good kid, m.A.A.d city
2012
Subtitled a short film, and the story runs in order across one day. The interludes are voicemails from his parents asking where the van is.
★ 8.6
Browse by time · century
21st century
2001 – 2100
Showing 85 albums from the 21st century
In Rainbows
2007
They put it online and let people pay whatever they wanted, including nothing. Some of the songs had been played live for ten years.
★ 8.6
The Blueprint
2001
It was recorded in about two weeks and released on the eleventh of September 2001. Kanye West sped the soul samples up to chipmunk pitch.
★ 8.4
The College Dropout
2004
Kanye recorded one of the songs with his jaw wired shut after a car crash, which is exactly what it sounds like.
★ 8.4
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
2002
Reprise refused it, so the band bought the tapes back, streamed the record free, and then sold it to another label owned by the same company.
★ 8.4
Back to Black
2007
Producer Mark Ronson had a Brooklyn soul band play it live to tape like a sixties session. Winehouse wrote about the man she kept leaving.
★ 8.2
Channel Orange
2012
Days before it came out, Ocean published an open letter about falling in love with a man, and then let the record speak.
★ 8.2
Speakerboxxx / The Love Below
2003
It is really two solo albums in one box, and the two of them barely appear on each other's halves.
★ 8.0
Elephant
2003
Recorded in eight days on equipment made before 1963, with no computers. The bassline everyone knows is a guitar pushed down an octave.
★ 7.7
The Black Album
2003
Every track has a different producer, which he did on purpose. He announced his retirement, held a farewell concert, and came back three years later.
★ 7.4
American IV: The Man Comes Around
2002
Trent Reznor said that after hearing Cash sing Hurt, the song no longer felt like his. Cash died the following year.
★ 7.1
Discovery
2001
Daft Punk set out to make the music they had loved at ten years old, and had the whole album animated as a film.
★ 7.0
Graduation
2007
It came out the same day as a 50 Cent album, and the two turned it into a public sales contest. Kanye won by a distance.
★ 6.9
Illinois
2005
Stevens announced he would make one of these for all fifty states, then made two and stopped. One song is about John Wayne Gacy.
★ 6.9
Late Registration
2005
Kanye brought in Jon Brion, a film composer who had never worked on a rap record, and put a string section behind everything.
★ 6.9
Random Access Memories
2013
They put the drum machines away and hired session players who had made the records they grew up on. Giorgio Moroder narrates his own life.
★ 6.8
Sound of Silver
2007
All My Friends is one piano figure repeated for seven and a half minutes while everything else is built up around it.
★ 6.7
The Eminem Show
2002
Eminem produced most of this himself rather than handing it to Dr. Dre, and it leaked so widely that the release was moved forward.
★ 6.7
Fleet Foxes
2008
The singer Robin Pecknold layers the harmonies so thickly, and drowns them in so much reverb, that it sounds recorded in a stone church.
★ 6.4