades of American music: garage disco, Chicago house, Antony Hegarty’s protean, smearing voice. But more than an inspired critical project, it was also an album! A gently paced, easy-to-digest, completely solid album punctuated by two fantastic singles (“Blind” and “You Belong”), and one which stands as the most consistent LP released by the decade’s most consistently necessary label, DFA. Hughes

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The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

62. Animal Collective, Merriweather Post Pavilion

It’s tough to make a case for an album that’s just a year old as being one of the best albums of the last 10 years, but Animal Collective’s landmark Merriweather Post Pavilion immediately cast itself as an album that will surely rank among the most influential records over the coming decade. A structural marvel that is as soulful as it is topical, Merriweather is simply beyond the capabilities of the vast majority of modern bands and stands as a challenge to be met by the next generation. Keefe



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

61. Yo La Tengo, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out

Only a group as brilliant, adventurous, and, uh, old as Yo La Tengo could release an album that’s both a make-out album for married people and one of the coolest things you’ve ever heard. Copping song titles from Pynchon, The Simpsons, and Whit Stillman, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out might have been a hipster’s vapid, self-referential mess in lesser hands. But sleepy cellos and keyboards supporting Ira Kaplan’s always-terrific guitar work and some of the most romantic lyrics cooed so far this century instead make for an album as beautiful as the Gregory Crewdson cover art. Newlin



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

60. Belle and Sebastian, Dear Catastrophe Waitress

Arguably the decade’s greatest comeback album, Dear Catastrophe Waitress saw the Scottish chamber-pop innovators escaping their late-’90s slump for an open pasture of upbeat, rollicking fun. It was if Stuart Murdoch and his colleagues finally realized they could never recapture the somber, fey magic of Tigermilk and If You’re Feeling Sinister and decided to start over from scratch, digging into glam guitars, bubblegum keyboards, and a committed devotion to AM gold and retaining only the band’s most important characteristic: brilliant, character-based songwriting. McBee



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

59. Ghostface Killah, Supreme Clientele

I guess if you put a gun to my head and demanded I give you my favorite line from Ghostface Killah’s Supreme Clientele, I would probably choose “Lightning rod fever heaters, knock-kneeder Sheeba for hiva,” off the album’s incendiary opening track, “Nutmeg.” But almost immediately I would be begging for a correction. No, no, “Scooby snack Jurassic plastic gas booby trap” instead, from “One.” Or wait, what about “Milk on my mustache, drop to my chiny-chin” from “Stroke of Death”? Okay, okay, it has to be “Supercalifragalisticexpialidocious/Dociousaliexpifragalisticcalisuper” at the end of “Buck 50.” Point being, the album offers up such an embarrassment of literary riches, supported by a dais of soul samples, that even thinking about it in the abstract sends the mind spiraling down Ghostface’s unique poetic vortex. McBee

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The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

58. Silver Jews, Tanglewood Numbers

Partly about his own struggles with substance abuse (“K-Hole”) and suicide attempt, David Berman’s always-brilliant lyrics reached a fever pitch with this shaky masterpiece. Populated with quirky characters (“My ex-wife’s living in the suburbs with her guru and her mom”), haunting aphorisms (“Time is a game only children play well”), and mystic experiences (“I saw God’s shadow on this world!”), Berman’s words drill through his rawest, most rollicking songs since the Joos’s first lo-fi experiments with a nerve that’s as exciting as it is devastating. A uniquely powerful record. Newlin



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

57. Carina Round, The Disconnection

In his Consumer Guide, “Dean of Rock Critics” Robert Christgau described Carina Round’s The Disconnection, on which the songs stutter and spit and entirely change direction with such abandon that it’s nearly impossible to feel entirely comfortable listening to it unfold, with a single throwaway line: “The Kate Bush of PJ Harvey.” But why let the full scope of Round’s influences get in the way of a chance for some juvenile, verbless wordplay? Keefe



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

56. Kleerup, Kleerup

Andreas Kleerup, the man who produced wonders for Robyn and Cyndi Lauper in the last decade, crafted for himself a soaring space odyssey guided by compulsive electronic beats and lilting vocal performances by divas young (Lykke Li on “Until We Bleed” and Marit Bergman on the equally infectious “3AM”) and old (have mercy for Neneh Cherry). Easily among the great collections of electro-pop balladry ever produced, Kleerup uses the beauty of a perfect harmony and a hypnotic synth to remind us of the horrible twinge of a broken heart. Gonzalez



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

55. The Streets, A Grand Don’t Come for Free

If Original Pirate Material pushed things forward, A Grand Don’t Come for Free pushed them over the edge. Birminghap rapper Mike Skinner applies his innovative mix of garage and hip-hop to the story of a bummed-out, heartbroken protagonist who sits on his couch all day “roaching a spliff.” Like the blue-collar Brits he rhymes about, Skinner suggests that his music must be taken on its own terms: The stoner humor and thumping guitar hooks of “Fit But You Know It” serve as a counterpoint to “Dry Your Eyes,” the most devastating breakup song of the decade, but it’s the sum effect that makes Grand a masterpiece, that rare kind of concept album that works as sonic experiment and social commentary. Schrodt

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The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

54. Missy Elliott, Under Construction

The backward-looped vocal hook on “Work It” may have gotten the bulk of the attention on Under Construction, but that wasn’t the only thing Missy Elliott flipped over the course of the album. Making a case that she exerted more control over her sound and her persona than any other act in commercial hip-hop, Missy overturned the genre’s sexual politics with a real sense of ferocity and vision. That she and partner-in-crime Timbaland did so with perhaps their oddest collection of hooks made Under Construction a record that neither has been able to top since. Keefe



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

53. TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain

Following the fuzzy, off-kilter allure of Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, TV on the Radio did something slightly unexpected, getting bigger, faster, catchier, and maximizing both their sound, literally and figuratively, and their audience, fine-tuning all the elements that made that previous album a success and adding a persuasive sense of newfound energy. A song like “I Was a Lover” uses the same prototypical formula as those on their first album but is invariably richer and more tightly executed, resulting in a series of firm songs that’s enviably short on filler. Cataldo



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

52. Kanye West, The College Dropout

Who says rap can’t be insecure and hopelessly neurotic? Kanye West proved the possibility of this kind of finicky introspection without losing a hint of swagger, hopping from big issues to self-involved bluster, always with one eye on the mirror, second-guessing himself all the way to the top. Before the ego-infused outbursts, before the anti-academic motifs became hopelessly stale, The College Dropout found West as a relatively blank slate, as well as the first rapper to score a hit single with his jaw wired shut. Cataldo



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

51. Eryka Badu, Mama’s Gun

Recorded at the same time as her fellow “Soulquarian” D’Angelo’s Voodoo, Mama’s Gun came out when the neo-soul movement was at its most innocent, when Aaliyah was still alive and the music was made between friends messing around. The arrangements are surprisingly spare for an artist known to flaunt her experimental side, but more surprising is the frankness with which Badu lays her emotional problems bare. “Guess I was born to make mistakes,” she sings on “Didn’t Cha Know,” “but I ain’t scared to take the weight”—proof that even when she’s playing the sensitive sister, she’s still got bite. Schrodt

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The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

50. Brian Wilson, Smile

Worth the wait of three decades? No, but what album could be? The even-better-but-how successor to Pet Sounds it was long rumored to be? Sadly, no, but that level of expectation would crush almost any album. Entirely successful as a teenage symphony to God? No, but Brian Wilson is hardly a teenager, so the question is somewhat unfair. Better than the various bootlegs and compilations put together by the die-hard contingent over the years? Probably not. Still among the finest and most meticulous, most sophisticated pop albums in history? And then some. Keefe



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

49. Justin Timberlake, FutureSex/LoveSounds

It’s debatable, but this is probably the best Timbaland album ever. Sure, he’s had more technically talented (Aaliyah) and insanely creative (Missy) collaborators, and some of his other projects exude more raw originality (Bubba Sparxxx’s Deliverance). But this is the album most representative of what you might call the Timbaland Ideal, as typified by his Shock Value albums, where you’ve got the big electro chart-toppers shoved up against the vaguely Coldplay-esque big-emotion rock ballads next to the Orientalist R&B. The stylistic ADHD works well here because all the parts are so strong. Also, Justin Timberlake is on this album, and he is a talented singer and performer. Hughes



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

48. Antony and the Johnsons, I Am a Bird Now

Describing Antony Hegarty’s heartbreaking vibrato with mere words is one of the trickier tasks a rock critic can take on. Comparisons to other great androgynous warblers (Nina Simone, Bryan Ferry, Klaus Nomi) fall short when you actually listen to this otherworldly talent who, on I Am a Bird Now, blows such A-list guest stars like Rufus Wainwright, Boy George, and Lou Reed out of the water. But despite Hegarty’s undeniable, awesome gifts and penchant for the bizarre, Bird is still a thoroughly humble work that investigates the sorrow of loss and the brief respite of dreamlife. Newlin



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

47. Erykah Badu, New AmErykah: Part One (4th World War)

Like her equally trippy, diggable Worldwide Underground, Erykah Badu’s New AmErykah: Part One (4th World War) was a promise and benediction, lush with big beats and even bigger ideas, braving to suggest that hip-hop in the last decade became a mode of learning more crucial than religion to a generation of people. Grandiose and intense, sincere even in its imperfections, it paid courageous homage to the teacher, the solider, the dreamer, the healer, even the telephone—which is to say, all messengers. Gonzalez

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The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

46. The Chemical Brothers, Come with Us

It’s no wonder Gregg Araki chose “Star Guitar” as the theme song for his stoner flick Smiley Face: There’s no better music to get blitzed to. “It Began in Afrika” and “Denmark” are stacked with bigger-than-life beats, but Come with Us isn’t just an interplanetary acid trip. The Chemical Brothers are the ultimate mood-enhancers, and what’s amazing is how fluidly each epically proportioned track flows into the next. The eerie opening notes of “My Elastic Eye,” which sound like the prelude to an Edgar Allen Poe reading, gradually segue into Beth Orton’s calming voice on “The State We’re In,” the perfect 7 a.m. comedown. Schrodt



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

45. Burial, Untrue

In less than a decade, dubstep has gone from a British house curio to a Rihanna-endorsed name. But by the sounds of Hyperdub’s recent compilation album, much of it just isn’t very listenable. Untrue is as dense and difficult as anything to come out of the subgenre, but it also speaks to its crossover potential. Burial takes what’s right about house (an undulating, propulsive beat to get lost in) and layers it with found vocals, looped and manipulated into unrecognizable howls. The result sounds like a skittish dance party haunted by dead lovers. Schrodt



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

44. Sleater-Kinney, The Woods

Even in a decade that included Boris’s Pink and A Place to Bury Strangers’s debut, the absolute loudest single moment of the last 10 years of music is the opening shrieks and squall of “The Fox,” the first track on Sleater-Kinney’s explosive coda The Woods. The energy—and noise—doesn’t let up for 10 straight tracks, building toward the Monks-y, 11-minute freakout “Let’s Call It Love” and the still quite loud but hypnotically melancholy closer “Night Light,” proving you can apparently go out with a bang and a whimper. Newlin



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

43. Missy Elliott, Miss E…So Addictive

Tweet’s wispy PSA on Miss E…So Addictive’s intro about not needing drugs or weed to enjoy the album would be laughable if it weren’t so true. That’s because beatmaster Timbaland had uncannily refined his signature sound to create an album where every song constituted a different kind of mood enhancer—bump-and-grind songs as MDMA blasts straight into our brains’ pleasure centers. Like the equally empowered Erotica before it, the album is an emboldened exaltation of its maker’s narcissism and sexual agency; yes, indeed, as Missy insists at one point, no drugs are needed because she is the high. Gonzalez

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The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

42. The New Pornographers, Twin Cinema

Hideous album artwork aside, there’s not much to criticize about the third record by preeminent power-pop supergroup the New Pornographers. Yes, Mass Romantic is rawer, and Electric Version hits harder, but this album is more expansive and emotionally generous than either of its predecessors, and, if anything, its hooks are even more ruthless. And from the windswept grandeur of “The Bleeding Heart Show,” to the oddball melodic superglue of “Sing Me Spanish Techno,” to two of the three best Dan Bejar New Pornos songs (“Jackie, Dressed in Cobras” and “Streets of Fire”), it’s wall-to-wall hits. Hughes



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

41. Arcade Fire, Neon Bible

Hookier, groovier, more affecting, contemplative, and adventuresome than Arcade Fire’s more revered (at least by the indie sect) than Funeral, more expansive in its thematic obsessions, even if a tad more sinister in tone, Neon Bible has the biting introspection of John Kenney Toole and exudes the immaculate grace of a Terence Davies composition. Its sonic landscape is immediately striking for its expansive scale: Its songs, which sound less performed than hurtled or exorcised, suggest immaculate visions reflected and refracted by the opening “Black Mirror.” Gonzalez



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

40. Lil Wayne, Tha Carter III

After a spectacular run of mixtape and guest-spot home runs over the course of 2007 and 2008, Lil Wayne would have been forgiven for releasing a cash-in collection of radio-ready hits. Instead, Tha Carter III managed to be both bankable (“Lollipop,” “Mrs. Officer,” “Got Money”) and terrifically weird. The conceptual rigor of “Dr. Carter” and potent social protest on “Tie May Hands” proved that Wayne’s lyrical powers extended beyond punchlines. And word-spewing shoot-’em-ups like “A Milli” and “Nothin on Me” confirm Wayne’s place in the pantheon of rap’s greatest wordsmiths. McBee



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

39. Madvillain, Madvillainy

Rumors of the ganja-flavored hip-hop super-duo Madvillain had the Internet buzzing for a year before the group, featuring red-eyed rapper MF Doom and jazzy producer Madlib, released its debut. When the thing came out, it was appropriately hailed as weed vision of bizzaro profundity and loopy madness: “Psycho, his flow is drowned in Lowry seasoning/With micropower he’s sound and right reasoning.” The fact that these dudes have been too disorganized and/or lazy to put together a follow-up only solidifies the album’s position as the undisputed pinnacle of aughts underground rap. McBee

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The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

38. Madonna, Confessions on a Dance Floor

Confessions on a Dance Floor could’ve just as easily been called Ghost of Madonnas Past: at once a thumping tribute to the restorative power of dance music (this was the workout album of the decade if there was one) and a treatise on the singer’s own fame (“I spent my whole life wanting to be talked about”), in which all her musical tics headily come to fore (singing in foreign languages? Check. Faux-tribalistic hymn? Check.). References to the past are everywhere, from the ABBA sample of “Hung Up” to her silly love letter to the city where she got her start, “I Love New York,” but Madonna has always been a thoroughly postmodern pop artist, and as such, songs like “Hung Up,” Sorry,” and “Forbidden Love” aren’t so much throwbacks as updates of the disco sound to which she’s indebted. Schrodt



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

37. Broken Social Scene, You Forgot It in People

Listening to this record, the fact that Broken Social Scene operated as a fairly loose collective rather than as a band in the conventional sense isn’t exactly a surprise. The decade’s warmest-hearted indie-rock record ranges from strength to strength like a pot-luck where everyone slaved over their contributions and included all their most special spices. Full of big, fuzzy rockers (“Almost Crimes,” “Cause = Time”) and queered, tender sympathies (“Anthems for a Seventeen Year,” “Lovers’ Spit”), everything’s anchored by the wry basslines of Brendan Canning, the founder of the feast. It’s many great tastes that taste great together. Hughes



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

36. No Doubt, Rock Steady

The Stephen Sprouse-inspired graffiti cover art suggests punk, but Rock Steady is soaked in the sunny sounds of pop (the album was, fittingly, recorded in Jamaica). From the moment you hear Gwen Stefani panting on “Hella Good,” it’s clear the band has ditched the indie-rock pretense that made Stefani the pinup dream of every liberal-arts undergrad in America. “Hey Baby” incorporates dancehall, while “Making Out” is driven by a propulsive ’80s synth beat. Stefani reportedly wrote lyrics on the spot, and the result is a freeform and playful, drunk-on-Red-Stripe-and-pool-water party album. Schrodt



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

35. Santogold, Santogold

Even if Santogold’s self-titled debut was all too evidently the calculated effort of a music industry vet (and a team of A-list producers like Diplo and Switch), and those M.I.A. comparisons were dangerously close to being spot-on, it was still hard not to get down to this mixture of hip-hop, pop, and indie rock. Santi White coos and purrs like a hipster chanteuse, and her army of smoky synths, angular guitars, and pulsating drum beats catapult her nine-to-five songcraft to the realm of timelessness. McBee

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The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

34. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Fever to Tell

It’s too bad “Maps” was so good. The single’s popularity made the transition to It’s Blitz!’s mannered East Village post-punk mimickry almost inevitable. Gone is the spontaneity of the band’s noisy, rough-around-the-edges debut album. The guitars screech, and the energy is concentrated in shorter songs like “Tick” and “Pin,” in which Karen O barks nonsense into the microphone like an avant-garde Japanese punker. That kind of vitality is exactly what’s missing from most of today’s garage bands. Schrodt



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

33. Interpol, Turn on the Bright Lights

Much of the appeal of Interpol’s calculatedly gloomy debut is encapsulated in its second track, “Obstacle 1.” First, and really foremost, the rhythm section: lithe and insectile, hiding sledgehammers behind their backs, Sam Fogarino and Carlos D dance around each other, tossing off little catchy fills and drops like it’s cake. Then, of course, the guitars, skyscraping and dressed all in gray, and Paul Banks, with his Ian Curtis impression and cheaply mocked, brilliantly vivid lyrics. For every “Her stories are boring and stuff, she’s always calling my bluff,” there’s a gem like “She puts the weights into my little heart.” If there was a record better suited for well-staged suicides during the aughts, it wasn’t as good. Hughes



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

32. The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

Some people claim that Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is a concept album. You probably have to ingest a fistful of acid to follow the storyline, so it’s easier to appreciate this album by Oklahomas’s trippiest natives as an unrivaled psychedelic-pop masterpiece. Even if it has appeared on more television commercials than Billy Mays, the idealist paean “Do You Realize” is still a stunning bit of big-hearted rock balladry. See also the Cat Stevens-aping “Fight Test” and the disco-on-quaaludes “Are You a Hypnotist” for instances of irresistibility. McBee



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

31. Madonna, Music

Though Madonna would collaborate with William Orbit on three tracks on her follow-up to Ray of Light, the album otherwise represented a seismic shift from its predecessor’s warm-and-gooey spirituality (a Book of Revelation to many fans, anathema to others). Mirwais’s defiantly experimental, Eurotrashy, wholly artificial production—awash in Auto-Tune and Nintendo beats—was bound to disappoint some, but no one does ersatz like Madonna, and fittingly, this is also one of her most soul-bearing works, from the feminist “What It Feels Like for a Girl,” to the Toni Morrison-alluding “Paradise (Not for Me), to “Nobody’s Perfect,” a slow burn that’s never less than affecting. Schrodt

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The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

30. Modest Mouse, The Moon & Antarctica

After the surprise hit “Float On” landed them squarely in Kidz Bop territory, it’s easy to forget how fucking weird Modest Mouse used to be, and what a shock it was when they released this stunning major-label debut. From the balls-tripping, nearly nine-minute-long freakout “The Stars Are Projectors” to the walls-shaking closer “What People Are Made Of,” The Moon & Antarctica is a psychedeli-punk masterpiece. Thanks in no small part to Brian Deck’s hallucinatory production, the album marks the moment Isaac Brock’s peculiar, druggy fever dreams were elevated into vision. Newlin



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

29. The White Stripes, Elephant

If you ever need to win an argument with someone who asserts that anyone other than Jack White is the most ridiculously shredtastic guitarist of the aughties (this happens to me a lot), just play them “Ball and Biscuit” and have fun watching them shut the hell up. Sure, White Blood Cells has “Fell In Love with a Girl,” but this is the album where the White Stripes emerged as the most inspired interpreters of the blues riff since, um, maybe Led Zeppelin? And it’s full of wicked little fuzz-rock songs like “Seven Nation Army” and the criminally underrated “The Hardest Button to Button,” t’boot. Rock. Hughes



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

28. The Streets, Original Pirate Material

Mike Skinner provides the excitement geezers young and old need, fusing electronica and hip-hop as imaginatively as Missy Elliott and Dizzee Rascal, turning a better phrase than Eminem, and name checking philosophers with a surprising lack of pretension. This great album’s 14 tracks are a crackling, richly detailed introduction to a middle-class British wanker’s social and artistic purview, a robust blitzkrieg of purposeful beats and even more purposeful lyricism. He earns his cynicism because few at his game are so tender or open about their emotional shortcomings. Gonzalez



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

27. Robyn, Robyn

Robyn raps with humor and knowingness, and even though the album’s sonic landscape suggests she’s trapped inside a PlayStation console, short-circuiting its motherboard before busting right out of it, there’s nothing cold or canned-sounding about this platinum blonde’s voice. Even her boasting is charming. Robyn’s complex feelings on everything from the nature of seduction to escape are thrillingly paralleled to the album’s equally emotive production, most thrillingly on the writhing “Cobrastyle” and “With Every Heartbeat,” the most vibrant jewel in a crown of perfect pop songcraft. Gonzalez

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The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

26. Spoon, Kill the Moonlight

Following the too-glossy sheen of Spoon’s Girls Can Tell, which played as a half-ditched attempt at winning back Elektra after the label cut them loose, sparse opener “Small Stakes” felt like something of a rebirth, indicating the sparse focus of Kill the Moonlight that singles out certain elements (a plinking key, a clomping bass-drum hit) pulling the album’s best moments from their straightforward simplicity. It set the standard for all Spoon albums to come, which, if not exactly appearing to diminishing returns, haven’t reached this level since. Cataldo



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

25. Basement Jaxx, Rooty

A good college party is usually made great by one thing: Basement Jaxx. The group’s noisy, raunchy house is the most fun thing about electronic music right now, as well as the one thing everyone seems to agree on, even if for all their superstar-studded collaborations (Yoko Ono, Cyndi Lauper, JC Chasez), they remain a relatively underground sensation. Rooty featured one of Basement Jaxx’s most popular tracks, “Where’s Your Head At,” a swirling, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink sensation—that rare electro crossover that even the fratboys dug. Schrodt



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

24. M.I.A., Kala

A beautifully weird and evocative kaleidoscope of a record, a socially-conscious dance record that finds M.I.A. reckoning with the hypocrisy of lobbing cherry bombs at the very capitalist system that has padded her pockets. Arular is the catchier, prettier record, but Kala is the more thoughtful one, what with its slyly intelligent and honest considerations of cultural displacement and ponderings of travels through the third world. M.I.A.’s moral conviction, emotiveness, playfulness, and crafty musical innovation shames almost every artist who produced music in the last decade. Gonzalez



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

23. Annie, Anniemal

Candy-coated pop with barely any cloying aftertaste, Anniemal set off a chain reaction after its release, minting dozens of similar-minded Scandinavian chanteuses, all suavely radiant, all mysteriously withholding, while helping define the expansive borders of the dance genre. Certain songs, like the surprisingly moody “Always Too Late” and “Helpless for Love” are darker than they seem, while others, like “Chewing Gum,” remain enjoyably straightforward, a mix of buried emotion and mindless, forthright fun that provides something for everyone. Cataldo

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The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

22. Dizzee Rascal, Boy in Da Corner

“Grime” may never have reinvigorated hip-hop in the way it was hyped, but the scene did boast one truly watershed record. But what makes Dizzee Rascal’s debut, Boy in Da Corner, one of the decade’s most essential recordings isn’t just its introduction to a new, aggressive take on hip-hop. Instead, it’s in the way the production’s take-only-what-you-need minimalism channels Dizzee’s aggression and his inimitable flow and cadence into his fearless narratives, making Boy play out as an ethnographic study and a compelling, insider’s portrait of urban rot. Keefe



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

21. Ghostface Killah, Fishscale

The Mickey Goldmill-style trainer on Fishscale’s “The Champ” pumps up Ghostface Killah by claiming he “ain’t been hungry since Supreme Clientele,” and though fans of The Pretty Toney Album may take umbrage, Fishscale meets the challenge nonetheless by delivering the rawest, most explosive rhymes of Ghost’s career. Passing effortlessly through hysterical drug narratives (the breathless “Shakey Dog”), slow jams (“Back Like That”), wistful remembrances of childhood (“Whip You with a Strap”), and ecstatic dance cuts (“Be Easy”), Ghost is aided by some of the sharpest producers in hip-hop, including the late Jay Dee, making for a nearly flawless hip-hop record. Newlin



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

20. Daft Punk, Discovery

Disco never really died, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t need to be resurrected. And while it certainly didn’t lack for prominent advocates during the last decade, perhaps the earliest and most important champions of disco’s rebirth were the rascally robots in Daft Punk. Discovery was a surprise not just because Daft Punk was using their post-Homework cred to resuscitate a much-reviled genre, but because they also chose to embrace its cheesier sounds: the gossamer harp on “Voyager,” the strings on “One More Time.” “Yes, we love disco,” they said. “We love it big and gaudy, covered in melting makeup and glitter, ecstatic and wistful and magical. So should you.” Hughes



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

19. The Strokes, Is This It

While rippers like the bouncy, post-punk/post-pop/post-everything “Last Nite,” “The Modern Age,” and “Barely Legal” made untold numbers of hipsters jump and dance around their rooms, the Strokes’s secret weapon on their breakout and excessively hyped debut is just how exhausted vocalist Julian Cassablancas sounds. His jaded sneer puts every Sid Vicious wannabe in their place, establishing the vocalist as a frontman to be reckoned with even as he makes it clear he’s got nothing to prove. Is This It makes for a party record that sounds just as great during the next day’s recovery. Newlin

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The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

18. Fiona Apple, Extraordinary Machine (Jon Brion Version)

Its vaudevillian, orchestral sound may seem like it was channeled from some bygone era, but no other album captured the zeitgeist of the decade—at least in terms of the state of technology, consumerism, and the industry as a whole—than Extraordinary Machine. The album defied its reluctant, dithering owners by taking on a life of its own and becoming an online phenomenon after Seattle DJ Andrew Harms first leaked the tracks on his radio show. There’s a feeling of daring and wonder in the original recordings, a sense of two people locked in a room beyond the reach of outside context and influence—which makes its viral dissemination and eventual impact on that outside world, in a word, extraordinary. Cinquemani



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

17. M83, Saturdays=Youth

The full-on, unapologetic tribute to the 1980s that I’ve long been dreaming of, Saturdays=Youth is a pop masterpiece. Marrying shoegaze’s volume with John Hughes-style adorability (dig that album cover!), S=Y touches on the ethereality of the Cocteau Twins and Kate Bush without completely embracing pure navel-gazing nostalgia. In a decade where “art” and “pop” became increasingly indecipherable from one another, S=Y was practically a flagship album, from its radio-ready single “Kim & Jessie” to its stirring, drone-driven closer “Midnight Souls Still Remain.” This is the new classic rock. Newlin



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

16. PJ Harvey, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea

A moving, seductive ode to New York City as an aphrodisiac pleasure center, at least for half its running time, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea attained a striking poignancy after the 9/11 attacks. Polly Jean Harvey loves the Big Apple but understands herself a tourist to it, and so her stories from the city are rife with ruminations on displacement. Bewitchingly conflating the geography of the city—and of the sea—with the geography of love, this lovelorn triumph in a career full of them also accomplished the impossible by making Thom Yorke sound recognizably human for the first time in years. Gonzalez



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

15. Beck, Sea Change

Like Tori Amos, Beck has continued to pump out new albums with a frequency that borders on compulsion but with increasingly mixed results (witness: half of Guero), and the two-turntables-and-a-microphone knob-turning is starting to feel like so much old shtick. By contrast, Sea Change, an album that felt like its own kind of folk-rock shtick when it first came out, has only gotten better with time. Like his underrated work on Mutations, Nigel Godrich’s orchestral-folk production is melancholic but strangely beautiful, and Beck makes you believe his rambling lyrics are almost poetic. Schrodt

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The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

14. Clipse, Hell Hath No Fury

After stewing in record-label limbo for four years, filling the interim with two classic mixtapes and building a rabid underground and web-based following, the Thorton brothers finally released their second album in late 2006. Featuring the Neptunes at their iciest and most minimal, with beats that recall car windows shattering, mortuary doors slamming, and bank vaults locking up, Pusha T and Malice rap with a joyless clarity about the vicissitudes of dealing coke and being unrepentant hard-asses. No rap album in recent memory can match Hell’s narcotic swirl of anger, amorality, and pride. McBee



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

13. Kanye West, Late Registration

Though his public appearances and constant blogging demonstrated an ego run so amuck it headed right into South Park fish-in-a-barrel territory, signing up to co-produce a rap record with PT Anderson mainstay Jon Brion was a pretty genius move. Brion’s strings and general sense of kooky bombast make for a consistently challenging record that never forgets that it’s still a pop record. Despite a tinge of melancholy on tracks like “Hey Mama” and “Roses,” or the outrage of “Diamonds from Sierra Leone,” Late Registration mostly captures the joy that can only be found in creative invention. Newlin



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

12. M.I.A., Arular

It’s impossible to hear a superstar’s debut the same way again. I chanted “pull up the people, pull up the poor” in my car like so many bored white kids when Arular first came out, not realizing I was part of a commercial phenomenon. Make no mistake: A superstar is what M.I.A. has become, one who knows the power of posturing. She uses first-person throughout the album, yelping over a low-fi drum machine and affecting the attitude of a third-world guerilla fighter: “I’ve got the bombs to make you blow.” But the point isn’t rote hip-hop self-aggrandizement so much as consciousness-raising. Like the candy-colored tanks on the cover, the beats are as addictive as they are explosive. And like the best political pop, from Public Enemy to Madonna, Arular is an album that demands to be heard. Schrodt



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

11. Sigur Rós, Ágætis Byrjun

It was a clear sign in 2000 when an Icelandic band that sung in a made-up language and played their guitars with cello bows actually went platinum that things might get a little “different” this decade. The echo-laden 70-plus minutes of Ágætis Byrjun include some of the most devastatingly beautiful tracks ever recorded (if you’re not consistently blown away by “Svefn-g-Englar,” you might not be human). These songs are so unique and operatic it seems like a disservice to even call them “songs.” Newlin

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The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

10. Portishead, Third

Portishead was always an outlier in the ’90s grunge scene—the Bristol misfits with the pretty noir music and a singer whose voice was more haunting than bitter. They left as quickly as they came, and in 2002 Beth Gibbons released an under-the-radar folk album, Out of Season, the minimalism of which would point the way to the band’s third collaboration, called simply Third, a reunion that couldn’t have been less sentimental or more austere. This anti-return-to-form comes in the form of an industrial dirge, synths hammering on “Machine Gun,” Gibbons whispering tormented thoughts, never wallowing because they seem so completely new, like every Portishead album, beamed-in from somewhere in outer space. Schrodt



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

9. Sufjan Stevens, Illinois

Among the many delights in returning to Illinois (a.k.a. Come on Feel the Illinoise) again and again is thinking about how such a soft-voiced, banjo-pickin’, goody two shoes could realize such a brash and enormous vision. Practically overwhelming, Illinois’s 22 tracks make for a forager’s dream come true, whether rediscovering the quiet folk confessional “Casimir Pulaski Day” or getting lost in the bombast of “Chicago” or “The Man of Metropolis Steals Our Hearts.” Fun as hell and damned difficult, Illinois is like a gigantic anthology of short stories you’ll never finish but leaf through year after year. Newlin



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

8. Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

The stupidity-of-the-record-industry fable illustrated by Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is well told by now, so let’s just skip it. The eventual outcome of Warner’s blundering mismanagement is a riveting document of Americana anxiety. From the plodding, hiccupping overture of “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” to the last static-y gasp of “Reservations,” the album thoroughly deconstructed that tricky genre label Americana, and in the process turned Wilco from the prime of the alt-country pack to America’s best answer to Radiohead. McBee



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

7. Jay-Z, The Black Album

He may not have the decade’s most egregious fake retirement (that dubious honor goes to Brett Favre), but Jay-Z’s break from the game lasted about as long as one of the interludes that punctuate The Black Album. While authorial intention may be anathema to true criticism, there’s still an element of pants-on-fire stunt posturing that hangs over the record, hyped as the final statement from the (rightfully) self-proclaimed best rapper alive. It’s a testament to the album’s power that, even if it no longer functions as a swan song, the record still stands as Jay-Z’s most dense and personal work. Keefe

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The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

6. The Avalanches, Since I Left You

Two years before Girl Talk started straining 40 years of popular music through the garbage disposal, the Avalanches perfected the art of album as reclaimed quilt with Since I Left You, stitching mounds of disparate samples into a quivering tableaux of jagged beauty, a medium where the samples, rather than settle in the background, were effectively transformed into song itself. Nearly 10 years after its release, the band’s sole album has yet to be challenged by a follow-up, despite a decade’s worth of hearsay and rumors. Cataldo



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

5. Jay-Z, The Blueprint

Only after the waters have receded can you accurately pinpoint a high-water mark. So it took eight years of relative disappointments like Kingdom Come and The Blueprint 3 and near-matches like American Gangster and The Black Album—not to mention the bottoming out of the record industry—before we could say with absolute confidence that The Blueprint represents Jay-Z at his finest: curbing competitors (Mobb Deep, R.I.P.), narrating his compelling autobiography, playing the globe-trotting man of luxury, and nurturing young talent. The production styles of Just Blaze and Kanye West, then-unknowns who produced more than half of the album between them, dominate rap to this day. McBee



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

4. Arcade Fire, Funeral

In fall of 2004, in the middle of a frustrating election season, the Montreal bleeding hearts in Arcade Fire appeared out of nowhere (back when a nascent hype cycle still allowed such things to happen) with an album of emotionally stunning, death-afflicted, pitch-perfect pop songs. There was a dash of Springsteen, heavy Cure, generous helpings of Joy Division, and, um, the Verve (come on, think about it). We all swooned. And are still swooning: Even after the band was elevated to Rolling Stone rock saviors, released a second album that sounded more amenable to arenas than churches or bedrooms, jammed with the Boss, and worst of all, was imitated by a host of lesser strings-and-tears outfits (ugh, Plants and Animals), Funeral still has the power to stop your heart. McBee



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

3. Björk, Vespertine

Vespertine finds everyone’s favorite shrieker barely rising above a whisper. Backed by subtle clicks and bloops from Matmos and some elegantly unobtrusive strings, Björk sings the praises of solitude, monogamy, and quiet days at home—all topics that would seem out of character if they weren’t brightened by her uniquely glamorous oddness. On the wonderful closer “Unison,” Björk claims she “thrives best hermit style/With a beard and a pipe/And a parrot on each side” before sweetly confessing that she “can’t do this without you,” in a moment representative of the record’s innovation and loveliness. Newlin

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The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

2. Radiohead, Kid A

One of the watershed albums of the last 10 years, Radiohead’s Kid A is really more of a ’90s album, capping off that decade’s alienated computer angst in a wave of post-Y2K catharsis, a chillingly detached work that signaled a newfound ambivalence with the omnipresence of machines. From the phase-shifting opening of “Everything in Its Right Place” to “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” everything about the album seems right, resulting in a starkly unified vision, the perfect closing note for one decade while also serving as a lasting emblem for the next one. Cataldo



The 100 Best Albums of the Aughts

1. OutKast, Stankonia

Though OutKast’s “B.O.B.” seems prescient now for other, more specifically historical reasons, Stankonia as a whole seemed to forecast the mood of this past decade by its very nature. Excessive, weird, endlessly ambitious and cryptic, and very, very long, Stankonia is a record that must be reckoned with as well as listened to, even 10 years later. From the hits (the omnipresent “Ms. Jackson,” the mind-blowing “B.O.B.,” the fantastically sleazy “So Fresh, So Clean”) to the bizarre personal mythology about a place “seven light years below sea level,” no other album from the decade better presses the limits of what popular music can do. On “Humble Mumble,” André 3000 confronts a rock critic who “thought hip-hop was only guns and alcohol,” and makes her “shit her drawers” with a groovy “Oh, hell naw!” Thus, a decade was born. Newlin

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