For one glorious moment it seemed as though the 21st century was going to drag us kicking and screaming into a new, technologically advanced utopia. Now we know better, but the one thing that hasn’t disappointed is the abundance of brilliant music that’s emerged in the first quarter of the new millennium. Across an ever changing, ever thrilling sonic landscape of substance and style, artists have produced some of the finest albums of all time. Not that you’d ever know it!
Frustratingly, music critics continue to point to the sixties and seventies as the golden age of music, a view reinforced by ‘The Canon’ of Rock’s Rich Tapestry, a supposedly definitive list of albums that can be traced back to 1974 when, like a university English department sending out a reading list to its undergraduates, the NME polled its writers and published its list of the top 100 of all time. Sadly, when it comes to ‘The Canon’ and those infernal lists, the albums of the 21st century don’t stand a chance.
Take a look at Acclaimed Music, a website that statistically aggregates every published list it can find into rankings to draw up the poll of polls, or rather the canon of canons. A breakdown of their current top 100 albums consists of one from the fifties, 26 from the sixties, 29 from the seventies, 18 from the eighties, 15 from the nineties, seven from the noughties and four from the twenty tens.
The biggest problem the albums of the 21st century face is that while the MP3 players and iPods of the noughties and the streaming services of today have made listening easier than ever before, the sheer volume of music available (100 million songs and counting on Spotify alone) and our shortened attention spans has diminished the primacy of the album and increased that of the playlist. As far as music is concerned, we may live in an age of plenty, but for most folk listening to Spotify’s algorithm generated Global Top 50 or Songs to Sing in the Car is an easier, far more attractive proposition than wading through Sault’s latest masterwork. And yet paradoxically, new millennium artists continue to thrive and create fully immersive musical journeys of the highest order.
In a possibly futile attempt to appease my own sense of injustice at this state of affairs, I took on the tricky task of reducing the last 25 years of music down to 33 of my own favourite albums I’ve never written about before. Something of an educational experience in itself, the final list may not please everyone, but one thing it does do is to prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that the albums of the 21st century are every bit as innovative and expressive as those from any other era.
Chris Green
July 2026
01. GRANDADDY / THE SOPHTWARE SLUMP (May 2000)
Favourite Track ‘The Crystal Lake’
At the turn of the new century, stuck in his home city of Modesto, California, Grandaddy’s Jason Lytle looked out on a landscape in which the surrounding forests were wilting under the weight of technological junk being dumped there and electricity pylons populated the highest mountains. In an attempt to reconcile one of the most enduring philosophical and ecological debates of our time, on The Sophtware Slump he found a way to refurbish his group’s core country muse with a bunch of vintage synthesisers and layer upon layer of studio manipulation to come up with a new millennial masterpiece that was ambitious, often breathtaking and totally unexpected.
02. CLINIC / INTERNAL WRANGLER (May 2000)
Favourite Track ‘The Second Line’
Still unknown, Clinic were one of those arty British groups who pop up from time to time, are hailed as the second coming and then hastily retreat back into obscurity. Clinic were one of those albeit subtly different, molding the limited trad rock set-up of guitar, bass and drums into exciting, previously unheard shapes. A testament to why rock music will never die despite outliving its usefulness, Internal Wrangler stood for everything rock is not while at the same time encapsulating everything good about it.
03. LIFE WITHOUT BUILDINGS / ANY OTHER CITY (February 2001)
Favourite Track ‘New Town’
In the early noughties I was intent on seeking out individual albums like The Sophtware Slump and Internal Wrangle, anything in fact that was a little different to the norm. Any Other City, the only album made by Glasgow’s Life Without Buildings in their short lifetime, embodied that philosophy better than most. A thrilling concoction of math rock and outsider pop underpinning a fragile layer of nonsensical, speaking-in-tongues poetry, it was Sue Tompkins voice bursting out of ‘New Town’, ‘The Leanover’ and ‘Sorrow’ that really grabbed my attention.
04. APHEX TWIN / DRUKGS (October 2001)
Favourite Track ‘Avril 14th’
The sound of Richard D. James pushing our future into the new age, ironically much of the thirty track, two hour long Drukgs sounded as old as the hills, which is maybe why it was almost universally panned and subsequently ignored. On the other hand, I considered it one of the more important Aphex Twin albums, ideas springing forth and briefly flourishing before fading into nothingness while computer-controlled piano pieces like ‘Avril 14th’ explored a direction that was genuinely original.
05. DOVES / THE LAST BROADCAST (April 2002)
Favourite Track ‘Caught By The River’
As far from the experimentation of Richard D. James as you could get, The Last Broadcast, or more specifically ‘There Goes The Fear’ and ‘Caught By The River’, were used a couple of years later by my eighteen year old soldier son and his teenage band of brothers to soundtrack the combat videos they were sending back from the frontline in Afghanistan. Not my usual kind of thing at all, surprisingly Doves gloomy atmospherics and miserable yet uplifting positivity gave me the kind of chills I had never experienced before.
06. FOUR TET / ROUNDS (May 2003)
Favourite Track ‘As Serious As Your Life’
In the post Napster landscape, sonic adventurers began to mess around with everything from rock guitar juxtaposed with avant-garde electronica to cutesy indie on top of beats from the most out there hip hop. One unfortunate byproduct was that music critics began to invent all manner of random genres, Kevin Hebden’s Four Tet having the misfortune to be tagged folktronica. Of course, Rounds was nothing of the sort. Instead it was a transcendent mish mash that weaved IDM glitches, experimental jazz, R&B production, dubstep, Afrobeat, a dog’s heartbeat and the kitchen sink into a gloriously modern tour de force.
07. BROADCAST / HAHA SOUND (August 2003)
Favourite Track ‘Before We Begin’
Foregoing the harsh industrial sounds and hissing atmospherics of their debut, Haha Sound continued Broadcast’s use of the lilting, sixties pop lullabies they loved, but instead let Trish Keenan’s expressive vocals float above a smorgasbord of rhythmic loops and fuzzy frequencies. Producing a haunting melancholia steeped in the ghosts of old Albion, it marked a significant turning point that set it apart from the rest of the group’s immaculate catalogue.
08. AIR / TALKIE WALKIE (January 2004)
Favourite Track ‘Run’
If 1998’s Moon Safari managed to reconcile the 21st century we imagined in our childhood with the one we grew into, Talkie Walkie, the Air album no-one remembers, did a different kind of job. While tracks like ‘Run’, ‘Universal Traveler’ and ‘Alone In Kyoto’ were no longer the sound of the future we once predicted, they were the sound of the future made human, which invariably is what happens once you start living it.
09. ANIMAL COLLECTIVE / FEELS (October 2005)
Favourite Track ‘Banshee Beat’
It’s often forgotten that Animal Collective existed long before 2009’s brilliant Merriweather Post Pavilion. Preceding it were seven other albums of various personnel combinations and varying listenability, the best of which was Feels. Toning down a tendency to balance their wonky pop sensibility with low key acoustic meanderings and the downright weird, it reflected their slightly more focused way of thinking on songs such as ‘Grass’, ‘Flesh Canoe’ and ’The Purple Bottle’. Greatest of all though was ‘Banshee Beat’, the perfect combination of Animal Collective’s split personality and easily the best thing they’d written up to that point.
10. J. DILLA / DONUTS (February 2006)
Favourite Track ‘Workinonit’
Famously pieced together on a laptop in his hospital bed where he lay seriously ill with lupus and a rare, life-threatening blood disease, James Yancey’s Donuts was a gem of an album that took instrumental hip hop on a groovy, futuristic voyage via a patchwork of pre-existing material. Encapsulating the decades of artistry that came before, it’s somewhat ironic that the long forgotten samples Donuts was built from by the likes of 10cc, The Jackson 5, Frank Zappa, Malcolm McLaren and the Beastie Boys would become culturally relevant once more when the albums tracks were repurposed by Nas, Busta Rhymes, Ghostface Killah, Common, The Roots and MF Doom amongst others.
11. THE FIELD / FROM HERE WE GO SUBLIME (March 2007)
Favourite Track ‘Over The Ice’
If Donuts let it be known what was possible in the hip hop of the mid-noughties, From Here We Go Sublime did a similar kind of thing for electronic dance music. Playing around in the hinterland of minimal techno, Swedish musician and DJ Axel Willner went on a sonic journey that was so deeply conceived it came across as effortless. A masterful set of tracks designed for everything from dancing to studying, their strange alchemy made them almost human. At times just a short step away from the repetitive, sickly sweet melodies of a million trance anthems, at others the kind of cutting edge exploration I hadn’t come across since the early nineties, artistically it was and still is in a class of its own.
12. JENS LEKMAN / NIGHT FALLS OVER KORTEDALA (September 2007)
Favourite Track ‘Your Arms Around Me’
Sweden’s coolest unknown pop star, Jens Lekman’s second album was packed full of his grand, sweeping, orchestral love songs tinged with old fashioned schmaltz. Armed as ever with his wise if weary baritone and an imagination that pitted a shimmering harp against hip hop beats and a set of endearing lyrics reflecting on the random minutiae of life, Night Falls Over Kortedala was bold, beautiful, genuinely affecting pop that meant a lot more to me than it possibly should have.
13. HERCULES & LOVE AFFAIR / HERCULES & LOVE AFFAIR (March 2008)
Favourite Track ‘Raise Me Up’
In the late noughties I found myself drowning in a sea of irrelevant crap with a desire to be lifted out of a life that had become overwhelmingly hectic. My listening tended to reflect that mindset but in search of a little light relief I turned to Hercule & Love Affair. A four strong collective of New York mavericks including Antony Hegarty, their self-titled debut reveled in the club music of the late seventies and early eighties but somehow managed to avoid the usual pitfalls of mimicry and cliché via a melange of anthemic disco hooks and unfiltered optimism that transformed it into something wholly its own.
14. PHOENIX / WOLFGANG AMADEUS PHOENIX (May 2009)
Favourite Track ‘Girlfriend’
In ten concise songs Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix provided some of the finest pop tunes of the noughties. An incredibly refined and immaculately crafted album, everything about Phoenix sounded precise and almost willfully sterile. And yet, there was something strangely of the moment about Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix and fantastic songs like ‘Liztomania’, ‘1901’ and ‘Girlfriend’ I found impossible to pin down, despite a feeling that there was something a little po-faced about the groups valiant pursuit of shiny pop perfection.
15. FLYING LOTUS / COSMOGRAMMA (May 2010)
Favourite Track ‘Do The Astral Plane’
In 2010 Cosmogramma had the misfortune to be so different its importance was difficult to gauge. However, sixteen years later I’m of the opinion that it’s one of those more challenging albums that gets decidedly odder the more it progresses. Whether it’s pretentious nonsense (with Thom Yorke thrown in for good measure) or teetering on genius, I have no idea. Then again, that’s probably why it’s here!
16. DESTROYER / KAPUTT (January 2011)
Favourite Track ‘Kaputt’
After years as a minor cult act, Destroyer’s ninth album finally got them into the American Top 100, even if was at 62 for just one week. But even that tiny modicum of success was surprising given how Kaputt was in effect a self-conscious homage to the sophisticated, mid-eighties pop perpetuated by the likes of Prefab Sprout and The Blue Nile. Featuring super glossy production, fretless bass, sax solo’s and a love for Steely Dan, those groups existence was another like punk never happened scenario. And yet, in 2011, to my jaded ears Dan Bejar’s recollections of such an unfashionable era were revolutionary.
17. ST. VINCENT / STRANGE MERCY (September 2011)
Favourite Track ‘Cruel’
An album I’ve admired since its release, nonetheless, Strange Mercy almost didn’t make the cut here mainly because it didn’t seem to fit in with the musical climate of the time. Ultra-serious and stripped back compared to the whimsical, ostentatious arrangements of Annie Clark’s previous work, the album focused more on atmosphere, the inclusion of guitar freakouts, prog piano and electronic drums resulting in a tense, claustrophobic listen. Having said that, it was still an album brimming with pleasurable moments, flipping through arty touchstones like Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel without relinquishing any of its originality.
18. THE XX / COEXIST (September 2012)
Favourite Track ‘Sunset’
I was there in 2009 when everyone was swooning over The XX, their self-titled debut album a much needed shot of transient, never to be repeated brilliance. Except, it didn’t quite work out like that and instead of The XX, it would be Coexist three years later that really mattered. A breathtaking display of confidence from start to finish, there wasn’t a second that wasn’t exactly as they intended, immaculate songs like ‘Chained’, ‘Sunset’ and ‘Tides’ buoyed by Jamie xx’s extensive sonic collage while the effortless fragility of Romy and Oliver Sim’s voices were often almost too perfect to bear.
19. VAMPIRE WEEKEND / MODERN VAMPIRES IN THE CITY (May 2013)
Favourite Track ‘Step’
Columbia undergrads Vampire Weekend’s third album found them forsaking their privileged ‘Upper West Side Soweto’ aesthetic to write a bunch of heartfelt songs about mortality and the passing of youth. Unlike their hardcore fans who weren’t quite so keen, I found them instantly more appealing and listenable, their too clever by half, gimmicky bullshit of the past finally giving way to an album of real substance and value.
20. SUN KIL MOON / BENJI (February 2014)
Favourite Track ‘Ben’s My Friend’
A singer of his own dour and caustic songs since the early nineties, Mark Kozelek has never acquired the midlife reputation of a Will Oldham or a Bill Callahan, but continues to produce album after album regardless. Benji, his sixth as Sun Kil Moon, was his most devastating, his supposedly true tales of misfortune and murder infiltrating every song. And yet it wasn’t all doom and gloom, Kozelek also detailing his youthful sexual fumbling’s, his love for Led Zeppelin's slower songs and on ‘Ben’s My Friend’, a catalogue of indignities resulting in one of the warmest, most revealing songs ever written about middle-aged, male friendship.
21. BJORK / VULNICURA (January 2015)
Favourite Track ‘Black Lake’
I’ve written before about Bjork’s 21st century albums and how they can be a tough listen and Vulnicura was no different. An unfathomably dense work detailing the emotional turmoil surrounding her break up with artist Matthew Barney, the nine, structure free and overlong songs may have demanded attention but they weren’t what you’d call easy listening. Even so, after multiple listens they gradually began to reveal Bjork’s torturous feelings of loss, making them operatic and fantastical on one level yet incredibly intimate on another, none more so than on the painfully intense ‘Black Lake’.
22. ANDERSON. PAAK / MALIBU (January 2016)
Favourite Track ‘The Bird’
The contemporary R&B of the 21st century has been as shameless and money grabbing as that of any post seventies era. Praise be then for Anderson. Paak and Malibu which flipped between soul, funk, pop and classic hip-hop to create the sound best suited for telling his story. And what a story it was, one of reoccurring hardship best told on ‘The Bird’ which served as both an introduction to his youth and a desire to rise above his struggles and come out the other side.
23. PERFUME GENIUS / NO SHAPE (May 2017)
Favourite Track ‘Slip Away’
By drawing on everything from pop to glam to Goth, Mike Hadreas’s fourth album was a little harder to pigeonhole than his previous three. What they did have in common was No Shape’s raw confessional nature and an unapologetic queerness typified by ‘Slip Away’, its magnificent pop chorus bursting into life over a pounding rhythm. Elsewhere the songs were so good it was easy to neglect their innate strangeness, although it was that very strangeness; the awkward, lurching rhythm on ‘Go Ahead’, the nervous electronic noise on ‘Wreath’, the agitated string arrangement on ‘Choir’ that made it so euphoric and rapturous.
24. ARCTIC MONKEYS / TRANQUILITY BASE & CASINO (May 2018)
Favourite Track ‘Star Treatment’
As much as I ignored the Arctic Monkey’s post Favourite Worst Nightmare albums, attracted by its cool, sixties soundtrack styling, subtle, Curtis Mayfield funk and Alex Turner’s louche croon, the troubled and trad rock free Tranquility Base & Casino appealed a whole lot more. Set sonically and aesthetically in a cocktail bar but with something of value to say, it proved a riveting listen and in my mind reinforced Turner’s status as one of our greatest songwriters.
25. WEYES BLOOD / TITANIC RISING (April 2019)
Favourite Track ‘Movies’
My twenty tens were packed with albums pushing the boundaries of twenty first music culture as far as they could go. In an era when pop was cool again, Titanic Rising blended otherworldly ethereality and emotion packed lyrics with influences as disparate as Gershwin, Wings, Demis Roussos and Can. Sounding both cathartic and triumphant, there was a real sense that both personally and artistically Natalie Mering had finally found a lot of the answers to what happens when everything you grow up believing goes horribly wrong. And if you bothered to listen there was every chance you would too.
26. LANA DEL REY / NORMAN FUCKING ROCKWELL (August 2019)
Favourite Track ‘California’
For all her faults and flaws there’s something about Lana Del Rey that connects with me in a way I really can’t explain. On her fifth album Norman Fucking Rockwell, she created a weird, retro, sonic aesthetic with subtle, classic rock references to Crosby, Stills & Nash, Neil Young, John & Yoko and oddly, even Led Zeppelin’s Houses of The Holy. That all of those influences gelled to create her most cohesive album was an achievement in itself, the hauntingly brilliant ‘California’, the nine minute ‘Venice Bitch’, ‘Hope Is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman Like Me to Have – but I Have It’ and the goosebump inducing ‘The Greatest’ some of the most touching and impressive songwriting I’d discovered in a long time.
27. FIONA APPLE / FETCH THE BOLT CUTTERS (April 2020)
Favourite Track ‘Fetch The Bolt Cutters’
Fetch The Bolt Cutters was my first experience of Fiona Apple and only came about because I was looking for something new and challenging to listen to during the first few weeks of lockdown. Her fifth album proved to be the perfect companion during that confused and confusing period. Recalling Kate Bush at her best, another female artist who soon outgrew the confines of pop, sonically the albums brave experimentalism pushed into uncharted waters while the 42 year olds intensely personal lyrics reached back to her early adolescence. I had never heard the like of them before and six years on that is still the case.
28. SAULT / UNTITLED (BLACK IS) (June 2020)
Favourite Track ‘Wildfires’
When the mysterious Sault first appeared very little was known about them other than they consisted of a central core revolving around multi-instrumentalist and producer Inflo, singer/songwriter Cleo Sol and rapper Melissa Young. Making an impactful and brilliantly sequenced collection of pro-Black music was their mission and on Untitled (Black Is) they succeeded wonderfully. Boasting an old school soul atmosphere and a powerful message of unwavering hope on songs like ‘Hard Life’, ‘Sorry Ain’t Enough’, Eternal Life’, ‘Miracles’ and ‘Wildfires’, it was a timely, uplifting album informed by struggle, solidarity and pride.
29. BLACK MIDI / CALVALCADE (May 2021)
Favourite Track ‘Dethroned’
After the noisy, proggy improv experience of their debut, Geordie Greep, Cameron Picton and Morgan Simpson opted for something a little different for album number two. Inserting some glorious melodies and heartfelt lyrics into their creative process, Cavalcade was all the better for it, ‘Dethroned’, ‘Ascending Forth’ and in particular ‘Marlene Dietrich’ surprisingly listenable and (whisper it), almost romantic!
30. DRY CLEANING / STUMPWORK (October 2022)
Favourite Track ‘Hot Penny Day’
Powered by the cold isolation of technology, politics, and global disaster, the last few years of the twenty tens provided a conduit back to late seventies/early eighties post punk. One of the finest groups to emerge were Dry Cleaning whose lead singer Florence Shaw delivered cut-up and found lyrics in a manner that lay somewhere between Mark E. Smith and Serge Gainsbourg. Slightly more refined, melodious and focused than their debut, what made Stumpwork such a great album was their skill in making the likes of ‘Hot Penny Day’, ’No Decent Shoes For Rain’ and ‘Conservative Hell’ appear as if they were saying nothing of substance whereas in reality they were saying so much.
31. FEVER RAY / RADICAL ROMANTICS (March 2023)
Favourite Track ‘Kandy’
In many ways Radical Romantics was familiar territory, songs like ‘Kandy’, ‘What They Call Us’ and ‘New Utensils’ immediately enthralling despite being assembled on Karin Dreijer’s classic blueprint of bright synths and liquid percussion. That said, Fever Ray have always created music with a far deeper meaning than its shiny surface gloss would have you believe. A brilliantly weird and vulnerable examination of the romantic ideal, Radical Romantics was candid and mysterious and all the more scary for it.
32. A.G. COOK / BRITPOP (May 2024)
Favourite Track ‘Pink Mask’
PC Music founder A.G. Cook’s Britpop had little to do with the Britpop of the nineties, but everything to do with British pop history. Consisting of a mammoth 24 tracks split across three discs titled past, present and future, it was an emotional and experimental love letter to his musical heritage. Going from the glitchy, ‘chipmunk fantasia’ of Disc One to the dreamy acoustic folktronica of Disc Two before ending with Cook’s trademark sci-fi sonics on Disc Three, it must be one of the few album’s to draw as much from medieval England as it did our hypothetical future.
33. BLOOD ORANGE / ESSEX HONEY (August 2025)
Favourite Track ‘Countryside’
As a producer and songwriter on songs by major pop artists like Mariah Carey and Kylie Minogue, Dev Hynes wasn’t on my radar until I read about Essex Honey, an intriguing album detailing a typically English late summer-into-autumn melancholy. And it didn’t disappoint, the frequently gorgeous melodies but inescapably sad lyrics coloured by the death of Hynes’s mother evoking both Greater London’s urban sprawl on ‘The Last of England’ and its more pastoral surroundings on ‘Countryside’. It was also an album on which memories provided a brief respite from looming tragedy while songs touching on The Replacements, The Durutti Column, Massive Attack, even The Smiths, added further to its beguiling sense of longing.
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