The Best Albums of the 21st Century So Far

If we can thank teen-pop Svengali turned convicted criminal Lou Pearlman for anything, it’s for angering these guys so much that they made an entire album about how they felt like puppets. ’NSync were engaged in a legal battle with management when they made their second album, No Strings Attached, and they took the theme to exaggerated levels, including the LP’s now-iconic cover of the group as stars in a marionette show. The album arrived at the height of 2000s boy-band mania (selling 2.4 million CDs in its first week out), but Justin Timberlake and Co. stood out by expanding their palette, dabbling in R&B and songs about cybersex and the ecstasy of getting your paycheck. —Angie Martoccio

With Electra Heart, Marina Diamandis created an electro-pop, Tumblr-era-defining cult classic. Anchored by pop earworms like “How to Be a Heartbreaker” and “Bubblegum Bitch,” Marina portrayed cynical archetypes of womanhood: a suburban housewife, a heartbroken teen, a homewrecker, and a celebrity-seeking beauty queen. Throughout, she breathes air into each of the album’s characters with her raw lyricism and expert production: “Wish I’d been a prom queen, fighting for the title/Instead of being 16 and burning up a Bible,” she sings on “Teen Idle.” She breaks hearts, gets her own heart broken, sets unreachable ambitions, and feels trapped, creating a beautiful LP in the process. —Tomás Mier

Before releasing Teens of Denial in 2016, Car Seat Headrest had already dropped a career’s worth of material. A run of eight self-released albums (plus a compilation of rerecorded favorites) cemented bandleader Will Toledo as a DIY hero, while Teens of Denial certified his status as a generational indie-rock talent. Described by Toledo as a bildungsroman, the album tracks the romantic, depressive, drug-and-alcohol-addled tribulations of young adulthood. It’s a reverential (and heavily referential) rock album thick with angst, confusion, and self-loathing, quotidian dread and bad trips, all of which Toledo handles with an intelligence, sincerity, and ambition matched only by its plethora of killer guitar riffs. —Jon Blistein

The proud Kentuckian made a touchstone album with 2017’s Purgatory, a record that dabbles in his home state’s bluegrass, with dashes of outlaw country and even U2 anthem rock. The brooding “Whitehouse Road” painted a picture of hardscrabble rural existence and the lengths locals will go to numb the pain. But Childers also sang of the strength a man can find in committing to a partner: “Lady May” was his love letter to his wife, Senora May. He also found footing in meditating, which he shares in “Universal Sound,” rich in Edge-evoking guitars. The fan favorite though remains “Feathered Indians,” a tale of devotion and raw passion that, to the consternation of Childers devotees, he no longer performs live. —Joseph Hudak

On his second album, Chicago rapper Saba breezes so many moods and grave topics — from mortality, depression, affliction — while sounding like he’s just lolling at the local coffee shop. Bright, cool, and triumphant, Saba played counterpart to his cold-hearted drill contemporaries, heartening his city, which in 2018 saw about 561 homicides. “Smile” is a sweet paean to perseverance despite the loss of a friend, and the harrowing “Prom/King,” wherein Saba raps about youthful ambition, being a virgin, and an M.I.A. pal, is lively enough to make you feel like you’re right there with him trooping it out. Saba’s devil-may-care swagger gives us a lot to care about. —Will Dukes

On their 2013 debut, the 1975 made pure, chaotic dysfunction seem like the epitome of romance. Matty Healy was a tattooed, chain-smoking messiah at the height of Tumblr’s redefining the perceived aesthetics of the coming-of-age experience. He delivered cinematic imaginings of blinding, intoxicated young love on “Robbers” and John Hughes-esque passion on “Heart Out,” then shrugged it all off on “Girls” and “Sex.” There were hushed love affairs on “Settle Down” and wedding blackouts on “Menswear.” And the jazz-inspired “Pressure” and piano ballad “Is There Somebody Who Can Watch You” grapple with the cult of celebrity. The record flourishes with storytelling that makes room in the back seat for a listener about to bear witness to a long night of sex, drugs, and guitar-fueled pop debauchery. —Larisha Paul

“I’m the bad guy,” crows 21 Savage on his first major release. Savage Mode is a short and sharp collection of nine songs that introduces the Atlanta rapper’s distinctive flow, and a voice that sounds sepulchral and shorn of emotion, or “no heart.” He deploys it to canny effect, even as listeners familiar with trap’s contours will assume that claims of retributive violence and bedding women are more about theatrics than verisimilitude. Metro Boomin, for his part, accompanies 21’s boasts with muted synth notes akin to minimal techno, heightening the menacing atmosphere. Rap heads may debate Savage Mode’s place in the canon, but it’s clear that this 21 Savage star-making performance added new sonic possibilities to a subgenre where “hard” personas trump all. —Mosi Reeves

Pierce the Veil struck an exemplary balance between pop and punk on their third album. A newfound grasp on melody is paired with a sense of urgency that frontman Vic Fuentes uses to communicate an embrace of chaos through theatrical storytelling. The explosive standouts “Props & Mayhem” and “King for a Day,” with Sleeping With Sirens’ Kellin Quinn, are brilliantly haunted by tortuous emotions. There’s death that rattles with the guttural screams of “Bulls in the Bronx” and a desperate plea to avoid ever encountering such tragedy again on “Hold on Till May” and “Stained Glass Eyes and Colorful Tears.” The band performs as if it’s actively being consumed by a fiery blaze. —L.P.

Over the tololoche plucks and trumpet tantaras of the traditional rancheras on La Gran Señora, late Mexican music diva Jenni Rivera sings from the perspective of the unapologetic Mexican American woman that she represented. She confronts a cheating lover on “Por Qué No Le Calas,” dabbles in country with a cover of Freddy Fender’s “Before the Next Teardrop Falls,” and delivers a trio of radio hits with “Ya Lo Sé,” “La Gran Señora,” and “No Llega El Olvido,” all staples at tequila-fueled carne asadas and drag shows alike. Released just three years before her death in a tragic plane accident, La Gran Señora served in many ways as Rivera’s magnum opus. Like Selena in the Nineties, she’s only become more revered since her death. —T.M.

North Carolina singer-songwriter MJ Lenderman delivered a perfect union of woodsy heartache and craggy indie-rock-guitar beauty on his fourth solo album. Manning Fireworks teams with vivid tales of doomed bros stumbling through life one drunken disaster at a time — from the newly dumped fool in “She’s Leaving You,” curing his blues by driving around in a rented Ferrari while listening to Eric Clapton, to the guy spelunking into his own loneliness playing Guitar Hero in his room on the 10-minute Ozzy Osbourne/Warren Zevon/Sonic Youth tribute “Bark at the Moon.” There’s a shabby poetry and dank majesty in every song, assuring Lenderman’s place in the sad-sack canon alongside greats from Paul Westerberg to J. Mascis to Gary Stewart. —Jon Dolan

After taking the world by storm with “Water,” South African artist Tyla’s debut rocked the intersection of the dance and Afropop movements that had risen through the early 2020s. Originally released in the spring of 2024, Tyla saw the singer wielding her gentle voice’s soft power over sensual and prominent fusions of amapiano and Afrobeats — but she also embodies hip-hop through Gunna, dancehall with Skillibeng, and Latin music with Becky G by her side. By the fall, the deluxe Tyla+ made it even stronger with raw amapiano cut “Shake Ah,” the highlife-indebted “Push 2 Start,” and the pure-pop heartache of “Back To U.” Though the young star takes her sound around the world, every Tyla+ track carries a piece of her continental home. —Mankaprr Conteh 

Doja Cat’s second studio album, Hot Pink, was a showcase of the astronomical heights the rapper and singer could reach when she was actually trying to after she accidentally charmed the internet with the impossibly catchy viral song “Mooo.” She was irresistibly charismatic on the disco-inspired smash hit “Say So” and the quick-witted “Rules,” which swells with sultry guitar licks. The spellbinding R&B ballad “Streets” reinforced Doja as a contortionist in both genre and tone, while her hitmaking and collaborative skills thrived on “Juicy” and “Like That.” She opened the record with an enticing idea on “Cyber Sex”: “Let’s break the internet.” Her effortless ability to do so is what solidified her as a bonafide star. —L.P. 

Kurt Vile had been getting a reputation as a low-fi Philly shredder to watch for a few years by the time he polished up his sound for this breakthrough 2011 album. His gentle fingerpicked lullabies (“Baby’s Arms”) and tripped-out jangle odysseys (“Jesus Fever”) nestled in perfectly next to his latter-day Neil Young rockers (“Puppet to the Man”), and producer John Agnello managed to make them all sound like should-be hits from an alternate-universe FM station. “Fingerpicking, in general, is a hypnotic thing,” Vile told Rolling Stone a few years later. “I feel like I’m more ADD all the time, so the music has to be hypnotic.” By the end of the LP, indie rock had an unassuming new guitar hero. —Simon Vozick-Levinson 

By the time Ashlee Simpson started working on her debut album, her pop star older sister, Jessica, had become one of the most famous women in the world. It was the younger Simpson’s dream to leave her sister’s shadow, and the rough and tough pop rock of Autobiography had a guitar-driven edge that put her in a whole different musical class. On lead single “Pieces of Me,” Simpson belted out a classic soft-rock love song in her signature vocal rasp, while “La La” was as spunky and raucous as her image at the time: with kohl black eyeliner smeared around and a mess of bracelets, chains, and belts on her baggy pants. She’d never have to worry about her sister’s shadow again. —Brittany Spanos

The Baltimore band Turnstile ripped through the barriers of what constitutes hardcore with 2021’s Glow On, a delightful dustup merging rock, R&B, electronic music, and glitch. From the fast, fun, and fierce “Holiday” to “Blackout,” both of which evoke snotty early-aughts punk while handily melting your face, Glow On ushered in a whole new class of hardcore musicians who aren’t afraid to not only shake off the cobwebs — but also torch them. Emphasizing the album’s wide-reaching vision, Glow On featured cameos from the avant-R&B artist Dev Hynes and indie singer-songwriter Julien Baker, and the surprising commercial momentum it created even led to a couple of Grammy nominations. —Brenna Ehrlich

The second album from Albanian British upstart Dua Lipa arrived at a moment that was fraught, yet ideal — it dropped a few weeks into the Covid-19 pandemic, a perfect time for a record that turned every home-listening setup into a super exclusive club’s sound system. Future Nostalgia being an impeccably put-together dance-pop album helped, of course. As far as divas go, Lipa’s not exactly a belter, but she does possess a knowing alto that, on songs like the strutting “Don’t Start Now” and the high-wire-walking “Break My Heart,” proves to be a formidable foil for disco funk’s bouncing-ball bass lines, flinty guitars, and insistent drums. —Maura Johnston

It was C. Tangana’s songwriting contributions to Rosalía’s El Mal Querer in 2018 that gained notoriety outside his native Spain. Three years later, El Madrileño confirmed him as one of Latin music’s visionaries, a gourmet maximalist who uses the trappings of urbano glamour as a trampoline into the unknown. He merges a serrated bachata line with flamenco heat on “Tú Me Dejaste De Querer,” cherishes the ennui of erotic decadence on “Demasiadas Mujeres,” and trades lines with Argentine godfather Andrés Calamaro on the corrosive post-rock of “Hong Kong.” Tangana surrounded himself with a cadre of deluxe collaborators — even the Gipsy Kings and José Feliciano say hello — but the wacky, hyperpop point of view was all his. —Ernesto Lechner

Two pillars of the rap underground met at the peak of their powers on Pray for Haiti. Westside Gunn’s ear for beats matched Mach-Hommy’s impeccable penmanship, resulting in a project on the short list for the century’s most impressive lyrical exercise. Both artists are prolific, but one can hear the particular intention behind Pray for Haiti’s suite of warm soul- and jazz-influenced beats. The cohesion gives Mach a strong soundscape to show off his brilliance. On the surface, the project shows off his raw rhyming ability, but every playback gradually reveals the project as a rich repository of cultural and historical references to Mach’s beloved Haiti. —Andre Gee

Just like the title says, this 2017 debut documented the life of Khalid Robinson, born in 1998 and possessed of a gift for turning his experiences into open-hearted, hook-laden R&B songs. “Location” was a hit pegged to cellphone technology; the title track was an anthem that name-checked the area code of his hometown, El Paso; “Winter” was the worldy wise love ballad with an all-time great chorus. And that title wan’t just descriptive. “I’m an African American man with an Afro, who isn’t your typical athlete — who wasn’t as masculine as other guys,” Khalid told Rolling Stone. “And now people are looking at me like, this is ‘The American Teen.’” —Christian Hoard

The self-titled debut from Philly-Brooklyn punks Swearin’ is an underground gem of the early 2010s, a hook-laden, lyrically potent collision of pop punk, riot grrrl, and indie rock. Co-vocalists and songwriters Allison Crutchfield (sister of Waxahatchee’s Katie) and Kyle Gilbride hitch an indomitable DIY spirit to the angst and aspirations that define one’s early twenties, when life feels like it’s at its most messy and glorious, confusing and clear, hopeless and hopeful. The album culminates with “Movie Star,” where Crutchfield distills all this sanguine unease to its essence: “You and me don’t earn much pay/But you and me got enough to get away/If we want to.” —J. Blistein

With Bangerz, controversial Disney darling Miley Cyrus was able to take the shock and awe surrounding her career into her own hands. She partnered primarily with trap producer Mike Will Made It, who helped push her pop sound to a sharper, heavier, and surprising edge. The result lives up to the album’s name: a collection of cheeky, twerk-friendly, trap-pop bangers. Not many albums can say they have both Future and Britney Spears, but the real star is Cyrus’ vulnerability. She’s more raw, unfiltered, and open than she had ever been before, leading to high points like the Number One hit “Wrecking Ball.” Bangerz opened a whole new world of experimentation for Cyrus and, thankfully, she can’t stop (and won’t stop) letting her freak flag fly. —B.S.

There may have been no voice more powerful in 2010s indie than the bone-deep howl that Frances Quinlan unleashed on their band’s records. If Hop Along started as an emo project with freak-folk overtones, on 2015’s Painted Shut they emerged as a first-rate heartland rock band. Quinlan wrote with prophetic clarity about casual violence seen on the street (“Powerful Man”), shame-filled encounters at a diner (“Waitress”), and the life of jazz forefather Buddy Bolden (“Buddy in the Parade”), among other large and small tragedies and epiphanies; their bandmates (guitarist Joe Reinhart, Quinlan’s brother Mark Quinlan on drums, and bassist Tyler Long) kept it tight, wringing everything they could out of their instruments to match that unforgettable voice up front. —S.V.L. 

Nigerian singer Wizkid emerged as perhaps the brightest exponent of Afrobeats, a sound that wedded electronic R&B, Jamaican riddims, and West African flows. His breakthrough single, “Ojuelegba,” introduced him to American audiences and earned a Drake co-sign, but he struggled to capitalize on its momentum. That backstory is partly what makes Made in Lagos so triumphant: Its biggest hit, “Essence,” featuring fellow Nigerian breakout artist Tems, earned major American radio play. Wizkid refined his music into a sensuous vibe while exhorting physical pleasure, bolstered by the likes of Skepta, Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley (author of the deathless “Welcome to Jamrock”), and H.E.R. They welcome him into Black pop’s global diaspora. —M.R.

The most adventurous band to emerge from the Brooklyn art-rock scene of the 2000s, TV on the Radio made dissonant, off-kilter music that teemed with melody and passion. They drop wailing noise over a juicy beat on “I Was a Lover,” deliver an A-plus noise-guitar banger with “Wolf Like Me,” and go avant-garage doo-wop for “Dirty Whirl.” The most striking moment might be “A Method,” where singers Kyp Malone and Tunde Adebimpe put on a dazzling nearly a cappella vocal clinic. David Bowie swings by for a torch-passing vocal on “Province,” befitting a record that updated the outre-New Wave tradition of Bowie’s Scary Monsters or the Talking Heads’ Fear of Music for a new century. —J.D.

The teenage wunderkind of athletic slaughterhouse rap grew up to be hip-hop’s leading avant-gardist; and the murkiest, most insular, most odd-angled album of his career would be his creative triumph. Over violently chopped soul samples and the utilization of very few choruses, Earl Sweatshirt’s Some Rap Songs explores depression, anxiety, fractured relationships, growth, not liking shit, and not going outside — or as he raps on “The Mint,” “Lotta blood to let, peace to make, fuck a check.” A free-associative mix of insight and incision, Some Rap Songs is a deeply personal, defiantly anti-commercial record where songs are brief but emotions run deep. —Christopher R. Weingarten

Years before Taylor Swift and Lorde blasted their most intense emotions all over the radio, necktie-slinging Avril Lavigne reimagined Alanis Morissette-style confessional angst for the teen-emo era on one of the early 2000s’ sharpest pop debuts. The Canadian 17-year-old struck gold with her punk attitude and soaring, relentlessly catchy songs. Let Go was just as dynamic as Lavigne herself, yielding dynamite like the Blink-y classic “Sk8er Boi,” while cleverly tackling the innate loneliness of being a teenager on acoustic-driven tracks that fit seamlessly into Top 40 radio. It’s no wonder that Kelly Clarkson’s power ballad “Breakaway” was written by Lavigne and originally supposed to be on this album. —Maya Georgi

R.E.M. were the crucial American guitar band of the 1980s, four Georgia boys defining the sound that came to be called “indie rock.” Yet they got even better in the Nineties, when these guys were suddenly bona fide rock stars, worshipped by the Nirvana-Radiohead generation. But the 2001 album Reveal is the most underrated sleeper in their catalog, a slept-on gem full of bittersweet space-folk beauty. Michael Stipe faces up to vulnerable adult emotion, from the the piano reverie “Beat a Drum” to the exhilarating guitar jangle “Imitation of Life.” R.E.M. sound like wise veterans who have already witnessed the end of the world as they know it a few times, yet face the future unafraid. —Rob Sheffield

This Boots Riley-led hip-hop group’s mix of lefty agitating and deeply-rooted funk was never more fully realized than on this Bush-era masterwork. Yes, this was the album that had the cover showing avowed-Communist Riley and DJ Pam the Funkstress blowing up the World Trade Center. (They changed it after 9/11.) But that controversy obscured some incredible music — from the sweetly principled “Heaven Tonite” to the slow-grooving “Ghetto Manifesto” (complete with a Trump diss). The West Coast funk grooves are varied and consistently inviting, and Riley flows like a righteous river, as on “Everythang”: “Every death is an abrupt one/Every cop is a corrupt one/Without no cash up in a trust fund/Every cat with a gat wanna bust one.” —C.H.

With a sound and style all her own — the album is largely written and produced by the artist herself — For Broken Ears is how Nigerian artist Tems became one of the most admired and sought after voices in Afropop — in part, because it bucks any stagnant ideas of what an Afropop artist can do. Though songs like the striking hymnal “Interference,” the hip-hop bop “Ice T,” and “Higher” (one of the most resoundingly sampled songs of the 2020s) are largely devoid of traditionally African composition, she sits deftly in those pockets on “Damages” and “The Key.” While the seven-song E.P. was relatively beloved when it debuted in 2020, it lived on long after as Future built his Drake collab “Wait for U” around “Higher” and “Free Mind,” which dominated Black radio. —M.C. 

This 2010 album cemented the National’s “sad dad” status. More lush musically than the moody Brooklyn’ band’s previous work, High Violet is both a startlingly beautiful album and a haunted house of anxiety: “I’m afraid of everyone”; “It’s a terrible love and I’m walking with spiders”; “I was afraid I’d eat your brains.” While written years before the Covid pandemic and Trump ever-presence, the lyrics feel especially contemporary. Maybe that’s why we keep coming back to High Violet, and the band continues to close every show with its final track, “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks,” on which Matt Berninger offers, “All the very best of us/String ourselves up for love.” —Lisa Tozzi

In a pop landscape obsessed with perfection, Pink threw out the R&B-pop playbook on her sophomore album and reintroduced herself — flaws first. “I’m a hazard to myself,” she declares on “Don’t Let Me Get Me.” With Linda Perry co-writing and producing much of the music, Pink found someone who could mold her messy brilliance and powerhouse voice into the sound of pop’s future. She brought raw confessionalism to Top 40 radio with songs about abuse (“Family Portrait”), depression (“Just Like a Pill”), and self-reliance (“18-Wheeler”). Two decades later, that blueprint — combining pop hooks with a punk attitude and unvarnished honesty — echoes through artists from Paramore to Halsey to Billie Eilish, and many more. —S.G.

The record that ended up being the last one Mac Miller released in his lifetime sounded, at the time, like a new beginning. Across previous efforts like The Divine Feminine and GO:OD AM, his flow had melted into an easy, burred croon, but he could sound lost in the grooves, as if pulled under by his demons. On Swimming, he’s aware of the abyss beneath him, but is temporarily afloat, determined to do and feel better. He’s aided in this effort by a murderers’ row of talent — including Thundercat, Dev Hynes, Dâm-Funk, and Jon Brion — who supply him with walking bass lines, star-lit West Coast funk, and effervescent synthesizers. Even the outro to “Self Care,” in which Miller toasts to oblivion, sounds beatific. —Clayton Purdom 

A$AP Rocky’s debut album successfully turned the rap game on its head. Up to that point, the Harlem MC flourished over Houston-inspired beats furnished by the blog era’s go-to producer in Clams Casino, ushering in a vibe shift within hip-hop that we’re still very much living in. With Long. Live. A$AP, he managed to bring the mainstream rap world up to his taste level. The generation-defining posse cut “F**kin’ Problems,” featuring would-be rivals Drake and Kendrick Lamar, remains one of the best tracks of the 2010s, while “1Train” brought together what felt like every major rapper of his generation over a menacing beat from Hit Boy. It’s the kind of cultural moment Rocky built a career in crafting. —Jeff Ihaza

Brothers is where the Akron, Ohio, duo of Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney perfected their throwback assemblage of Rust-Belting guitar grit, Delta-blues moan, glam stomp, and hipster soul swagger. Recording a good chunk of the album on the hallowed ground of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, they created a sound that was gritty but uncluttered, hard-boiled but spacious, minimalist yet thick. From the mordent grind and wail of “Next Girl” to the Sixties garage-mirage “The Only One” to the Gary Glitter-meets-John Lee Hooker thwump of “Howlin’ for You,” they hit upon one of the most unlikely and weirdly durable arena-rock sounds of all time. —J.D. 

Halsey’s third studio album is a self-examination turned operation. Alternating between whispers and a wail on the opening track, “Ashley,” the musician slices herself open and reveals a chilling appraisal of pop stardom. There are wounds from past relationships, treated with both biting edge (the hit “Without Me”) and tender care (“Finally // Beautiful Stranger”). There’s also hyper-awareness of mortality as she examines her painstaking yearning to be a mother (“More”); her most co-dependent interpersonal relationships (“3am”); and her complicated confrontations with paranoia (“Forever … (is a long time”)). At the album’s heart is the realization that even in the most crowded of rooms and the most intimate spaces, she ultimately stands alone — thread in hand — stitching herself back up. — L.P.

When Julieta Venegas dropped the alternative-rock gem Bueninvento in 2000, the critical praise was unanimous — the commercial prospects, not so hot. Looking to reboot her sound, the Tijuana, Mexico, native decamped in Buenos Aires, teamed up with songwriter Coti Sorokin and producer Cachorro López, and veered into the mainstream and a Latin blockbuster. Inspired by a blossoming love affair, Venegas anchored her accordion playing on joyful electronic beats, and sang with starry-eyed giddines about fresh beginnings on “Lento” and “Andar Conmigo.” Once timid onstage, she sounds elated on the brash “Lo Que Pidas” — showing off her gorgeous vocals as she takes you to the bridge. A pop diva was born. —E.L.

Opening with a bass line that sounds like an SOS and a narcotics roll call (“Nicotine, valium, Vicodin, marijuana, ecstasy, and alcohol … c-c-c-co-caiiiiine!”), the second album from the Queens of the Stone Age initially suggested that founder Josh Homme and friends had simply traded in their stoner-rock bongs for harder recreational past times. But Rated R revealed Homme had more up his sleeve than fuzzed-out solos. The killer riffs remained — tracks like “Tension Head,” with bassist Nick Oliveri yowling about being sick on the bathroom floor, couldn’t be groovier or heavier. But Homme also added a sense of melody and playful, semi-psychedelic touches into the mix, all while keeping his lounge-crooner’s baritone set to stun.  —David Fear

Classic-disco throwbacks are a dime a dozen, but an album that evokes the style in its late-Seventies and early-Eighties heyday as acutely as this one is rare. For her fourth album, the soulful British singer Jessie Ware and co-writer and producer James Ford, with occasional assists from others, crafted a dozen gems whose specific touchstones — the very Minneapolis synth-bass of “Soul Control,” the surging Philly strings of “Step Into My Life,” the robo-Chic groove of “Mirage (Don’t Stop)” — the songs themselves glance off on their way to disco nirvana. —Michaelangelo Matos

You Forgot It in People answers the question of what’s possible when talented friends truly work collectively. Toronto’s Broken Social Scene, anchored by Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning, swelled to some 10 members (along with a few more guest contributors) by the time they were culling their breakout second album. Their recording approach embodied an indie-rock ethos, where participants — including Feist and members of Stars and Metric, among others — played different instruments throughout the record. The resulting experimentation led to pop perfection, from “Almost Crimes” with Feist, to the Emily Haines-fronted centerpiece “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl.” —Althea Legaspi

One of the unlikeliest pop stars in history, Mike Skinner was a British MC who emerged from the U.K. garage scene but was fixated on the details of “the day in the life of a geezer.” As the Streets, he also rhymed like a geezer — his clipped Northerner cadence doesn’t even pretend toward funk, which took getting used to. But his debut put forth such a totally realized persona, with so many quotable lines (“’Round here, we say birds, not bitches”; “I make bangers, not anthems”) delivered with such flat aplomb that its total effect was, and is, irresistible. And “Weak Become Heroes” is the most lovingly detailed re-creation of a peak rave-floor vibe that anyone has penned. —M.M.

The “freak folk” boomlet of the late-2000s produced a lot of dudes who looked like they’d do pretty well in a Charles Manson lookalike contest and one musical visionary — Joanna Newsom. On Ys, it’s just her and her harp, accompanied by string arrangements from Southern California orchestral-pop legend Van Dyke Parks. She sings like a cross between Björk, Judee Sill, and Billie Holiday, telling fables, creating myths, chumming personal memories, and following her waking heart through extravagantly pretentious, opaquely beautiful overlong dream songs that glance off everything from sisterhood to death to astrophysics to showbiz capitalism. She skips into an epiphany with every pluck and warble. —J.D.

Paul McCartney hit a glorious turning point with Chaos and Creation in the Backyard. After a long dry spell, when people seemed ready to file him away as a nostalgia act, the Beatle legend found a whole new songwriting mojo. He worked with Radiohead/Pavement producer Nigel Godrich — they clashed in the studio, but Godrich pushed the 63-year-old Macca into coming up with the sharpest tunes he’d written in three decades, from “Fine Line” to “Friends to Go.” “Jenny Wren” is the poignant acoustic tale of an indestructible woman, like a sequel to “Blackbird.” Chaos and Creation was a late-game breakthrough that set McCartney off on the strongest artistic roll of his post-Fabs life. He hasn’t made a dud album since. —R.S. 

Vince Staples’ 2015 studio debut established the Long Beach, California, rapper as one of this generation’s greatest storytellers. With beat selection that perfectly encapsulates the time period (including a number of tracks he produced himself), Summertime ’06 finds Staples offering clear-eyed reflections on the kinds of harsh realities that shaped his adolescence. With the wit and introspection that’s become a hallmark of his work as both a musician and, more recently, a filmmaker, Staples manages to treat hardship with a lens devoid of sentimentality, instead offering up his real life with the raw and uncut perspective of a film director with an uncompromising vision. —J.I.

Not since Taylor Swift’s 2006 debut had a Nashville newcomer arrived with pop sensibilities as fully formed as Maren Morris did on her first album. Hero was a sugar rush of huge hooks, swooping choruses, and singles that thrived on country radio even if they were just as influenced by Max Martin Nineties pop and contemporary R&B as Music Row. Produced alongside the late songwriter-producer busbee, Morris’ debut album, one of the earlier Nashville streaming blockbusters, was so successfully sui generis, there’s been nothing quite like it since, and not for lack of trying. —Jonathan Bernstein

Annie Clark’s lyrics alone made St. Vincent an instant classic. “Birth in Reverse” begins with “Oh, what an ordinary day/Take out the garbage, masturbate.” Then there’s “Remember the time we went and snorted that piece of the Berlin Wall that you’d extorted” on “Prince Johnny.” And best of all, the punch line to “I Prefer Your Love”: “I prefer your love … to Jesus.” But it’s the way she sings those lyrics with breathless hysterical realism and sets those musings to funky synth-pop orchestrations and her own novel guitar playing that makes the record a complete statement. Plus, her total contempt for Twitter on “Digital Witness” feels ahead of its time a decade later. —Kory Grow

The success of the Shins’ whimsical folk pop set the table for the scads of bearded Beach Boys and CSNY revivalists to come, from Fleet Foxes to Father John Misty. James Mercer whistled and jangled and mumbled his way through the summery prettiness of songs like “Caring Is Creepy” and “Girl Inform Me,” landing somewhere between the wide-eyed Nineties weirdness of Neutral Milk Hotel and the high-Sixties beauty of the Left Banke. When the album’s best song, “New Slang,” soundtracked a memorable scene in the twee-touchstone Natalie Portman/Zach Braff movie Garden State, it was a key moment in the rise of 2000s “indie” into the mainstream fringe. —J.D. 

“Bitch, get it together, bitch/You don’t know you went home with,” Jazmine Sullivan admonishes herself in “Bodies (Intro),” from the Philly R&B singer’s superb (and superbly titled) Heaux Tales. Connected by a thread of confessional stories, the 2021 release is rife with frank, empathetic explorations of women’s lives, messy and layered in their pursuit of pleasure, love, and security. Sullivan gives them all a voice, whether grieving (“Lost One”), exacting revenge for infidelity (“Pick Up Your Feelings”), or half-crazed by good dick (“Put It Down”). There’s one astounding vocal performance after another, evoking tenderness, anguish, and ecstasy alike. In the raunchy “On It,” Sullivan and Ari Lennox’s spine-tingling runs pirouette around one another, a breathless dialogue between trusted friends celebrating their sexual agency. —Jon Freeman

50 Cent walked into the booth a superstar, rapping with such an effortless surplus of charisma that the only surprise was why he wasn’t famous already. Sharpened over a string of ruthlessly enjoyable mixtapes — not to mention a completed debut LP, shelved after the rapper was shot nine times — 50’s flow is a wonder of the natural world, whether he’s kicking come-ons (“21 Questions”) or defenestrating Ja Rule (“You sing for ho’s and sound like Cookie Monster”). Once he starts rapping, almost every track sounds tailor-made for the Queens upstart, as if he were merely assuming a 50 Cent-shaped hole in the zeitgeist. —C.P.

The Libertines burst out of London in the early 2000s with an armload of roughly hewn, offhandedly genius songs. Carl Barât and Pete Doherty trade vocals and soused hooks, and the band rocks like a beat-up car threatening to careen out of control. With help from producer Mick Jones, formerly of the Clash, the Libs honed a shaggy, punkish sound that looked to the past but felt deeply alive, and the tunes — especially the sly, self-referential “Boys in the Band” — stick in your head. Doherty would go on to make headlines for the wrong reasons, but here he and his mates were a brilliant as any lads to ever down a pint and strap on a guitar. —C.H.

Probably the most consequential 20 minutes in contemporary hip-hop, Daytona is both Pusha T’s solo masterpiece and arguably Kanye West’s last blast of true brilliance. It’s entirely repulsive: The cover image, of Whitney Houston’s drug-strewn bathroom, is the conceptual equivalent of Pusha’s infamous “yeughck” ad-lib. “Rapped on classics, I been brilliant,” he raps, accurately, on “Come Back Baby,” before finishing with the threat, “Now we blend in, we chameleons, ah!” Two decades after he popped out of Virginia as the less-conflicted Thornton brother, Pusha can’t help but be likable, kicking bilious puns over fractured loops and aiming his infrared disdain with laser precision. —C.P.