After D’Angelo’s years in the wilderness, struggling with addiction and indirection, many thought he was finished. 1, topping the chart on several occasions. CDs were still the main source to listen to tunes, but the rise of Napster and file sharing networks would soon change the game. Listen to the album. Bringing in a more rugged hip-hop mood to the neo-soul of his 1995 debut, D’Angelo created a landmark in black American pop. Madlib and MF Doom combined for an album that rattled with enough innovation and enough bars to prop up 10 records. A total of 454 different albums were voted for. There is another side here, too: chatty, puckish and getting over it all. By Jamie Milton. Ad Choices, The 21 Albums from the 21st Century Every Man Should Hear, Photo: Kevin Mazur/WireImage for Parkwood Entertainment/Getty Images. By Emily Barker. VW figured out what to chuck and what to cultivate. She is also the only artist on this list to have all her released albums included, with 25 at number three. All rights reserved. The hook "They tried to make me go to … The influence of this and his 2006 debut cannot be overstated, feeding into the dub songcraft of the xx and James Blake, as well as an entire generation of ambient producers. Listen to the album. The two big singles are genius: Piece of Me bats back tabloid gossip with a sonic golf club, and Gimme More is her best-ever song, an erotic psychodrama where the purring come-ons of the title also sound like a woman drowning under her ambition. You can almost touch the gold teeth, Valentinos and dreads in Mike Skinner’s debut, a love letter to living for the weekend written in UK garage that heralded the arrival of a brilliant British storyteller – Weak Become Heroes remains the single greatest evocation of being on ecstasy in a club. Listen to the album. Their most ferocious album, then, though the wry and bitter ballad Modern Girl uses the distortion to prettier ends. “I’m dying to push their backs against the grain / and fool them all again,” he sang. Menu. It’s all overlapping samples and off-kilter drums—without speaking a word, J Dilla made an album that still has so much to say. ... “It’s simply one of the best records ever made, and is still powerful enough to floor you 28 years on,” we wrote. Big Boi embraced saucy brass licks and propulsive flow while André 3000 tapdanced through funk, though each arrived at solid gold pop: The Way You Move and Hey Ya! World domination s… Believe it or not, that’s not all gone. Infectious ego, unknockable confidence and hysterical commentary: a relic from lighter days that did not foresee West’s extraordinary evolution. The cracked poetry (“Jigsaw pattern dominoes left a trail / The whites of their eyes / Polaroids of the tale”) was chewed up and then spat out for moshpit soundbites (“Cut away!”, “Is it heavier than air?”), between see-sawing riffs and bursts of pure noise. Although I could play some instruments, I wasn’t good enough to be original. Rollicking and restless … Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead. Listen to the album. These points were totalled up, resulting in the following ranking. Tracks such as Kill V Maim were made for the balls of your feet, full of the chillingly cutesy pep of east Asian pop, but the best tracks were the robo-funky World Princess Part II and the demo version of Realiti: the sound of speeding through a city, its sounds muffled inside a luxury sedan. He may now sing in an ironic mid-Atlantic croon, but Alex Turner started off with the most tangibly south Yorkshire voice in pop since Jarvis Cocker. XCX stopped waiting around for mainstream acceptance and showed the normies what they were missing with this bracingly eclectic, guest-laden mixtape. The Seattle group’s debut heralded a generation’s post-recession retreat into rural comforts, conjuring a pastoral idyll from the best of west coast folk and British traditionalism. With electronic music, it was different. Listen to the album. By blending the frat-boy energy of nu-metal with the goth moods of Nine Inch Nails and Smashing Pumpkins, the northern Californians united rival factions of brooding teenagers with these strangely sexy studies in tension and release. HNHH ranks the top 25 best hip-hop debut albums of the 21st century. Tiny, lisping and with a high-pitched voice, Grimes weathered plenty of sexism with her breakthrough – but converted even indie snobs with her take on rave, Italo and industrial synthpop. Listen to the album. BECAUSE: The greatest female R&B artist of the century finally made a record as sexy, snarling, soft, strange, and outright superlative as she is. A list of the top albums of the year from The Guardian (21st Century). The funk deepened – the way Prayer smears its on-beat is astonishing – along with his social conscience on The Charade, though the bedroom door still beckoned constantly. OK Computer might be Radiohead's best album, and Kid A their most musically innovative, but In Rainbows shook the music industry's very infrastructure. Listen to the album. The UK's Official Top 40 biggest studio albums of the 21st Century We celebrate National Album Day by unveiling the UK's biggest records since January 2000. Seven years after her previous album, Apple’s return sidelined her orchestral trademarks for an austere, homespun sound that exposed her insular lyrics even more starkly. Listen to the album. Dave Longstreth had this uniqueness of voice—and I don’t just mean his singing voice, which is unique, but the perspective. The gentle glitches and serene pulses on this intimate, sensual, clean record could sound naive, even simplistic, when put next to the complexity of her recent work with the producer Arca, but Vespertine remains one of Björk’s defining records thanks to the strength of its songwriting. The band’s biggest hit set the template for Elephant: brooding moods, measured out in eighths by Meg White, would tip over into cathartic squalls of blues rock. Listen to the album. BECAUSE: When Y2K arrived, MTV VJs and saccharine-pop enthusiasts told us rock ’n’ roll was dead. Site also contains reviews, ratings & more. The Eminem Show was the fourth studio album from the rapper and marked a change in style for the rapper. Listen to the album. And so it couldn’t. Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson, the best director alive to Scorsese and F.F. Ha.". Romy Madley-Croft and Oliver Sim made the most compelling duets of the period: rather than singing to each other, it was as if two people were going through the same thing without the other knowing it – the perfect mood music for the disconnected interconnection of dating apps and social media. My Arms your Hearse but on Blackwater everything came together perfectly and one of the best metal albums of all time let alone of the 21st century was born. Listen to the album. Listen to the album. Oh, and because Justin Timberlake says so. Pristine neo-soul played by an old soul in a 19-year-old’s body. It is full of energy, Harvey stalking the gutters and subways; it is full of sex, most of it new and dangerously in flux. Listen to the album. Thought shaky at the time, her controversial debut – the one responsible for Video Games – has since acquired cult status. But it's the album's five original songs, all co-written by Clarkson, that make Wrapped in Red the best Christmas album of the century so far. Listen to the album. And finally: because for one short moment, she pushed back the demons to make something this full of life. The finest boyband breakout since Robbie Williams’s Life Thru a Lens, and that’s not damning with faint praise: Timberlake’s Neptunes/Timbaland-helmed debut was slick, sexy and most importantly, convincing. The record had a political feeling of early Public Enemy but a sense of fun and energy. Entering the 21st century, music was just beginning to be consumed en masse online. The first rap masterpiece of the century was an epic that covered all of hip-hop’s bases – horndog G-funk on We Luv Deez Hoez and I’ll Call B4 I Cum, raunchy boom-bap on Xplosion, rap-rock on Gasoline Dreams, pop on Ms Jackson – but added endless new flavours: drum’n’bass, acid, psychedelic soul. 1. JAMIE XX NOMINATES: "Number one is Original Pirate Material by the Streets. "Julian and his bandmates followed in the footsteps of the Velvet Underground, Television, Suicide, the Ramones, and Blondie, creating the fresh, distinctive sound we’d been waiting for for over a decade. Listen to the album. THE TOP 100 ALBUMS OF THE 20TH CENTURY. Read Alexis Petridis’s essay on our No 1 choice here. "SMiLE" by Brian Wilson - Metascore: 97 - User score: 7.9 - … Jay-Z, Pearl Jam, Daft Punk, R.E.M. A multicultural celebration, a political statement and a middle finger up to misogynists. Listen to the album. Remember when we argued about albums? Released by the Odd Future collective, he and they have done so much in the last decade to break rap and R&B out of tired, restrictive genre considerations. It seethes with trauma both personal and social, and the strongest moments consider how black America is sticking its head in the sand – even Kanye himself, fretting about Kim while a sample of lynching lament Strange Fruit plays. Listen to the album. He stumbles, numb, through his own poetry, pondering suicide, gaining existential clarity and – crucially – finding beauty: “The breakers in the bar / The neighbour’s greeting.” Listen to the album. In case we’d forgotten, we were reminded that Jack can fucking shred on guitar. A band working in perfect equilibrium, where wild prog and bug-eyed Burroughs-esque visions were tethered by earthy punk. BECAUSE: After a six-year gap between records—due to contemplation of retirement, a lyrical drought, and record-label delays—Fiona was all of a sudden all grown up. Merrill Nisker grafted sweaty, human filth on to the clean machine shock of electroclash on her hilarious, titillating debut as Peaches. After bulging baroque creations The Age of Adz and The BQE, Stevens pared everything back to soft electronics and fingerpicking for this moving rumination on his stepfather and late mother. It was electric gospel, like the heavens had opened up and revealed that the angels were cyborgs and that the Pearly Gates were electrically charged. Kevin Martin’s discordant and seductive second, voicing his discontent via an array of guest MCs. (Jay himself rates this one second among his great albums, after Reasonable Doubt; nope, sorry, Jay!). Mixing chilling realism with devastating metaphor, Vordul Mega and Vast Aire painted a grim, dystopian vision of their native New York City. Listen to the album. This is the closest a film can get to being rated a 10, without actually being rated 10/10. Album closer, The Move, has one of the best trumpet solos of the 21st Century and showcases Halsall tendency to opt for picking the right notes, rather than all the notes. CDs were still the main source to listen to tunes, but the rise of Napster and file sharing networks would soon change the game. BECAUSE: No one, including Daft Punk, has made a better dance record—big and bright and melancholy and the blueprint for damn near half the pop music that has come since, from Kanye to Skrillex to Pharrell, all of whom are still unashamedly ripping off Discovery today. makes a purchase. Part state-of-the-nation opus, part eye-opening trawl through the unexplored depths of Badu’s brain. Listen to the album. Like a superhero who doesn’t realise their own strength, everything hits too hard, burning the edges of the guitars and drums with fuzz. If Wiley’s “eski beats” acknowledged grime’s froideur, then Dizzee Rascal turned the temperature down further: his debut is a chillblained study in urban harshness that remains grime’s masterpiece album. Released two days before he died, Blackstar saw Bowie pour everything left of him into his best album since his 70s hot streak. Listen to the album. Since 1957, GQ has inspired men to look sharper and live smarter with its unparalleled coverage of style, culture, and beyond. And then, suddenly, we had Ocean and his debut, Channel Orange—a fully realized instant classic from an artist who couldn’t be bothered with even a single one of the steps between "neophyte" and "master." Listen to the album. From left, Amy Winehouse, Arctic Monkeys, Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar. Listen to the album. On the group’s debut, she could electrify her withering bluesy scorn with a single yelp, and suddenly she’d be a banshee screaming round the rafters; meanwhile the song Maps was pure vulnerability. Listen to the album. Amid videogame clatter, Rascal’s voice is full of scorn and bafflement as he considers girls, rivals and his place in the world. The 20th Century set the bar pretty high for concept albums. "Ten Freedom Summers" by Wadada Leo Smith #2. Listen to the album. Listen to the album. They were complete pieces of work—progressive and retro at the same time. Listen to the album. Listen to the album. Also: because of the casual honesty she brought to inventorying her own flaws. Everybody my age was listening to it. A generation’s Stevie Wonder had arrived. The album that ushered in the moody, neon-lit synthpop that would define the rest of the decade, Ruth Radelet playing Nico to Johnny Jewel’s Velvet Underground-worthy cool. With the help of producer Jon Brion, she built a sound so big and bright, it was as though all the sadness we’d come to expect had been shoved behind a floodlight. MIA frequently showed just how conservative the US is by doing ordinary things – rapping while pregnant, sticking her middle finger up – that nevertheless had people reaching for the smelling salts. Listen to the album. Listen to the album. On Blackwater Park, Opeth perfected the sound they had on Still Life striking the perfect balance between brutal death metal and emotionally charged acoustic passages. The Top 40 Best Selling Albums of the 21st Century so far... 1) Adele - 21. When the last note of the radio single made us reflexively hum the intro to the next track? BECAUSE: Jack and Meg built out the raw garage rock from their first three albums into an entirely re-imagined sound, taking their pissed-off swagger and channeling it into ambition: blistering blues, whimsical folk, Stooges-esque punk, contemplative love tunes. Whether shaking your ass to Digital Witness or drifting off with Prince Johnny, you did so under a constant cloudburst of ideas. _My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy _(2010). 100 best albums of the 21st century Entering the 21st century, music was just beginning to be consumed en masse online. Listen to the album. Blame these guys. Chino Moreno’s voice is magnificently plastic – rapping, bellowing, crooning, and deploying his secret weapon: vocal fry that creaks like a door to a haunted house. BECAUSE: We’ve spent the past three minutes shattering furniture at GQ HQ listening to the tireless anthem "U Don’t Know." Made after notable incidents of police brutality, Lemonade was charged with real political fervour, while there were numerous sharp jabs at Jay-Z for doing whatever predicated that elevator fight with her sister Solange. You could feel that album in the air a few years before she did it—just these incredible kaleidoscopic filters of different cultures coming together in a pure and innocent way. Listen to the album. Listen to the album. The best album artwork of the 21st Century so far. Listen to the album. When we listened to them straight through? Sweating and spitting into each other’s mouths while singing "If you’ve lost your faith in love and music, the end won’t be long" into a shared mike. The ghosts of London raves gone by are conjured by this ouija board of a record, where garage vocals flit upward past dust-covered breakbeats. On their second album, they broke through the snark, pondering their identities as New Yorkers, Americans and thirtysomethings – and with a range of potential dance moves, from pogoing to sleek disco shapes. They transformed whatever world I was in at the time. BECAUSE: After making two solid albums about the sounds of spring semester in New York and summers on barrier islands, they over-delivered with a radical declaration of maturity that turned on an entirely new set of listeners. Listen to the album. Single A-Punk masked a hugely diverse album: a strange yet winning mix of flutes, strings and Afrobeat. Listen to the album. Listen to the album. Listen to the album. The Malian guitarist set a new career benchmark with this intimate set, adding classical western harp and African ngoni to her subtle, bluesy electric guitar. Listen to the album. Kendrick Lamar, Jay-Z, Dizzee Rascal, and Missy Elliott all appear on this list, but who holds the top spot? To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. His evisceration of Nas on The Takeover made for a firebomb diss track, generating gossipy heat fanned further by some of his biggest pop moments: Girls, Girls, Girls, Izzo (HOVA) and Song Cry. (Watched, too.) Coleman is best known, of course, for his role in liberating form: his album Free Jazz was one early rallying cry, and so was The Shape of Jazz to Come, recorded almost exactly 60 years ago (May 22, 1959). Listen to the album. Smith’s final album followed his brief adoption by Hollywood, and added a cinematic grandeur to his work – but, thankfully, it didn’t swamp his haunted songwriting. To get started, we looked at more than 60 albums rated at the bottom of review aggregator Metacritic's ranking of the more than 12,600 albums* from 2000 to today. Made amid her most troubled phase, Blackout defied the odds to become a diamond pressed from trash. A list of the top albums of the year from The Guardian (21st Century). For all the hype, the Brooklyn scene of the early 00s didn’t produce many genuine rock stars, but Karen O was its finest. The blithe stoicism of his flow, seemingly resigned to a violent death at any moment, fills the record with poignancy, and transmutes his words into wisdom. A biting subversion of the era’s cocaine rap, evident in the despairing lyrics and magnetically ruined textures. Listen to the album. This album is lauded for the three masterpieces Aaliyah made with Timbaland – Try Again, More Than a Woman and We Need a Resolution – that lend a serpentine malevolence to her voice, but there are also strong old-school jams and languorous ballads. 9. But then, out of nowhere, came this back-to-basics guitar-driven record made by five leather-clad hipsters (before that was a thing). The rest of us are free to enjoy it for the bloody, hard-won, titanic achievement that it is. by Doriean Stevenson, for Metacritic – October 19, 2017. BECK NOMINATES: "M.I.A.’s Arular. BECAUSE: André 3000 with a perm, bleating Don’t pull the thang out unless you plan to bang? Listen to the album. Listen to the album. The Best Hip-Hop Albums of the 21st Century. The anchor of the album – initially released in a trailblazing three parts across 2010 – was Dancing on My Own, a breakup song with a wildly transgressive edge: is there a secret erotic thrill behind the pain of going to the club to watch her partner with their new girlfriend? Listen to the album. That title sounds horribly prescient in the wake of the substance misuse that would kill her, but Winehouse was incandescently alive – funny, pissed off, in love – on her finest album. Drawing from house, psychedelia and even Bollywood soundtracks, Missy’s third – the one responsible for Get Ur Freak On – forced pop to catch up with her yet again. Twenty-five years after forming, the Congolese group made their name with this rhythmic explosion of likembes (thumb pianos) put through junkyard amplification. More city than sea, PJ Harvey’s most accessible and open-hearted record conjures that feeling of being on a rooftop, wanting to hear every story in the streets below you. The duo were obscured behind robot heads, and their music got equally playful: cock-rock guitars, vocoders and brilliantly manipulated slivers of records by ELO, Tavares and Eddie Johns condensed into tinny yet heavy filter-house.