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
For Emma, Forever Ago
2008
Justin Vernon spent three winter months alone in his father's hunting cabin, recovering from a breakup and glandular fever, stacking his falsetto in layers.
★ 6.4
Get Rich or Die Tryin'
2003
50 Cent had been shot nine times two years earlier, and the bullet still in his jaw is part of why he sounds like that.
★ 6.4
Sea Change
2002
Beck wrote it after a nine-year relationship ended and recorded it in about two weeks. His father wrote the string arrangements.
★ 6.4
1989
2014
Swift named the record for the year she was born and dropped country entirely, writing straight synth-pop for the first time.
★ 5.8
A Rush of Blood to the Head
2002
The piano figure in Clocks turned up so late in the sessions that it nearly missed the record. Everything here is built to fill arenas.
★ 5.8
Amnesiac
2001
Recorded at the same sessions as Kid A and held back eight months. The band spent years insisting it was not a collection of leftovers.
★ 5.7
American Idiot
2004
Someone stole the master tapes for the album they had just finished, so Green Day started over and wrote a punk rock opera instead.
★ 5.7
Bon Iver, Bon Iver
2011
Every song is named after a place, and some of the places do not exist. The cabin has been replaced by horns and pedal steel.
★ 5.7
Dear Science
2008
Guitarist and producer Dave Sitek moved the band out of Brooklyn to a house in Malibu, and the record came back funkier and less claustrophobic.
★ 5.7
Lost in the Dream
2014
Adam Granduciel spent two years and a dozen studios on it, mostly rerecording parts he had already finished, in the grip of severe anxiety.
★ 5.7
Merriweather Post Pavilion
2009
There is no guitar anywhere on it, which for a rock band was the point. It is named after a Maryland concert amphitheatre.
★ 5.7
Raising Sand
2007
T Bone Burnett chose every song and neither singer had heard most of them. Plant sings underneath Krauss rather than over her.
★ 5.7
Tha Carter III
2008
So much of it leaked in advance that he recorded a second album's worth. The A Milli beat is one chopped-up vocal repeated endlessly.
★ 5.7
Run the Jewels 2
2014
They gave it away free online, as they had the first one, and Killer Mike's verse about being stopped by police arrived weeks before Ferguson.
★ 5.7
Time (the Revelator)
2001
There are only two people on it, Welch and David Rawlings, recorded live in an old Nashville studio with a single pair of microphones.
★ 5.6
Turn on the Bright Lights
2002
The bass lines run as counter-melodies rather than following the guitars, which is why so much of it sounds like two songs at once.
★ 5.6
Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
2006
The band's early demos spread on burned CDs and file-sharing sites, passed around by fans rather than the band, long before any label appeared.
★ 5.6
Watch the Throne
Jay-Z and Kanye West
2011
They recorded much of it in hotel suites around the world to stop it leaking, and the gold sleeve was designed by a Givenchy designer.
★ 5.6
FutureSex / LoveSounds
2006
The producer Timbaland built most of the tracks in two halves, so the songs change shape halfway through instead of repeating a chorus.
★ 5.5
Helplessness Blues
2011
Singer Robin Pecknold scrapped a finished version and started over. The title song is about not wanting to be anyone special.
★ 5.4