The first 25 years of this century have seen a big shift in the way we listen to music. Photo / Getty Images
The first 25 years of this century have seen a big shift in the way we listen to music. Photo / Getty Images
From the shock of Radiohead’s radical Kid A in 2000 through to Charli XCX’s brilliant Brat, critics from the Sunday Times pick the records that have defined the past 25 years.
The first 25 years of this century have brought about a huge shift in the way we consume music.Streaming has challenged the way we pay for it and listen to it, with the knock-on effect of a big increase in the number of singles released. You are now more likely to discover a new artist on a playlist rather than an album.
But every year a few superb records buck that trend, which is one reason why we’re celebrating them here. After some heated debate and a few backroom deals the Sunday Times music critics have landed on the 25 best albums of the past 25 years - perhaps the most varied era of pop music so far.
These are records we can defend individually and to the hilt - Lady Gaga, Adele, Little Simz, Frank Ocean and Bon Iver narrowly missed the cut. Let the band/singer/rapper/DJ play on.
25. Billie Eilish - When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? (2019)
Billie Eilish performs at Glastonbury in 2019. Photo / Getty Images
Billie Eilish wrote these songs when she was a teenager: where did she come from? They sound bassy and cavernous, a little bit alien,as she sings in a skittish whisper that perfectly captures an online generation who have grown up more wired than any before. As Thom Yorke once said: “She’s the only one doing anything interesting.”
24. Arcade Fire - Funeral (2004)
This was a debut that came from nowhere and was endorsed by David Bowie. The Canadian oddballs made anthems great again by not trying to write them in the first place. Funeral is chaos confined, with lyrics drawing on childhood nostalgia. The one black mark? They started the wordless chorus fad “Wooh! Woo-aah!” that gave Mumford & Sons a career.
23. Gorillaz - Plastic Beach (2010)
Damon Albarn’s cartoon band came into their own with this concept album about environmental waste. Everyone from Snoop Dogg to Mark E Smith of the Fall lined up to take part in what amounted to an exercise in worldbuilding. And the songs are fantastic: fun and groovy, transcending genre as if belonging to some parallel pop universe. On Some Kind of Nature even Lou Reed sounded like he was enjoying himself.
22. Jay-Z - The Blueprint (2001)
Released on September 11, Jay-Z inadvertently offered an act of defiance with the ultimate New York rap album. Stuffed full of cool samples — you can hear Five to One by the Doors running through Takeover — alongside outrageous boasts, disses on rival rappers, effortless rhythmic dexterity and a general air of triumph, it remains the highlight of his career.
Fiona Apple is an experimental artist who fell into pop by mistake. The former heart-on-sleeve Nineties shouter combined the emotional heft of Kate Bush with the bohemian spirit of Tom Waits in a totally original attempt to make sense of early fame, childhood abuse and other traumas. It’s all delivered with a lightness of touch and an ear for a tune: the funky Ladies is an entire novel about female miscommunication in three catchy minutes.
20. The Streets - Original Pirate Material (2002)
Mike Skinner, aka The Streets, in 2002, the year his debut album came out. Photo / Getty Images
Not since the Specials had an act captured the grimy realities of young British life so well. Coming out of the pirate radio-led garage scene, Birmingham’s Mike Skinner dealt with the most basic themes - getting stoned, going to KFC, fancying someone, trying not to get beaten up - in a tone that suggested he was having a chat down the pub.
19. Rihanna - Anti (2016)
None of the huge hits - Diamonds, Umbrella, We Found Love - are here, but instead we see what happens when an A-lister does things her own way, darling, and makes woozy music for fans too stoned to dance. Then comes Love on the Brain, which sounds like Amy Winehouse and makes the businesswoman’s imminent return to singing so exciting.
18. LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver (2007)
Taking his love of Bowie into the clubs of New York, James Murphy wrote the album that has been soundtracking late, occasionally narcotic, nights for nearly two decades. Its pulse is relentless but there’s a beating heart too. Its paean for a lost hero, Someone Great, just hits harder the older we get.
17. Beyoncé - Lemonade (2016)
Beyoncé strikes a pose on stage in California in 2016. Photo / Getty Images
“You can taste the dishonesty!” A bold opening lyric, but for a superstar like Beyoncé, talking about the infidelity of her husband, Jay-Z? Jaw-dropping. The music stepped up a level too. For all the hype about her recent foray into country and dance, it was all here already as Beyoncé shows us - and her husband - what she’s capable of.
16. The White Stripes - Elephant (2003)
Jack White inadvertently came up with a million-selling monster when he made his tribute to Britain’s garage punk scene, recorded on vintage gear at the tiny Toe Rag Studios in Hackney. Variously angry, tender and brutal, the album was a triumph of imagination through limitation: two musicians, eight tracks to record on, no equipment made after 1963. It also spawned Seven Nation Army, which has been terrorising sports stadiums ever since.
15. Taylor Swift - 1989 (2014)
Which is the biggest pop star of the century’s best album? Easy, this one. Just look at the Eras concert crowd last year: the songs from this behemoth were the best received by far. Its run of hits is ridiculous, and in Blank Space, Style and Out of the Woods we see Swift’s combination of wit and heartbreak at their most perfect.
14. Daft Punk - Discovery (2001)
Having emerged as the most successful act from the French Touch wave of late Nineties Parisian dance music, the robotic duo Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo forged an autotune-heavy style that pretty much set the course for pop music for the next two decades. They also offered an ode to childhood loves, from soft rock to Japanese animé. The result is an innocent if remarkably sophisticated celebration of music for its own sake, with all deeper meaning left at the studio door.
Seattle’s Robin Pecknold led a Noughties folk-rock revival with this churchy, solemn instant classic, inspired by a backpacking trip to the Lake District and the discovery of an old Steeleye Span album (yes, really). A generation of hipsters took note and got into craft ale, pickling and dressing like 18th-century pioneers.
12. Lorde - Melodrama (2017)
Lorde bringing the melodrama in 2017. Photo / Getty Images
Its opener, Green Light, is arguably the song of the century, but the rest of Lorde’s tribute to youth and hedonism features some of the most sophisticated floor-fillers of recent times. There’s a confidence in challenging pop formulas by asking, “Do we really need a verse to always follow a chorus?” and coming up with the answer: “Well, no.”
11. Leonard Cohen - You Want It Darker (2016)
Aged 82, the great, gloomy poet of the hippy era tackled his impending end with typically mordant wit, dismissing his inner demons as “middle class and tame” and undercutting the glorious backing of a synagogue choir with his own languorous croon. Shuffling towards the dying of the light at his own leisurely pace, Cohen’s nonchalant approach was wise, funny and strangely reassuring.
10. Charli XCX - Brat (2024)
After a decade of being, in her own words, “famous but not quite”, Essex girl Charli XCX broke through spectacularly with an album that combined the shock of the new with age-old themes. Von Dutch and 360 sounded like they belonged to a nightclub in space, but elsewhere Charlotte Aitchison fretted over female rivalries, motherhood and other enduring concerns. Bitching about her fellow pop star Lorde on Girl, So Confusing, only to have Lorde guest on the remix, was a masterstroke.
9. Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not (2006)
The Arctic Monkeys were right on cue in 2006. Photo / Getty Images
With songs so smart and immediate that cynics accused Alex Turner of being an industry plant, Arctic Monkeys revived British guitar music after the doldrums of latter-day Oasis. His stories about Sheffield — featuring pool cues, Converse and riot vans — were kitchen-sink pop, with melodies that nailed the stadium singalong.
8. Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010)
OK, Kanye West has now landed somewhere between awful and unwell - but his best music remains undeniably powerful and inventive. Here he cemented hip-hop as the most popular music on the planet by shifting it into its prog phase. The songs have energy, movement, attitude - and an exhilaration all their own.
7. Radiohead - Kid A (2000)
Britain’s best band largely sidetracked guitars in this turn-of-the-century surprise, which ditched the rock music they believed had turned stale in favour of electronica and various fiddly noises. Who would have thought that the past 25 years would cement it as Radiohead’s best album? Well, Thom Yorke maybe.
6. Sufjan Stevens - Carrie & Lowell (2015)
Delicacy is getting harder to come by in an industry that needs to sell hard - yet Sufjan Stevens manages it. When his mother died, the wispy balladeer worked through his grief with the kind of intimacy that would shock a diarist. At the same time it’s too pretty to be sad - less a lament and more a necessary celebration of life.
5. Lana Del Rey - Norman F***ing Rockwell (2019)
Lana del Rey on stage in New Orleans in 2019. Photo / Getty Images
Solo female artists dominate this century, Lana Del Rey and her soaring ballads chief among them. Her masterpiece represents the peak of her slightly bizarre hold on a generation apparently lacking in attention spans - a swarm of strings and sass from the Joni Mitchell of the Instagram age.
4. David Bowie - The Next Day (2013)
His death-foretelling swansong Blackstar gets all the attention, but this is the 21st-century Bowie classic to return to. After a ten-year gap, he tapped into the art-rock spirit of his 1980 album Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) for a reflection on his life. Where Are We Now? summoned memories of Seventies Berlin, while The Stars (Are Out Tonight) was the sound of a celebrity realising his time had passed. Bowie was making peace with himself, in other words.
3. Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp a Butterfly (2015)
Long before he was picking fights with Drake, the Compton rapper Kendrick Lamar was soundtracking the early Black Lives Matter movement with this complex, jazz-led, state-of-the-nation address. Inspired by a visit to Nelson Mandela’s jail cell, Lamar sought to encapsulate the history of black American music in its contemporary form: hip-hop. The result proved that stimulating, purposeful music can have a serious mainstream impact and even influence the political climate; Lamar won a Pulitzer for his next album, Damn.
2. Amy Winehouse - Back to Black (2006)
An album forged in pain, capturing the love, drug and fame-battered lifestyle that ultimately killed her, Amy Winehouse’s visceral masterpiece is a knockout punch delivered in retro stylings. Rehab might sound like a Sixties girl-group belter, but the title tells you all you need to know about its singer’s state of disarray. The title track is as musically adventurous as it is lyrically devastating: suicidal despair captured by an arrangement that drops away into nothingness, a vocal delivery that is defiant and desperate.
1. The Strokes - Is This It (2001)
The Strokes on tour in 2001, the year their “perfect” debut album landed. Photo / Getty Images
Tapping into the history of New York bands from the Velvet Underground to Television, the Strokes kissed goodbye to the 20th century with the perfect album: taut, stylish, joyous, snarky, bittersweet … just right in every way. As well as inspiring a garage rock revolution, Is This It evoked the insouciance of youth, from picking up girls to hanging out in bars to feeling bad about it all the next morning. They looked the part too - minimalist in a way that felt like the inspiration for Steve Jobs and his back-to-basics Apple aesthetic. No wonder everyone suddenly wanted to be in a band.
Written by: Will Hodgkinson, Blanca Schofield and Jonathan Dean
