Kid A
2000
Singer Thom Yorke pulled the lyrics out of a hat because he could not write, and the band released it with no singles and no interviews.
★ 8.8
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2000s
2000 – 2009
Showing 73 albums from the 2000s
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
Stankonia
2000
B.O.B. runs at a hundred and fifty-five beats a minute, which is drum and bass speed, with a gospel choir on top.
★ 8.5
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
The Marshall Mathers LP
2000
It sold nearly two million copies in a week. Elton John agreed to perform with him at the Grammys while the protests were loudest.
★ 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
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
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
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
All That You Can't Leave Behind
2000
U2 dropped the irony and went back to anthems. A year later, after September 11th, the songs sounded like they had been written for it.
★ 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
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
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
O Brother Where Art Thou Soundtrack
Various artists
2000
T Bone Burnett recorded most of it before the film was shot, so the Coens built scenes around the music. It sold eight million.
★ 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
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
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
Kala
2007
Denied a visa to work in America, she recorded it instead in India, Trinidad, Liberia and Australia, with whoever was in the room.
★ 5.4
Vampire Weekend
2008
Four Columbia students made it in dorm rooms and a church basement, and spent years answering for borrowing from African guitar records.
★ 5.4
Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
2002
Yoshimi is a real person, a Japanese drummer, and the screams on the record are recordings she made and sent them.
★ 5.3
American III: Solitary Man
2000
Cash was too ill to work in a studio for long, so Rubin recorded him mostly at home, singing other people's songs.
★ 5.1
Be
2005
Kanye West produced most of it and J Dilla the rest, and Common's father closes the record talking over the last track.
★ 5.1
Figure 8
2000
Smith recorded much of it at Abbey Road with full arrangements, and titled it after the ice-skating figure, a loop that goes nowhere.
★ 5.1
Heartbreaker
2000
It opens with Adams and a friend arguing about which Morrissey record a song is on. The whole thing was recorded in fourteen days.
★ 5.0
Hot Fuss
2004
Mr. Brightside was the first song Brandon Flowers and Dave Keuning ever wrote together, and they never managed to write a bigger one.
★ 5.0
I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning
2005
Conor Oberst, who is Bright Eyes, put this out on the same day as an entirely electronic companion album. Emmylou Harris sings on three songs.
★ 5.0
Michigan
2003
The first of the fifty state albums, with Stevens playing most of the instruments himself and naming songs after towns nobody writes about.
★ 5.0
Neon Bible
2007
They bought a church in Quebec and recorded in it, using the pipe organ, a military choir and a Hungarian orchestra.
★ 5.0
Parachutes
2000
It cost a few thousand pounds to make. Chris Martin has said Yellow came from looking up at the stars outside a Welsh studio.
★ 5.0
Toxicity
2001
Serj Tankian and Daron Malakian sing over each other constantly, one shouting while the other croons, often within the same bar.
★ 4.8
Transatlanticism
2003
One line repeats for eight minutes on the title track, with an instrument added at a time until the whole band is playing at once.
★ 4.8
Van Lear Rose
2004
Lynn wrote every song herself, which she had not done for decades, and Jack White recorded it in an old house in East Nashville.
★ 4.8
White Blood Cells
2001
Recorded in Memphis in about three days. Michel Gondry animated the video for Fell in Love with a Girl entirely out of Lego bricks.
★ 4.8
Arular
2005
Named after her father, a Tamil militant she barely knew, and built largely on a cheap secondhand sequencer in a London flat.
★ 4.5
Chutes Too Narrow
2003
James Mercer, who essentially is the Shins, recorded most of it in his own basement. A film later put an earlier song in front of everybody.
★ 4.5
Come Away With Me
2002
A twenty-two-year-old on a jazz label made a very quiet record, and it sold twenty-seven million copies and swept the Grammys.
★ 4.4
Deltron 3030
2000
Del plays a mech soldier in the year 3030 fighting a corporate empire with rap battles, and somehow it works.
★ 4.4
Fever to Tell
2003
There is no bass player, just Nick Zinner's guitar and Brian Chase's drums under Karen O's yelping. Maps was written about missing someone.
★ 4.4
Extraordinary Machine
2005
An earlier version leaked online and fans mailed apples to her label demanding its release. She rerecorded almost all of it anyway.
★ 4.4
Funeral
2004
Three of the band lost close relatives while they were making it, which is where the title came from. Everything is played as though shouted.
★ 4.4
How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
2004
Bono wrote Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own about his father, and sang it at his funeral before the record was finished.
★ 4.4