The 100 greatest debut albums of the 21st century

95. Soccer Mommy: Clean (2018)

Amidst the verses of “Still Clean,” the opening track off of Clean, Sophie Allison is grappling with a temporary tryst, a seasonal fling—the kind we often pretend to have gotten over, while we replay the minutiae of the affair over and over again in the privacy of our own heads. “I guess I’m only what you wanted for a little while,” she sings—still dazed months later from the abrupt departure of her summer love’s affections. Those are the first lyrics that jumped out at me, instantly conjuring up a face, and a name and my own replayed reel of amatory memories and now-hollow words. This speaks to Allison’s songwriting, a craft she honed for years in her Tennessee bedroom. With Clean, she may have again left her bedroom for the studio, but her introspective and comfortably confessional lyrics maintain their intimacy and diary-scrawl relatability. Only this time, Allison is zeroing in on the freeing, but often painful realizations that we all experience at one time or another—the kind that usually only come with the ending of something. Allison was young on this record, her slight 20 years evident not only in her youthful voice, but her talk of missed calls from mom, parked cars, and hanging around after school. But she does it all in an honest, uncomplicated, and well-crafted way that Clean is anything but juvenile. You might just forget how old you are for a second, as her bedroom melodies carry you back to when feelings were freely given and many lessons still had to be learned. —Madison Desler

94. A Silver Mt. Zion: He Has Left Us Alone But Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace the Corner of Our Rooms (2000)

In my eyes, the debut album from A Silver Mt. Zion is as good as any Godspeed You! Black Emperor release. It’s a “Jewish experience,” based on Efrim Menuck’s “immersion” in a friend-based Jewish community in Montreal, but the imagery and meanings explored on He Has Left Us Alone But Shafts of Light Sometimes Grace the Corner of Our Rooms are cryptic and moody. Even without resolution, it’s a technical accomplishment spanning forty-seven minutes separated onto two sides. The CD edition of the record breaks it down into eight tracks, but I prefer to consider the LP as it is presented on vinyl: “Lonely as the Sound of Lying on the Ground of an Airplane Going Down” on side one; “The World Is SickSICK; (So Kiss Me Quick)!” on side two. What we’re left with regardless is a dynamic collection of sometimes bucolic, sometimes brutal pathways. There is almost no percussion on the album; Menuck’s compositions, compared to Godspeed’s, are sparse, emotional, and without the kind of pretentiousness that so often plagued many of his other band’s earliest releases. I find myself flummoxed by the humanity in these songs, in the haunting, great ruminations on death as life’s ungovernable, non-negotionable punctuation. I’m terrified of this record yet I’m always in need of it. —Matt Mitchell

93. Kara Jackson: Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love? (2023)

​​What the Chicago-based interdisciplinary writer and musician Kara Jackson accomplishes on her debut LP Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love is not “raw,” at least not in the sense that the writing is unrefined or off-the-cuff. Instead, that distinction comes through how the listener is made to feel listening to Jackson’s cosmic country jams. Lines like “Some people take lives to be recognized” are delivered with nonchalance, and the way she belts “don’t you bother me” over swirling harp notes elicits chills. Jackson is communicating her message with precise orchestration for optimal impact. As a listener, you may feel exposed, maybe even singled out. Jackson starts the album with “recognized,” a lo-fi exercise contemplating what people do for validation and why. As she and her piano arpeggiate, she raises the stakes. It contrasts with the lush “no fun/party,” where her theatrical voice balances with a racing guitar and reclining strings. She reckons with men who won’t rise to the occasion and take that out on her and, as much as she laments the loss of companionship, she remembers that the other person is just as liable to miss her, too. Across the album, Jackson’s expert guitar work and lyricism reveals an extensive archive of her relationships with peers, partners and more who she’s entrusted with her love. Many of those people are men who’ve mishandled that love. When Jackson is solo, she is a force. With her friends’ help, the result is divine. —Devon Chodzin

92. Life Without Buildings: Any Other City (2001)

For a while, Any Other City lived in an underground part of the hardcore post-punk world. Burned CDs were passed around in grungy flats and parking lots. Sue Tompkins’ unique vocals became the lightning rod for both praise and criticism. In an early review from 2001, NME wrote that “only mad people and immediate family could warm to Tompkins. Hers is the sound of a performance artist having a self-conscious breakdown.” And my personal favorite slight, from the same review: “Plainly, she thinks she’s Patti Smith reborn with an estuary accent.” Which, I guess, is a pretty British dig. Of course, now we can all point at NME and laugh. Hindsight is 20/20, and Life Without Buildings were doing something other bands weren’t: They were taking risks. They were taking their time to explore the outer limits of what music and lyrics can be. In that sense, Any Other City explores the deconstruction of language and music. The listener can wonder, forever and ever, what “LGO, LGO, chi sound,” means, and they’d maybe never get closer to the truth, if there even was one. Tompkins’ stuttering vocal work doesn’t follow the rules. She’ll repeat words and phrases, or she’ll meander through a sentence in fragments. It’s sometimes disorienting but always engaging, and it’s a style that has endured nearly 25 years later. —Ben Jardine

91. Iron & Wine: The Creek Drank the Candle (2002)

The best music often blends the old with the new to create something fresh and invigorating. The past becomes much more than some iconic, lifeless repository found on classic rock stations; it’s a still-vibrant font of inspiration. Iron & Wine’s debut provides a good example. Iron & Wine is really just Sam Beam, a Florida cinematography teacher with a penchant for writing beautiful songs and gifted with an angelic voice to deliver them. Beam calls to mind other current acts like M. Ward and solo Damien Jurado for their low-fi warmth and deeply personal viewpoints. But you can also hear the echoes of old-time songwriters like Neil Young and Nick Drake in Beam’s acoustic purity and unapologetic romanticism. The mix is seamless. Brief vignettes or portraits feature gently strummed or finger-picked acoustic and slide guitars, an occasional banjo, and the close harmonies of Beam as he reveals acutely intimate histories. He spins out gorgeous couplets with misleading ease; there’s a head-turner in practically every song. When the wayward narrator of “Up Over the Mountain” tells his mother that “sons are like birds flying upward over the mountain,” or an ex-lover declares, “We gladly run in circles / But the shape we meant to make / is gone,” you can just about hear hearts rend. It’s all delivered in hushed, sometimes whispered tones, but there’s nothing secret about the healing powers of this record, proof that the past and present can coincide and prosper. —John Schacht

90. Lady Gaga: The Fame (2008)

Through an autobiographical lens, The Fame documents Lady Gaga manifesting her way from a “no one” to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100—twice. Supersized synth-pop asserted her avant-garde visions, a true fake-it-til-you-make-it approach that sent her first fans staggering across dancefloors to the woozy bridge of “Just Dance,” and later stunned them with the ominous strut of “Poker Face.” And while “LoveGame” never advanced beyond #5 on the Hot 100, its melody could shatter stadium speakers with its bulletproof buzz—perhaps the soundtrack for a musician making their grand entrance onstage, or two lovers commencing an animalistic smackdown. Outside of the immaculate lineup of singles, Gaga culled inspiration from her own unfabulous trek towards relevance. She advocates for a life of excess from the gutter of New York City against a snappy snare drum beat on “Beautiful Dirty Rich,” and spits venom at her first record label on “Paper Gangsta.” (Prior to her deal with Interscope, L.A. Reid fumbled the disco ball when he dropped Gaga from Def Jam.) The 2011 music video for “Marry The Night” would eventually reveal her triumphant rebound in bedazzled detail, but “Paper Gangsta” stews in the beef, sharpening an arsenal of insults. Gratuitous vocal effects practically pixelate Gaga’s pipes as she admits she feels so “deaf in the jam,” a jab not even a vocoder could conceal. —Victoria Wasylak

89. Death Grips: The Money Store (2012)

The first studio album by Sacramento hip-hop trio Death Grips, The Money Store expands on inventive, eclectic, and brutal ideas that filled their first mixtape Exmilitary while ditching their use of samples for a much more dystopian, organic portrayal of alienation. The album is raw and wildly imperfect—a testament to how non-linear instrumentals and Stefan Burnett’s one-note vocal intoning could merge and coalesce into a brilliant collection of punk-infused, experimental, and spiritually-confounding avant-rap. Burnett, Zach Hill, and Andy Morin muse about gun violence and desensitized youth while harmonizing together with a strange, toned up alchemy that hardcore and rap had never quite flirted with before. The Money Store, driven by tracks like “Get Got” and “I’ve Seen Footage,” and “Hacker,” will challenge you. You could only make this record one time, and Death Grips doing it for their debut is unbelievable. —Matt Mitchell

88. Erika de Casier: Essentials (2019)

Erika de Casier’s music takes me back to the prime days of Aaliyah, Mýa, and mid-career Janet Jackson, where her singing was very head-register, vibrating, and close-mic’d. So much of it was light and beautiful, sweetly and sensually entrenched in the not-so-yesterday flourishes of Black club music and Afrofuturism. As far as Danish pop music goes, “Little Bit” and “Puppy Love” are some of the best examples. Essentials lets de Casier’s MTV-inspired, Y2K-revivalist heart simmer in the playful slipperiness of her own cosmic rendezvous. The music is nocturnal, hazy. de Casier colors her blasé minimalism with a fever of nostalgia. Intimate and adrift, she’s an aura merchant dedicated to preserving Real Lover hours. Essentials is seductive, slow, and sharp. —Matt Mitchell

87. The New Pornographers: Mass Romantic (2000)

A staple from the first New Pornographers LP is “The Slow Descent Into Alcoholism”—proof that A.C. Newman can spark a power-pop hook from any lyric, no matter how dark or absurd. The rest of Mass Romantic strikes a similar creative balance, fueled by the indie supergroup’s longtime personnel dynamic: Powerhouse Neko Case fronts the windows-down surge of “Letter From an Occupant” and the title-track; and Destroyer’s Dan Bejar leads quirkier deep cuts like “Breakin’ the Law.” The Pornos perfected this recipe on Twin Cinema their heavier, huger-sounding third record, but the legend begins here. —Ryan Reed

86. Veeze: Ganger (2023)

Detroit rapper Veeze’s 2023 LP, Ganger, is one of the most moving rap albums of the decade, punctuated by “Safe 2,” a sweet, dreamy ballad that shows just how intimate the MC can go when the delicious beats of tracks like “No Sir Ski” and “Tony Hawk” turn sublime. Ganger is a precious album that oscillates between pop, folk, soul, and trap, and Veeze is our confident steward—whispering flows so lightly his vocals grow gravelly with unbotheredness. With guest appearances from Lil Yachty, Babyface Ray, Lucki, and Lil Uzi Vert, not even the most braggadocious and uptempo tracks ever grow too chaotic. With that, Ganger is patient and methodical—a grand statement from an under-the-radar artist who grows stronger with every project yet never wavers from his steadfast brilliance. If Ganger is any immediate sign of what’s to come from Veeze, his punchlines and vulnerability will always be essential in this generation of rap. —Matt Mitchell

85. Fontaines D.C.: Dogrel (2019)

Fontaines D.C. was pigeonholed as the British Isles’ next great post-punk export à la shame or Idles, but the Irish five-piece always deserved more than that reductive framing. Fontaines D.C. are more poetic than the bands they’re lumped in with, and their debut album Dogrel is a testament to a different set of concerns. Dogrel takes on the degradation of urban cities as lively cultural hubs and launching pads for people to make something of themselves—or at least put some change in their pockets. Frontman Grian Chatten and his bandmates share a love of literature and poetry (the Beats, James Joyce, Patrick Kavanagh, etc.), and they write songs together in Irish pubs, resulting in a brazen-faced, romantic portrait of Dublin and its vast characters. Two of their biggest calling cards are self-belief and authenticity. The uplifting lyrical themes on the lead track “Big” (“My childhood was small / But I’m gonna be big”) are analogous to “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” the lead track on Oasis’ Definitely Maybe, though “Big” has more wit and spit. If self-awareness is one factor of the renewed interest in post-punk, the intense, charismatic Chatten certainly has it as he pokes fun at charisma (“Charisma is exquisite manipulation”). Dogrel is an album of tremendous ardor and vivid landscapes, and interspersed with an Irish underdog spirit, Fontaines D.C. are nearly untouchable. —Lizzie Manno

84. Belong: October Language (2006)

There’s something about New Orleans duo Belong’s debut LP, October Language, that can only be described in mixed metaphors. It sounds like TV static. It’s a photo so overexposed that all the colors bleed white and drip distortion. It’s submerged in fuzz. In a 2006 interview, Belong’s Mike Jones was asked if the duo’s sound was inspired at all by the city of New Orleans. Jones replies, “New Orleans feels…worn. There’s a decay in the city. Things that aren’t obviously beautiful. Dissonance. And distortion and buzz and layering sounds.” Released just six months before Hurricane Katrina brought devastation to New Orleans, October Language is a hauntological epic that finds sonic beauty in physical decay, not unlike William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops,but not particularly like that record, or really, any other—take the droning feedback that intensifies as the title track progresses. There’s a single tone that persists throughout, modulating either slightly or not at all, with a warbling surround of feedback and the slight glissando of a slide guitar that seems to seep through the cracks. Tracks like “I Never Lose. Never Really” and “I’m Too Sleepy…Shall We Swim” crackle on their surfaces, the layers of highly modulated guitar and synth noise enveloping each other. There’s a bleakness to October Language, despite the swirling bliss, that makes it perhaps the most stirring ambient record of the 20th century. —Madelyn Dawson

83. Santigold: Santogold (2008)

In the alternative music landscape (if we can still call it that in post-monocultural world), the concept of “genre-bending” now feels like a given in any standard promotional materials. It’s difficult to imagine the tenor of the MySpace era, when an artist like Santi White—formerly of New York punk band Stiffed and her then-new project, Santogold (now Santigold, following a lawsuit from jewelers Santo Gold)—was told by at least one A&R rep that her “genre-bending” work was essentially unmarketable. Thankfully for us, she got to cap this story with, “But then I had Björk reach out to me on my Myspace page!” Blending strains of electropop, dance-punk, dub, and hip-hop to spin tales of city social climbing and self-possession in an industry that others you, Santogold remains one of the most forward-thinking, indelible albums of its time and place—as indicative of the Lower East Side in 2008 as the punk she loved was of the same neighborhood in 1976. Though plenty has changed here in the years that followed, the city as it stands still hums with the sound White captured on her debut: kinetic, hungry, and bafflingly singular. —Elise Soutar

82. Bloc Party: Silent Alarm (2005)

For at least a little while in the mid-2000s, Bloc Party was one of the best bands on the planet. Fresh off of the release of their debut album Silent Alarm in early 2005, Kele Okerke and co. were thrust to superstardom in the U.K., eventually leading the indie British invasion of sorts stateside alongside Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand, the Libertines, and others, acting as the more intellectual and political act of the bunch. Silent Alarm was immediately adored by fans and music journalists alike, simultaneously becoming one of the most critically acclaimed albums of the year and one of 2005’s most successful, entering at #3 on the British charts and going gold within 24 hours of its European release. Hell, on Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip’s viral 2007 single “Thou Shalt Always Kill; Bloc Party were listed as “just a band” alongside the Beatles, the Cure, Oasis, and more—at the time, it wasn’t a stretch to think that the London quartet was on the same trajectory as those other legends. —Steven Edelstone

81. Friko: Where we’ve been, Where we go from here (2024)

“20 years spent above this place, you could smell the iron from the room,” Niko Kapetan hums at the opening of Where we’ve been, Where we go from here. “And the train was running through the window, carrying a pillow so I could lay my head down onto you.” His vocals galvanize saccharine guitar chords into an oblivion of noise, gang vocals and a wallpaper of distorted gibberish. It’s what I’d imagine Conor Oberst making a pre-OK Computer Radiohead song in 2024 might sound like; this is how Friko chose to introduce themselves to us, with phantasmic guitars and a volcanic wall of sound so arresting and mythical you’ll have to run the whole track back just as soon as it fades out. It’s one hell of a hello. Where we’ve been, Where we go from here is inspired by everything from classical concertos to the Garden State soundtrack to Led Zeppelin. Everything Friko has connected with or has listened to, even passively, enforces the way Kapetan and Bailey Minzenberger play alone and together. At the heart of Where we’ve been, Where we go from here, there is a lingering sense of intensity, renewal and out-of-body connections to performance and writing. The whole record is one big thesis statement on, as Kapetan puts it, “wanting better for yourself and the people around you, but wondering how you can possibly do that with the world we live in.” Thus, there is burning. There is despair. But, there is also salvation and closure and resolution. In just a matter of minutes, Where we’ve been, Where we go from here will make you run through a turnstile of emotions. It’s risky, poetic, sublime, and intimate music. Friko are animated, direct, and vividly in-sync. And the world has never needed that kind of joyous, purposeful brilliance more than it does right now. —Matt Mitchell

80. Kacey Musgraves: Same Trailer Different Park (2013)

When it comes to humor, straightforwardness, and never, ever giving a shit, Kacey Musgraves is taking all the right cues. Lyrics about same-sex kissing and double standards may have been scarce on commercial country airwaves in 2013, but that didn’t stop Musgraves’ “Follow Your Arrow” from rising as a fan favorite. A top-seller despite its lack of radio play, the song has become popular across genre lines by promoting open-mindedness in a way country music hasn’t necessarily seen before. The writing on Same Trailer Different Park builds on the simplicity and straightforwardness of country classics while mixing in distinctly modern romantic sentiments, freshening the sound for a new generation of music-lovers. —Dacey Orr

79. Vampire Weekend: Vampire Weekend (2007)

When a record has not only no bad songs but no bad moments, when basslines bounce like rubber, when drums do more than keep time—when they roll and tumble in hypnotic patterns—and when vocals glide between the mannered crooning of an over-privileged indie boy and the spastic yelping of a shocked dog, well, what are we supposed to do? Not love it? Vampire Weekend is Anglo-Afro fusion on par with Graceland. It sounds like David Byrne fronting Orchestra Baobab. It sounds like The Strokes with a sense of humor. It sounds like indie rock simultaneously gentrifying and miscegenating—despite rumors to the contrary, the neighborhood’s getting better, more interesting and more colorful. These days, it ain’t just surly white dudes playing shitty guitar for other surly white dudes. Indeed, this cosmopolitan quartet has streamlined ska, post-punk, chamber music and Afropop into a glorious ultramodern groove. —Nick Marino

78. Chat Pile: God’s Country (2022)

Chat Pile’s debut LP ends with a 9-minute narrative that sounds outlandish on paper: A man is tormented by a nightmare figure resembling McDonald’s mascot Grimace, to the point of suicide. The surreally macabre premise is heightened all the more by the track’s name: “Grimace_Smoking_Weed.jpeg,” a title calling to mind a tossed-off joke file name or online message to a friend in lieu of an actual image. But the song itself is arguably the most chilling selection on an already-bleak record, in no small part due to vocalist Raygun Busch’s tortured contributions that sound an inch from self-destructive action at a moment’s notice—even before erupting into agonized shrieks in protest of the “purple man” who haunts him. When the track’s back half stretches into a sludgy death march, his lyrics become all the more direct, culminating in Busch crying out, “I don’t wanna be alive anymore / Do you?” The pressure of the track proves to be so suffocating that even Busch’s final scream of Grimace’s name to close the album becomes bloodcurdling, where a more ironic approach would have rendered the whole thing high camp. “Grimace_Smoking_Weed.jpeg” is, in microcosm, emblematic of the tricky balance Chat Pile evokes with visceral ugliness throughout God’s Country. The absurdity and paradox of capitalist landscapes are laid bare, depicted with just as much horror as the band believes they ought to merit. Just as characters for fast-food marketing and toys become taunting reminders of the soul-crushing nature of post-industrialization, so, too, does the illogical nature of houselessness in a nation with buildings to spare, and the pursuit of wealth above personal fulfillment. —Natalie Marlin

77. Run the Jewels: Run the Jewels (2013)

Coming off the high of the previous year’s respective Cancer 4 Cure and R.A.P. Music, El-P and Killer Mike’s inaugural collaborative album as Run the Jewels caught the new duo on the high-end of an upswing, with their project seeming like a clever play on what smart people do while others are watching the throne. And the others can have the throne; El-P and Killer Mike were having too much fun to be stagnant and watch anything. Yes, a lot of the album is clever self-aggrandizing rhetoric, meant for “ohhhhhhh” reactions or just flat-out laughter, and yes, the beats are not elegant, most of them happy to be filthy and cheap and something that will make you move; leave the fancy production for those self-proclaimed kings and queens. Rather, Run the Jewels is a summer album made from a crafty use of a keyboard, melody lines, and 808 beats, perfect for listening with a friend. And the album’s heavy moment, closer “A Christmas Fucking Miracle,” lands because of the album that preceded it. It’s powerful in both delivery and in effect, without being heavy-handed or sacrificing form. Both rappers take the opportunity to show their longtime supporters that they were right all these years, that they bet on the right horses. And to those bandwagoners jumping on just now, pretty sure you are welcome, too. —Philip Cosores

76. Interpol: Turn On the Bright Lights (2002)

The ’80s are known as the period when artifice smothered musical soul like so much lip gloss. Interpol’s post-punk-derived atmospherics belie that notion. Turn on the Bright Lights revels in minor keys and clear, wiry bass/guitar tones that bring to mind Wire, New Order, or early U2, while lead singer Paul Banks combines the flat delivery of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis with the wounded shakiness of the Violent Femmes’ Gordon Gano, or David Byrne at his most sensitive. It adds up to a pained and compelling sound that feels like it’s mostly their own. The album kicks off with Banks mumbling his lines over a building swarm of guitar and drum echo—Joy Division’s and U2’s way of disseminating a mood. “I’ll surprise you sometimes / I’ll come ’round / when you’re down,” he repeats, until it becomes the untitled song’s mantra and Banks’s promised coming-round (who he’s speaking to, and why, is unclear) takes on a sort of eschatological significance. There’s always something grey and misty about their sound, which reaches its peak on the just-slightly-majestic “NYC,” as strings drift like searchlights over the slashing, pinprick guitars while Banks, who seems to be walking through the city, tells its streets that he’s “Sick of spending these lonely nights / training myself not to care.” A strong, dramatic debut. —Philip Christman

75. Bad Bunny, X 100pre (2018)

If you currently have a pulse, then you certainly have felt the gravitational stardom of Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny. So few acts in the last decade—or maybe even this century—have emerged into the mainstream like Bunny, whose work in the realms of Latin trap, reggaeton, and pop are one of a kind. With nine of the album’s 15 songs released as singles, X 100pre might just be one of the most accessible debut records made by a non-continental U.S. musician in a long, long time. Some of Bunny’s most recent albums—like YHLQMDLG and Un Verano Sin Ti—have helped him transcend household name status, but you can trace that greatness straight back to X 100pr in 2018, where songs like “NI BIEN NI MAL,” “La Romana,” and “MÍA” reign supreme. It’s not that you can see the makings of a star on Bad Bunny’s debut—it’s that he was already a star by the time the record came out, a feat only reserved for the brightest global sensations. —Matt Mitchell

74. Charlotte Adigéry / Bolis Pupul: Topical Dancer (2022)

Belgian duo Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul’s electronic music melds their experiences of being othered with hilarity and stern lucidity; in their own words, “We sugarcoat the message, but we put it in your mouth.” The duo began a creative partnership after being connected by Soulwax for a film soundtrack before developing their debut album, Topical Dancer. Biting lyrics are followed up with a precise jest, keeping you constantly guessing what comes next. It helps, too, that Topical Dancer is soundtracked by buoyant synths and oil-slick production; “It Hit Me,” the album’s centerpiece, features dissonant whistles and details Adigéry’s teenage memory of being sexually harassed for the first time, before Pupul recounts his first brush with being an object of desire. Devastation always lurks in the viewfinder of Topical Dancer, as Adigéry and Pupul paint portraits of those who should know better but don’t. “Esperanto” chides performative political activism, while “Thank You” smiles sarcastically before taking a switchblade to the unsolicited counsel of their critics. The minimal “HAHA” is flat out bonkers, and is built around Adigéry’s guffaws that are cut apart, dissected, and sewn back together. Topical Dancer is a science experiment left unsupervised by a professor, but in turn yields a result of the future of electronic music. —Jaeden Pinder

73. Lupe Fiasco: Lupe Fiasco’s Food & Liquor (2006)

In my lifetime, Lupe Fiasco is rap’s greatest export who’s in the margins of stardom. For twenty years, the Chicagoan’s been making excellent records. Seriously, just look at the catalogue: The Cool, Lasers, Samurai. Lest we forget the man’s debut, Food & Liquor, which I discovered after watching Lupe perform “Kick, Push” on One Tree Hill (I didn’t think that show would get referenced in this list twice, by the way). But it’s not just that track. It’s “I Gotcha.” It’s “Daydreamin’.” It’s “Hurt Me Soul.” It’s contributions from Jill Scott, Gemini, Jonah Matranga, and Matthew Santos. It’s production by the Neptunes, Kanye West, Mike Shinoda, Prolyfic, and Soundtrakk. It’s the lyrics, which tell stories of skateboarding, single motherhood, creative pride, American misconceptions of Islam, and addiction. Lupe was a twenty-something hot shot with a quick pen in 2006; Food & Liquor made him a rap hero. I think his best is still yet to come. —Matt Mitchell

72. Waxahatchee: American Weekend (2012)

Katie Crutchfield has put out many fantastic albums over the years under the Waxahatchee moniker, from Cerulean Salt to Tigers Blood, but we owe those records to her outstanding debut solo LP, American Weekend. With its lo-fi production, pared-down, acoustic instrumentations, and vulnerable lyrics, American Weekend feels deeply intimate, like one of those records that you’d be convinced was written just for you if you found it at the right time. It captures a specific time as an early twenty-something trying to understand who you are and where you’re meant to be going in life while feeling utterly lost, whether it’s thinking about friendships that drifted apart (“Noccalula”) or navigating situationships while convincing yourself you don’t need it to turn into something more (“Be Good”). —Tatiana Tenreyro

71. Band of Horses: Everything All the Time (2006)

Seattle’s Band of Horses have taken many forms since their early-2000s inception, with vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter Ben Bridwell as their only constant. After emerging from the ashes of Carissa’s Wierd, and a short stint as simply Horses, the band caught Sub Pop’s attention while opening for Iron & Wine in their hometown, releasing their debut album Everything All the Time on the label in 2006. The acclaimed debut established Band of Horses’ signature, reverb-blurred sound, combining the atmospheric guitars and yelpy vocals of the Shins with Sam Beam’s lived-in Southern storytelling, and earned them the “indie rock” and “alt-country” tags, as well as comparisons to everyone from My Morning Jacket to Built to Spill. “Monsters” is one of the most overtly Southern-sounding songs from Everything All the Time. Sparse without feeling austere, the warm folk-rock track is driven only by Tim Meinig’s kick drum and tambourine in its first phase, with Mat Brooke’s banjo plucks and a simplistic electric guitar riff adjoining Bridwell’s vocals. What Bridwell’s songwriting lacks in detail, it makes up for with the mood that hangs heavy all around it, evoking the gnawing feelings of discontent and loneliness that so often break through the surface at the end of long years … or, in the case of “The First Song,” at the beginning of great albums. But what started it all, Everything All the Time lead single “The Funeral,” is the band at their most dynamic, beginning with its ghostly riff and Bridwell’s distinctive vocals before suddenly exploding into guitar-rock overdrive, only to lapse into dirge mode and back again. Bridwell meets crashing power chords with haunting “ooh”s and the resolute assurance, “At every occasion, I’ll be ready for the funeral,” and a cathartic instrumental peak—the kind you just know makes audiences flip out—puts an exclamation point on it all. —Scott Russell

70. Fabiana Palladino: Fabiana Palladino (2024)

On her self-titled debut album, Palladino’s breakup anthems offer the velveteen emotion of ‘80s soul pop with lyrics that don’t hold back. Where hazy, vintage production can erect a barrier between listener and singer, Palladino’s intimate, Janet Jacksonian musings feel immediate, breathing much-needed vitality into a recognizable sound. 21st century pop loves to play in the sandboxes of its progenitors, to varying degrees of success. In the underground, there is a wealth of musicians borrowing vintage pop’s tools and updating them just enough to bridge past and present. Fabiana Palladino approximates these gestures and more, incorporating soul and funk on tracks overcome with emotion. Her feelings are more kinetic, less contemplative. Whether on the guitar-driven balladry of “Give Me A Sign” or on the booming clarity of “I Can’t Dream Anymore,” Palladino’s breakup songs are rich in style and seriousness. It’s the kind of pop that’s meant to carry you away on a bed of pure feeling. With this album, Palladino recalls a time when pop craftsmanship didn’t require unfettered access to tabloid archives, when thematic relatability and sonic commitment could let anyone with reasonable talent top the charts. Say what you will about the Stock Aitken Waterman era of British radio pop—and there’s much to be said—but at least the Hit Factory’s assembly line could generate pop celebrity without relying on stars excavating the minutiae of their public personas for lyrical content. Palladino splits the difference between SAW cynicism and contemporary realities with pop that draws from personal experience but shared with bigger, universal questions in mind, supported by detailed, variegated production. It’s pop that works its way in with iron hooks arranged to stoke feelings of clarity, grief and desire. That’s what separates the flavor-of-the-month chart topper from a true classic: genuine depth and unsquashable memorability. —Devon Chodzin

69. TV On The Radio: Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes (2004)

TV On The Radio were critically acclaimed when they were first active, but they never set out to be a “buzz band.” They certainly weren’t the most commercially successful act in the scene they’ve become associated with—now colloquially known as the “Meet Me In The Bathroom” era, named after the Strokes song and Lizzy Goodman’s oral history book—but they’re perhaps the group from that era whose overall output has been the most consistent and truly inventive, and one that seems to be largely absent from the reference boards behind the 2020s “indie sleaze” “revival.” Even at their most desirous or celebratory, there has always been an air of mourning in TV On The Radio’s music, often mourning something while it’s still on its way out. Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes is largely about what it means to love (or crush, or fuck, or party, or rejoice) in times of war. When Tunde Adebimpe croons, “You were my favorite moment of a dead century,” in “Dreams,” it’s unclear whether he’s singing about the last one or the coming one, but either way, there is grief banging on the walls of each anguished expression of love. —Grace Robins-Somerville

68. Young Fathers: Dead (2014)

Young Fathers make such good music, we should study Dead for decades. The Scottish experimental trio—Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole, and ‘G’ Hastings—deservedly won a Mercury Prize for their debut album 11 years ago, and the record has lived on as one of the best examples of what happens when soul, avant-pop, and rap merge together in a liminal space. There’s complexity and passion and strangeness throughout the tracklist, and songs like “No Way,” “Low” and “Get Up” polish grit into lush yet staggering expression. If you were around and hip to synth-rap in 2014, you likely had never heard anything like Dead before. I sure didn’t. And, surely, you’ve never heard anything quite like it since.I sure haven’t. But what’s maybe most terrific about Dead, though, is that there’s nothing to compare it to. Young Fathers made their own unique world here, and they continue to do so even now. —Matt Mitchell

67. Wolf Parade: Apologies to the Queen Mary (2005)

Produced by Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock, Wolf Parade’s debut sounds suspiciously similar to Brock’s own before-the-boards work: twitchy rhythms, half-hollered vocals, echoing pauses, and squeaky, discordant guitar. Still, while Wolf Parade may be dark and spastic, its updates on indie formula—the band had connections to a mess of other Canadian guitar slingers, including Arcade Fire, Destroyer, and Frog Eyes—were undeniably impressive. “Shine A Light” (which opens the band’s self-titled EP, released earlier this summer) boasts piles of keyboard, thumping dance drums, and a fist-pumping, vaguely Springsteen-like chorus of “I don’t sleep, I don’t sleep”—play it loud enough and you’ll get your whole building out of bed and into the street, hair-swinging and hip-twisting, grins all around. —Amanda Petrusich

66. Jessie Ware: Devotion (2012)

Jessie Ware’s backstory is not particularly dramatic, but there is an aspect to it that speaks to the masses, primarily in her maintained attitude that she is quite ordinary. Ware was not someone looking for pop stardom her whole life, but, rather, took a stab at being a soccer reporter before taking jobs as a backup singer at the encouragement of her mother. In 2012, Devotion sounded like pop music’s future. It wasn’t composed of club bangers, but subtle, textural, and groove-focused beats. They provide enough to keep the album fresh and forward-thinking, but never really remove the focus from Ware’s voice, words, and melodies. “Wildest Moments” feels like it could carry the planet on its shoulders, wise and comforting, able to sell a line like “wherever there’s smoke, there’ll soon be fire,” despite its lack of sense. “Sweet Talk” is close to an equal, speaking both to classic soul music and to some of Ware’s pop heroes from the ‘80s and ‘90s. And following it with “If You’re Never Gonna Move” (previously the Big Pun sampling “110%” that was forced to change both the sample and name for legal reasons), a song that wrestles with near-campy tip-toeing vocal lines with a rap sample, shows Ware as a risk-taker. —Philip Cosores

65. Cameron Winter: Heavy Metal (2024)

Heavy Metal possesses limitless concepts, stories, journeys, and fables rolled into one. “Nausicaä (Love Will Be Revealed)” is profound and somewhat prophetic, as Cameron Winter voices his need to see and be seen, to hear and be heard, to know that someone is here and for someone to know that he is here. In Homer’s Odyssey, Nausicaä is young and beautiful, and helps Odysseus after he is shipwrecked by offering him clothes and bringing him back to the edge of town. The songs of Heavy Metal ache with a deep sense of longing, and a hope that help will come in the form of love—which takes many different shapes throughout. Love will be revealed, it “takes miles,” but it will eventually call—and when it does come, it will be like nothing you’ve ever felt before. “There’s a sardonic self-awareness that defines Heavy Metal and its existentialism, but the illusive presence of God and religion throughout the album blurs the line between handcrafted irony and pure authenticity. References to deity reveal themselves, such as when he tells his lover they were born to hold his “cannonball brain like the Lord holds the moon” on “Try as I May.” The most damning display of this is the feverish descent of “$0,” in which Winter triumphantly proclaims, “God is real, I’m not kidding this time, I think God is actually for real, I wouldn’t joke about this.” For how straightforward his claims of enlightenment are, his detached, impassive tone still makes it hard to tell if he truly is for real or not (he swears he is). It shouldn’t be funny, but in a feat that is nothing less than impressive, it still manages to be. But it feels as though that was one of Winter’s goals with the work—to create a paradigm of truth and fiction, reality and the abstract, humor and utter seriousness. —Alli Dempsey

64. Youth Lagoon: The Year of Hibernation (2011)

The debut album from Idaho-based experimentalist Youth Lagoon—Trevor Powers—is, just maybe, the single most wondrous album on this entire list. The Year of Hibernation, in all of its lo-fi, psychedelic glory, is a labor of love that Powers crafted while suffering from debilitating panic attacks. He took to writing about anxiety and heartache in ways that intertwined with coming-of-age in Middle America, as the record tapped into solitary landscapes and the absence of young, fleeting joy. “17,” “July,” and “Montana” are startlingly beautiful, but it’s the one-two punch of “Afternoon” and “Daydream” that solidify the monumental and devastating power of The Year of Hibernation. It’s a document of survival, as is much of what Powers writes under the Youth Lagoon name (and his own). “I have more dreams than you have posters of your favorite teams, you’ll never talk me out of this,” he sings on “Cannons,” and there’s an enduring dreaminess across the album that doesn’t aim to mask the complex subject matter. Rather, the arrangements underline the complicatedness of growing up and growing into yourself—as they beckon us to tap into our own nostalgia for past lives no longer touchable. No other album from the last 20 years can still conjure as much color on the 1,000th listen as it did on the first. —Matt Mitchell

63. The Killers: Hot Fuss (2004)

You could just say “Mr. Brightside” and leave it at that, but the Killers’ debut album Hot Fuss is much, much more than a hit single that everyone on Planet Earth has heard before. Released in the summer of 2004 via Island Records, Hot Fuss was a convergence of new wave, glam, and alt-rock in a way that let the Killers deviate greatly from the garage rock revival occurring all over the country. They escaped the underground for a flirtatious affair with the radio mainstream—I mean, “Mr. Brightside” has damn near transcended almost every categorization at this point. But, even then, the best song on Hot Fuss is actually “All These Things That I’ve Done” (that “I’ve got soul, but I’m not a soldier” line still goes, and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise). “Somebody Told Me” and “Smile Like You Mean It” are also standout moments. You might think “When You Were Young” is on this album and, sadly, you’d be wrong—but, even if their best song isn’t on the tracklist, Hot Fuss is still perfect and rid of any skips. Though the album is never held in the same regard as Is This It or Fever to Tell, there’s still time to make things right and call a spade a spade: Hot Fuss is one of the most idyllic, polished, and energetic rock records in the last two decades. —Matt Mitchell

62. Burial: Burial (2006)

Burial is 21st century electronic music. Plain and simple. There’s no need for debate. Burial is one of the most important records ever made, but William Emmanuel Bevan’s journey started a year earlier, on Burial. It bridged the gap between dubstep and UK garage. The samples are dramatic, the grooves are incongruous, the moods are air-tight. Burial is cryptic but the ideas reach a dark, emotive sustain. Beats skip, the bass strangles. Nostalgia brightens with rising static. Burial, to my ears 20 years later, is dystopian and disembodied. Bevan is Eno, Lee Perry, and Plasticman. But Bevan is also none of those producers. Burial has no modern equivalent. This music is a labyrinth of dub, reverb, and panging, heady rhythms. —Matt Mitchell

61. black midi: Schlagenheim (2019)

It may be hard to write about, but Schlagenheim is a record you feel more so than anything else. Case in point: First track “953” features one of the hardest hitting lead guitar riffs of the 2010s, an opening salvo that makes you want to drop everything and go run a mile—something I actually did, resulting in my fastest time ever. Within mere seconds of hitting play on their debut album, Geordie Greep and Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin make their case as two of the most inventive contemporary guitarists, all while you try your hardest to keep time with a beat that will still elude you after ten listens. There’s a high barrier to entry for Schlagenheim, a record by a band who refuses to meet you halfway. Pedantic and pretentious all the way through, Schlagenheim showcases why black midi are generationally great instrumentalists despite our inability to follow what they’re doing and why. By the end of “Ducter”’s anarchic pandemonium, you won’t know what hit you, but you’ll find yourself quickly returning to “953” for another go around of an album that showcases some of the most talented musicians around, coalescing behind an experimental, genre-less and extremely noisy sound to exceptional results. Schlagenheim is beyond weird; Schlagenheim is a legitimate one-of-a-kind record. Schlagenheim is a masterpiece. —Steven Edelstone

60. Chris Stapleton: Traveller (2015)

The country music underground has never been more important than it is right now, considering how piss-poor the mainstream’s become since the ‘90s. Luckily we had Chris Stapleton ten years ago. Traveller felt old-school, headstrong, and full of Southern character, as Stapleton emerged from his Nashville studio stupor with a genuinely compelling, essential country record. Dave Cobb’s production lends a bluesy touch to Stapleton’s gravelly, solemn croon. Obvious on “Fire Away” and “The Devil Named Music,” Stapleton’s voice could do magical things. But his guitar was like a road map. Very few popular country records have been as good as Traveller. In 2015, it earned praise from Stereogum and Billboard alike, a rare overlap. “Tennessee Whiskey,” his slick David Allan Coe cover, wasn’t originally released as a single but has since become one of the man’s signature tunes, along with “Parachute” and “Nobody to Blame.” Stapelton came out like a juggernaut aiming for the jugular. —Matt Mitchell

59. Pallbearer: Sorrow and Extinction (2012)

My pick for the best metal debut of the last 25 years or so? Pallbearer’s Sorrow and Extinction, an awesome smear of doom-rock from some Arkansawyers. No song on here is shorter than eight minutes. The guitars trap you in sludge while Brett Campbell’s lyrics pierce through you like a sword. His vocals might bring about comparisons to Ozzy, but Pallbearer’s suffocating crush of rock cathedrals is beyond reference. Their music is holistic. Sorrow and Extinction is as beautiful as it is challenging, incorporating moments of nylon-stringed guitars (“Foreigner”), synthesizers (“Given to the Grave”), and shredded, eviscerating climaxes (“An Offering of Grief”). Pallbearer are happy to embrace their strongest prog-metal, noise-rock, and ambient habits. Sorrow and Extinction is uplifting, epic. The band traffics in ancient imagery but sound triumphantly new. —Matt Mitchell

58. Magdalena Bay: Mercurial World (2021)

Mercurial World is music-first, written and recorded at home during COVID-19 and full of tight pop songs cast in a neon glow. The album encourages you to enter Magdalena Bay’s fantastical, silly, and dark universe and linger there. Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin cite progressive rock as influences on Mercurial World and lean into the genre’s tendency towards excessive, multi-movement songs—structured with classic catchy structures but rife with their signature goofiness. A Pop Rocks-textured sugar-rush, the brilliant, absurdist, and endlessly fun scapes of Mercurial World come to life on songs like “Secrets (Your Fire),” “Chaeri” and “You Lose!” Magdalena Bay’s work is driven by nostalgia, but they never venture into pastiche; lesser artists would use the same palette—tape filters, 8-bit synths, and fantasy costumes—and come across reductive. But Tenenbaum and Lewin use these tools out of genuine love, not just as a ‘90s kid cosplay. —Andy Steiner

57. LCD Soundsystem: LCD Soundsystem (2005)

LCD Soundsystem’s self-titled debut came out 20 years ago, yet it still—somehow, confoundingly—sounds like it’s not of this millennium. The record is alien and futuristic, pulling off the greatest trick of enigmatic dance-punk and electronic fantasies we’ve seen in this century. Point out any track from the sequence and it’ll be a hit, I’m sure. From “Daft Punk Is Playing at My House” to “Losing My Edge,” you can hear everything from the Stooges to New Order to Devo roaring through James Murphy’s veins. AltPress once wrote that LCD Soundsystem would “survive the fleeting tastes of cosmopolitan hipsters,” but, perhaps, they didn’t account for the cyclical nature of any lineage—that each new batch of hipsters loves LCD Soundsystem. The band’s debut is not as reflective or as epic as something like Sound of Silver or This Is Happening, but it’s such a reward to tap into an hour of relentlessly good work made by a band not yet at the height of their craft. You can tell that Murphy wanted to be Suicide wearing George Clinton’s clothes here—and LCD Soundsystem is the perfect, encyclopedic masterpiece that would carve out a lifelong destiny of supremo electronic taste-making for him. —Matt Mitchell

56. Beth Gibbons: Lives Outgrown (2024)

If you arrive at Lives Outgrown looking for something that sounds like Portishead, you might find your thirst briefly satiated by “Floating on a Moment”—but it’s only a slight parallel. The song is melancholic yet enchanting, as Beth Gibbons finds herself trapped in a purgatory of middle-age—the prosperous hope of the future suddenly feels dimmer, and retrospect snaps itself back into place with a much less graceful ferocity. Lives Outgrown achieves a wondrous feat of relatability—even if what inspired these songs are not universal feelings. Gibbons’ splendor comes from her innate ability to make our own experiences feel denser and louder. When she sings about the timing never being right “when you’re losing a soul” on “Burden of Life,” anyone who has confronted the monstrous clamors of grief may feel it deeply. Gibbons likens her response to lostness to shoreside pebbles, to understanding why generations dwindle. “I used to feel the feelings,” she admits, over the strums of her own acoustic guitar and Lee Harris’s percussive thrums. “Love that I once said I’d never rile.” Gibbons’s first solo record is embroidered with raw, cherished instrumentation that duets with open spaces. It is sometimes beautiful, sometimes jagged and worrisome. —Matt Mitchell

55. Sleigh Bells: Treats (2010)

The title for Treats, the dazzling debut from Brooklyn noise pop duo Sleigh Bells, is incredibly apt. Listening to it often feels like getting a sugar rush after eating large swaths of candy. Across a half and hour of bubblegum pop, raucous punk, and crunchy guitar riffs, the record’s relentless energy rarely lets up, but you kind of don’t want it to. Its commanding opener “Tell ‘Em” announces the band’s arrival like a triumphant fanfare played for a king and queen, blasting its acid-laced sonic distortion loudly and proudly. The tracks that follow—particularly “Kids,” “Riot Rhythm,” and “Crown on the Ground”—keep that first song’s kinetic charge flowing, enough to make you want to scream, thrash, and start throwing shit. But despite its infectiously blaring bounce, the LP’s greatest offering, “Rill Rill,” is also its most grounded, thanks in part to an impeccably used Funkadelic sample. Alexis Krauss’s shimmering voice rises above all the clamor like a cushion to soften Derek E. Miller’s blaring, blown-out sound, either offsetting its intensity or roaring along with it. Though the two struggled to replicate and expand on their formula in their subsequent work, Treats remains a propulsive, buoyant pop confection that still satisfies fifteen years after its release. —Sam Rosenberg

54. Los Hermanos: On Another Level (2004)

Under the banner of the revolutionary, underground group Los Hermanos, Gerald Mitchell, DJ Rolando, and “Mad” Mike Banks formed a brotherhood that pooled together ideas of electro-jazz, funk, gospel, and Latin music, with the help of Santiago “S2” Salazar and Nomadico (DJ Dex). The result is On Another Level, a unique meditation on diaspora, tradition, and dance history. Think Herbie Hancock, WAR, and Chick Corea’s Return to Forever—Mitchell, Rolando, and Banks do wonderful things with flamenco guitars, Yamaha synths, ecstatic techno breakbeats, and jazz percussion. On Another Level is one of the greatest DJ sets you can go to. It’s devotional (“Resurrection”), mythological (“Olmec My Brother”), and clashing (“Birth of 3000”). On Another Level is one of the best Detroit albums released during my lifetime. —Matt Mitchell

53. Lift to Experience: The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads (2001)

Josh T. Pearson, Andy “The Boy” Young, and Josh “The Bear” Browning formed Lift to Experience in Denton in 1996. Five years later, their one and only record, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads, came out on Bella Union. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever heard, released twenty-some years before a boom of sweeping, post-punk bands fell off the Windmill stage and into the critics’ palms. But Lift to Experience stick to guitars. And then they add more guitars. Blues, krautrock, ambient, noise, and hymns fill the album like a ten-gallon hat. It’s a Biblical concept album but the setting is a Texan apocalypse. The twang you’d expect is substituted with hailstorm drumming and sprechesang singing from Pearson. And, considering that 66-percent of Cocteau Twins mixed the record and Pearson’s currently making the rounds as a folky, The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads feels all the more unlikely. It’s a maximalist masterpiece full of humanness and titanic instrumentals. Redemption and spirituality abound yet the end is nigh. Space-y breakdowns and flare-ups are soothed by soupy, melodic exhales and acappella scripture singing. The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads is 90 minutes long, longer than your typical prayer service. Have a step inside to look at “God’s terrible swift sword.” Texas is the reason. The city is yours for the taking. The Lord’ll make you a deal. —Matt Mitchell

52. Snail Mail: Lush (2018)

Lindsey Jordan’s first EP as Snail Mail in 2016 won over critics and fans with its subdued power and studied melancholy, revealing a songwriter well beyond her 16 years. After that, she graduated high school, toured with the likes of Waxahatchee and Girlpool, and was featured in a roundtable of female rock musicians for the New York Times. Her debut LP, Lush, is a collection of ten lucid guitar-pop songs that show off her classically trained guitar skills, structural know-how, and an ability to express the inquisitiveness and confident insecurity of youth with a surprising sophistication. “They don’t love you, do they?” she asks during the magic-hour-esque “Intro,” her clear and comfortingly relatable voice singing the first of many questions she poses throughout the album. Her music is laid-back, gently hooky, and complements the poetic vagueness of her lyrics. There isn’t enough detail for you to know exactly what she’s talking about, but you understand the mood. Though the highs and lows of the album are subtle, Lush confirms what the Habit EP first introduced: Jordan is a definite talent. The songs illustrate a wise songwriting style, with none of the self-importance and indulgence that can come with more experience. Nothing feels trite or contrived. She’s a natural, with an impressive sense of restraint, placing points of tension and release right where they need to be. —Madison Desler

51. Chief Keef: Finally Rich (2012)

What makes Chief Keef’s debut album Finally Rich so special is how it really was such an important precursor to a trap trend that would become an entire movement. Where were you when Keef took over the world in 2012? The Chicago rapper was one of one, able to master gangsta, trap, and drill rap. Finally Rich was spearheaded by lead singles “3 Hunna,” “I Don’t Like,” and “Love Sosa”—all of which tapped into a complicated brutality and nihilism centered around being young and trying to survive in such a close proximity to dangerous power and oppression. Chief Keef released Finally Rich when he was just 17 years old, calling upon peers like French Montana, Rick Ross, Young Jeezy, 50 Cent, and Wiz Khalifa to launch the project into the stratosphere. Talk about lightning in a bottle. —Matt Mitchell

50. Sofia Kourtesis: Madres (2023)

Sofia Kourtesis captures a warmth few of her contemporaries ever achieve. Arriving after a series of singles and EPs, Kourtesis’ first LP—Madres—finds the Peruvian producer working within storied traditions of deep house and the Berlin nightclub scene, while infusing those influences with a beating heart all her own, like a tender embrace in the heat of a crowded dance floor. Tracks like “How Music Makes You Feel Better” live on the miasma of emotions Kourtesis entangles at any turn, skittering house loops, airy vocal exhalations, and brief chops of soul singer howls. On “Moving Houses,” Kourtesis forgoes beats entirely for an ambient piece centered on decaying loops of her own voice, shedding her usual arsenal to even more intimate poignance. Though built through struggles and pain, Madres is a reciprocal gift from Sofia Kourtesis to the listener, a record that seeks to impart its personal comforts and catharsis onto those who take it into their hearts. —Natalie Marlin

49. Moses Sumney: Aromanticism (2017)

In a 10-year career punctuated by tours with James Blake, Solange, and Sufjan Stevens, it’s no wonder why Moses Sumney endures as one our best and brightest storytellers. His work flirts with the margins of soul, art rock, and baroque pop—merging them all into a cauldron of distinctive, passionate colors. His debut album, Aromanticism, set the tone for his artistry way back in 2017. As informed by the pillars of folk music as it is the traditions and heritage of jazz, Sumney focuses on the orbits and the maneuvers of bodies and the radicalism of human desire. It’s a beautiful embellishment of soul and spirit, told through the romantics of emotional structures and silky, dainty arrangements layered with hushed, cosmic thoughtfulness and confidence. “Doomed” and “Quarrel” and “Lonely World” and “Plastic” are as delightful as they are devastatingly powerful. —Matt Mitchell

48. Arctic Monkeys: Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not (2006)

When their debut album arrived in 2006, Arctic Monkeys were the kind of new blood no one guessed would pack such a punch. The reason this record is so great is simply because of how incendiary it was when it hit the airwaves. It was truly something different. It’s a chatty record, one that relies on fast talk and even faster guitars. Tracks like “Red Light Indicates Doors Are Secured” or “Perhaps Vampires Is a Bit Strong … ” capitalize on Alex Turner’s quick tongue and flash fingers, as well as his band’s ability to keep up with the nearly boundless energy the young frontman radiated into the microphone and through amps. There’s no denying the album takes influence from so many incredible rock acts of the era—you know the ones: The Strokes, the Libertines, those types—but it also takes pages out of older books, too, like those of the Clash and Oasis. Ultimately, the cool thing about the record is it never stays in any of those places for very long, not before dragging itself back to the bar for another one, and one for that bird near the end, as well. It’s a concept album, which, as we now know, is not an anomaly for the Sheffield group, but at the time, the idea that a messy rock and roll group would debut with a concept record, no less one about the clubbing scene in northern England, was totally unheard of. Naturally, it struck a chord within the country for its catchy relatability, and the rest is history. —Lex Briscuso

47. Los Thuthanaka: Los Thuthanaka (2025)

On their own, the siblings behind Los Thuthanaka have grown into mystical, technicolor talents in the world of experimental composition. Between the Great Recession and 2020, the artist now known as Chuquimamani-Condori reworked electronic and folk traditions across a panoply of aliases, albums, and collaborations. Their 2023 reemergence on DJ E has become one of the decade’s most celebrated projects. Their brother, Joshua Chuquimia Crampton, has spent this decade cultivating a vast repertoire of electrified guitar compositions that explore psychedelia and Aymara traditions. Los Thuthanaka is a bold suite of turbocharged huayño, caporal, and kullawada recursions that look back at queer traditions while projecting a future that’s loud, kinetic, and liberated. It’ll leave you feeling infinitely more energized. —Devon Chodzin

46. Kali Uchis: Isolation (2018)

“There’s no tracking where I’m going / There’s no me for them to find.” The riddle-like words drift in covered in mist. The sounds of Tropicalia and bossa nova surround your ears with humidity. Are you dreaming? Are you flying? This is “Body Language,” the lush intro that transports you to the world of Kali Uchis, a world the Colombian-American songstress invites you deeply into, as she compellingly keeps herself a mystery. From the all-Spanish, dancehall romance of “Nuestro Planeta” to the boss-ass-bitch anthem ”Miami”—as sexy and diverse as the city in the title—Uchis gives ample nods to her Latin roots, while asserting herself as a strong, independent woman. “Why would I be Kim? / I could be Kanye,” she sings on “Miami,” never content to be anywhere but the driver’s seat. On the Reggaeton highlight “Tyrant,” she’s pondering the question of whether or not to give her man any power, the slightest control only hers to hand over, even when she’s head-over-heels in love. For this self-preservation she sacrifices never being truly known—perhaps even to herself—a trade she seems eager to make, holding back to avoid being hurt on her road to ruling the world. “You never knew me then / And you’ll never know me now,” she sings on “Just A Stranger,” which infectiously glides over a bouncy groove courtesy of whiz-kid Steve Lacy, one of several promises she makes throughout the album to be untouchable. —Madison Desler

45. The Streets: Original Pirate Material (2002)

Original Pirate Material arrived sounding deliberately out-of-step with its moment, rejecting both American rap conventions and UK pop gloss. Instead of posture or polish, Mike Skinner turned everyday class anxiety, mind-numbing mundanities, and social unease into something both hyper-specific and widely legible, rapping in a plainspoken Midlands cadence that felt almost aggressively unglamorous at the time. Its brilliance lies in how casually it fuses garage beats and minimalist hooks with diaristic realism, making the small dramas of nights out and missed calls feel momentous without mythologizing them—it’s music that seems to unfold in real time, at street level. In retrospect, its impact wasn’t just stylistic but conceptual: it proved that ordinariness, regional voice, and even emotional ambivalence could sustain a debut with genuine cultural weight. Few debuts have expanded the expressive limits of British popular music while sounding so unconcerned with doing so. —Casey Epstein-Gross

44. Caroline Polachek: Pang (2019)

A handful of pop songs in the past decade—think “Teenage Dream” or “Run Away With Me”—bottle the lightning feeling of whirlwind love perfectly, the sound of a saxophone horn or a vocal swell sublimating the yearning of a new romance. Pang, Caroline Polachek’s first album under her own name, stretches out that feeling, eking out the intricacies of feeling simultaneously liberated and trapped by the feeling of being overwhelmed by someone else. It’s a big task, but Polachek might be the ideal candidate, an indie darling who shaped her last band Chairlift’s twee-pop origins into big-budget, emotional cinema to brilliant effect. The most sublime moments on Pang match the all-cylinders feeling of falling into new love, each neuron so stimulated by the feeling that they threaten to overload and collapse entirely. The divine title track is, at once, twee and lustful, as if the Postal Service were tasked with making a quiet-storm track—the base feeling of unexplored love compounded with each touch of the skin. By the end of Pang, Polachek has fully opened up to the headrush of new love—both in the chance that it could devastate, and the very real possibility that it could result in something transcendent. “The parachute, I’ve got to trust it now,” she sighs on album closer “Parachute,” her voice weightless, at ease. It’s a relief, for her—and for us. —Joshua Bote

43. The Postal Service: Give Up (2003)

It’s mind-boggling sometimes that a band featuring the frontman of Death Cab For Cutie and the frontwoman of Rilo Kiley were able to come together and make one of the best synth-pop albums of the last 30 years. But, under the tutelage of Jimmy Tamborello—known by his DJ stage name Dntel—anything is possible. When The Postal Service released Give Up in 2003, there wasn’t a true synth-pop identity in the mainstream. The Meet Me in the Bathroom era had engulfed rock and roll, and even a band like Phoenix wouldn’t become fully entrenched in dance music for another half-decade. Thus, what Ben Gibbard, Tamborello, and Jenny Lewis were able to assemble here is, truly, a revelation. Combining indietronica with 1980s keyboard sensibilities, Give Up has only aged with grace since its release 23 years ago. A song like “Such Great Heights” exudes just as much wonder now as it did in the death rattle of Y2K premonitions. Gibbard would also release the legendary Death Cab For Cutie album Transatlanticism later that same year, but it’s Give Up that fully cemented his shape-shifting artistry—and has remained one of the best synth-pop albums in recent memory. —Matt Mitchell

42. Earl Sweatshirt: Doris (2013)

Richard Wright’s existential left-turn The Outsider opens with the book of Dread, and the post-exile release by Odd Future’s odd man out creeps heavy with the stuff. The kid is crazy smart, by which I mean wicked smart, by which I mean he’s blessed with the type of superb intellect rappers used to shield behind alter-egos. That life makes you wonder. Earl Sweatshirt’s got poetry in his blood and cuts to the veins of his own identity without the just foolin’ safety net of Doom or Lord Quas. The endless piano loop of “Chum” might say it all, rising marionette notes falling time and again into a melancholy let down, but Earl gets the last word in reflective slants and internal rhyme. A joke stuck in his throat and up to his neck in the medicine cabinet, Sweatshirt stares through a grimy bedroom window while the instrumental “523” staggers like a pilled-out echo of Wu Tang’s “Tearz.” But because this is Earl’s wildly intertextual life, he wades out of that eggy pharmacetical wooze and passes the mic to the the real RZA. “I’m fucking famous, if you forgot,” says Earl, his words doubled with irony, truth, and loads of outsider dread. —Nathan Huffstutter

41. The Shins: Oh, Inverted World (2001)

The Shins don’t just have one of the best debut albums of the last 25 years—they have one of the best debut singles of all time in “New Slang,” which found more ears three years later in the film Garden State. “New Slang” was released many months before Oh, Inverted World, and the latter only exists because the former did so well and Sub Pop couldn’t help but offer the Shins a shiny record deal in response. Bandleader James Mercer had previously been fronting a crew called Flake Music, which was heavier and more alt-rock-oriented than the Elephant 6-inspired kaleidoscope of the Shins. Oh, Inverted World was just the third Sub Pop album to be certified platinum, but its legacy stretches much further than that: songs like “Know Your Onion!” and “One by One All Day” are such jubilant, psychedelia-inspired pop-rock tracks that they helped cement the Shins as song-cycle aficionados. Oh, Inverted World wasn’t a revival but its own marvelous invention. —Matt Mitchell

40. Ethel Cain: Preacher’s Daughter (2022)

Three years ago, Ethel Cain was on a brilliant ascent. 2021’s Inbred EP solidified her position as a force to be witnessed in American music as she wrestled with the uniquely Southern version of the American dream that shaped her young life. The divinity of gospel, the audacity of heartland rock, and the frankness of 2010s Tumblr-era pop collide into an arresting narrative spectacle, portraying the experience of a woman who is intimately familiar with depraved violence, the gospel, and the strict social hierarchies of the South and the Plains. The EPs have only revealed a portion of Cain’s lore, but on her whopping 75-minute debut LP Preacher’s Daughter, Ethel Cain, the narrative figure and the musical sensation, manifests a breathtaking account of a woman, her mysterious partner and her troubled family. Much as Inbred mangled Americana, ambient folk, and slowcore into a terrifying sonic experiment, Preacher’s Daughter is a sound all its own. Imagine what would happen if singers as familiar as Bruce Springsteen or Nichole Nordeman were backed by Midwife or Sunn O))). The glamorous and aphrodisiac sound of Lana Del Rey is undoubtedly there, but the thematic and instrumental elements on Preacher’s Daughter possess a weightiness and impulse away from ironic glamorization of the American dream and toward outright criticism that render the comparison only so relevant. At times the record throbs with a noisy, immersive intensity before transitioning into the kind of epic guitar solos that decorated the cult of rock personalities in generations past. This collision of dark ambient and Def Leppard is uniquely American in the best way conceivable. —Devon Chodzin

39. Charlie Megira: The Abtomatic Miesterzinger Mambo Chic (2001)

Of all the forgotten gems that Numero Group has worked to dig up in its time as a label, few of those revitalized back catalogs dazzle like that of Charlie Megira, whose hazy, lo-fi rockabilly transmissions from another planet floated his devout cult following into a strange new century. Clocking in at a lean twenty-three minutes, Megira’s debut The Abtomatic Miesterzinger Mambo Chic doesn’t so much play but drift and disappear in a cloud of smoky reverb. It’s surf rock for inside kids, “hypnogogic” before music writers knew to milk that descriptor—a dusty, dreamy doo-wop missive meant to be heard through your neighbor’s wall during a night with no moon. Or, at the very least, has the power to transport you there, regardless of the actual time. —Elise Soutar

38. Nation of Language: Introduction, Presence (2020)

It’s no secret that 1980s nostalgia has been prevalent in indie rock for years now. From Future Islands and Interpol to the 1975 and TOPS, countless bands from the last two decades have found success filtering their music through distinctly ’80s lenses. Still to this day, you can hardly swing a dead cat without hitting an indie band with one or more of these elements: interstellar synths, bass-driven songs, rich production, and melodramatic vocals. To join these ranks is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, there’s a huge demand for music that sounds like it came from the era of big hair and goths, but on the other hand, it’s hard to stand out in such a saturated market—and even harder to make lasting, impactful songs that transcend its revivalist label. New York City band Nation of Language approach this weighty task with more grace and far better songwriting chops than the vast majority of bands who attempt retro pastiches or something close to them. For starters, lead singer and songwriter Ian Devaney (formerly of Static Jacks) has a low-pitched, aching voice that just screams classic new wave, but more crucially, he has an ear for awe-inspiring melodies and synth lines that go above and beyond mere cinematic uplift. Nearly every one of his songs prompts a mental highlight reel of one’s own life, but without the stylish, candy-coated nostalgia that’s fetishized nowadays—it’s the profound kind that allows you to view yourself at your lowest and highest moments and see the beauty in having a finite amount of time to live. —Lizzie Manno

37. Phoebe Bridgers: Stranger in the Alps (2017)

“Jesus Christ, I’m so blue all the time,” Phoebe Bridgers sings in “Funeral,” one of the best songs on her incredible debut album, Stranger in the Alps. “And that’s just how I feel. Always have, and I always will.” No doubt about it: Alps is, at its core, a collection of sad folk songs, presented with nifty sonic accoutrements (mournful fiddle here, electro-noise there) and clever references (David Bowie, Jeffrey Dahmer) that give them added dimension. But it’s Bridgers’s plainspoken lyrics and airy, inescapable melodies that make Stranger in the Alps one of the best albums at any stage of anybody’s career. At 23-years-old, Bridgers already had a masterpiece under her belt. —Ben Salmon

36. J Dilla: Welcome 2 Detroit (2001)

In 2001, J Dilla was coming off the high of his group Slum Village’s tremendous Fantastic, Vol. 2. It was the beginning of the “Beat Generation,” and Dilla was the anchor. Going solo, he found something dramatic, vast. Welcome 2 Detroit provided Jay Dee the space to keep the bounce of the Soulquarians alive. He brought in Dwele (“Think Twice”), Blu (“The Clapper”), Frank N Dank (“Pause”), Phat Kat (“Featuring Phat Kat”), Beej (“Beej-N-Dem Pt. 2”), and Elzi (“Come Get It”) to rap over his shit. The result is rap history overflowing with underground talent. “Think Twice” is Detroit on a granular level; “Rico Suave Bossa Nova” suggests that Dilla’s obsessions with jazz and world music were as fruitful as his hip-hop habits. Welcome 2 Detroit sounds not like reinvention, but opportunity. Here we have the greatest beatmaker of all time stretching out under the banner of his own name. It’s an unconventional masterpiece that tells the story of Dilla and the story of the city he called home. —Matt Mitchell

35. The Strokes: Is This It (2001)

When the Strokes hit the NYC rock scene with their debut album in 2001, no one could have predicted that Julian Casablancas, Nick Valensi, Albert Hammond Jr., Nikolai Fraiture, and Fabrizio Moretti were going to become figureheads of a “revival.” Continuing the history of what bands like Talking Heads, Television and Blondie started 25 years prior, Is This It emerged as a game-changer. You’ve heard it all before, how it inspired bands like the Arctic Monkeys, Kings of Leon, and the Libertines to kick up a fuss, or how it was a “template for rock and roll in the modern day,” as Zane Lowe once said on BBC Radio 1. And maybe that much is true, as songs like “Last Nite,” “New York City Cops,” “Someday,” “The Modern Age,” and “Hard to Explain” were all certifiably top-notch rock tracks fit for Gen X kids yearning for a post-adolescent identity. The Strokes set the gold standard for Y2K bands, showing that you can make a modern classic on your first go. What you know now about contemporary rock music likely owes a big number of thanks to Is This It. —Matt Mitchell

34. Noname: Room 25 (2018)

In 2016, Chicago rapper Noname, née Fatimah Nyeema Warner, made a brief but unforgettable appearance on the penultimate track on Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book, the unapologetically joyful collaboration “Finish Line / Drown.” That song also featured T-Pain and Kirk Franklin and others, but Noname, relatively unknown at the time, administered one of its best lines: “The water may be deeper than it’s ever been / Never drown.” On Room 25, the follow-up to her 2016 mixtape Telefone that she surprise-released in September, Noname helms a collaborative jingle of her own, the empowered “Ace,” which features fellow Midwestern rappers Smino and Saba. They waste no breath in declaring their summary of hip hop in 2018: “Smino Grigio, Noname, and Saba the best rappers / And radio n****s sound like they wearing adult diapers.” It’s on the album’s first two tracks (“Self,” followed by the observatory “Blaxpoitation”), however, where Noname forges more political waters, delivering deeply important lines of poetry about racism and sexism. “Self” is her documented questioning of everything that’s absurd in 2018 and a breakdown of what it’s like to wade through the music industry as a woman rapper. “My pussy teaches ninth-grade English / My pussy wrote a thesis on colonialism,” she raps, before later asking, “Y’all really thought a bitch couldn’t rap huh?” Through Room 25’s calculated wisps of groove rap and studied waves of neo-soul, Noname proves she’s wise and fortified, and not to be questioned. —Ellen Johnson

33. Dry Cleaning: New Long Leg (2021)

British quartet Dry Cleaning extract the profound from the mundane and the meaningful from the nonsensical. On “Viking Hair” from the band’s 2019 EP Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks, Florence Shaw’s everyday sexual fantasies stood in for the arbitrary guidelines determining acceptable and shameful desires; as she surreally rattled off “traditional fish bar, chicken and ribs, bus pass” and more on “Traditional Fish” from the band’s other 2019 EP, Sweet Princess, she scorned the very idea of commerce. And she did it all in a bone-dry, comical sing-speak set to rollicking, if not straightforward, post-punk courtesy of guitarist Tom Dowse, bassist Lewis Maynard and drummer Nick Buxton. New Long Leg is all of that and none of that. Shaw’s semi-accidental revelations about the ridiculousness of being alive when we live in a society are sharper than ever, and her voice newly takes the tone of a psychic waking up from a 70-year nap. Dowse, Maynard, and Buxton have massively upped their game, too: The EPs’ post-punk foundation remains, but atop it come stomping glam riffs, dream-pop arpeggios and razor-sharp melodies that loosen Dry Cleaning’s prior tension without entirely taming the mania. —Max Freedman

32. Shabazz Palaces: Black Up (2011)

Seattle experimental rap duo Palaceer Lazaro and Tendair Maraire—aka Shabazz Palaces—have done more for music in the last 12 years than many artists have done in a lifetime. Their debut album, 2011’s Black Up, might go down as one of the most ambitious rap records of this century when it’s all said and done. Few introductions in the genre have ever been so revered so quickly, but, then again, Black Up is unlike any rap record you’ve heard. It’s an explosion of complex hip-hop measured up against anti-maximalist instrumentation. The samples aren’t overwrought, instead serving their purposes as space-fillers so Lazaro can show off his penmanship. Songs like “Free Press and Curl” and “An Echo from the Hosts That Profess Infinitum” and “Are You… Can You… Were You? (Felt)” are ridiculously mind-bending in how groovy and artful they are—especially the latter, which merges mid-1970s soul affections with oldhead flows. Maraire is no longer a part of Shabazz Palaces, but the work he did with Lazaro on Black Up is forever. —Matt Mitchell

31. Lorde: Pure Heroine (2013)

A 16-year old girl in 2013 not looking to twerk, whine, or sugarshock? Meet Ella Yelich-O’Connor, who emerged as a distaff Holden Caulfield, by employing a sangfroid that punched through an acquisitional society which measured worth by a flauntatiousness divorced from meaning. “Royals,” that summer’s surprise lo-fi trance-ish alternative #1, found Lorde ironically checking rap/video staples. She merged Lana Del Ray’s flat affect, Queen-evoking curtains of disembodied vocals, and Massive Attack’s electronica over an anything but fizzy electro-pop. Superficiality fell beneath her razor-scrawled lyrics, which skewer the sexualization of violence (“Glory and Gore”), the willfully blissfully unaware (“Buzzcut Season”), and the unattainability/desirability of faux perfection (“White Teeth Teens”). For Lorde, youth was both the ultimate revenge and burden. To know so much, to feel so little, and to embrace what is, she illuminated being young, gifted, and bored with a luminescence that suggested life beyond Louis Vuitton. —Holly Gleason

30. John Talabot: ƒIN (2012)

ƒIN sounds unlike anything else. It’s a tropical noir patched together with deep house, disco, and indie pop. Producer John Talabot is a Barcelona techno institution, and his debut record matches the work he was doing with BPitch Control and Border Community—his sample plug-ins put him in conversations with Tensnake and Four Tet and Delorean. His slow-tempo dance music is delicate but never dull. The funk of “Estiu” is underwater; the breakbeat on “Last Land” is straight out of a Mr. Cheeks track. The two Pional-assisted songs on ƒIN, “Destiny” and “So Will be Now…,” are beautiful moods stabalizing into deep grooves. The whole album blurs across vocal loops, synth stabs, and, even at one point, a chorus of frogs (“Depak Ine”). ƒIN owes as much to ‘80s synthwave as it does psychedelia. It’s like a contact high, and it’s one of the best electro albums I’ve ever heard. —Matt Mitchell

29. Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago (2008)

Not since a creek drank a cradle in 2002 had anyone so quietly overtaken the indie-folk world as Justin Vernon did in 2008 with Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago, when Jagjaguwar gave the album a wide release after Vernon pressed 500 copies himself the year before. This lonesome post-breakup album—with its mythic origin story in a remote Wisconsin cabin—is drenched in the kind of melancholy that feels a lot like joy, and sounds just as vivd. Rather than wallowing in loss, Vernon’s otherworldly falsetto and warm acoustic guitar provide a hopeful contrast to impressionistic lyrics like “Saw death on a sunny snow.” Vernon’s real trick was imbuing such hushed music with so much feeling and such seemingly nonsensical lyrics with such specific meaning to individual listeners. It was less like the end of a relationship and more like the promise of a new beginning. —Josh Jackson

28. Deltron 3030: Deltron 3030 (2000)

Rap concept albums likely don’t make it to Man On the Moon or Astroworld without Deltron 3030. The eponymous debut from Del the Funky Homosapien, Dan the Automator, and DJ Kid Koala is among the best of its kind, in this century at least. Del plays Deltron Zero, a soldier and computer prodigy who rebels against a New World Order in the 31st century. In that interplanetary universe, humanity and hip-hop is ruled by oligarchs. Del fights for freedom in rap battles until he wins the Galactic Rhyme Federation Championship. But Deltron 3030 is more than just storytelling ephemera; it’s alt-rap excellence that arrived in an era of hip-hop without a concrete mainstream identity. Rather than follow the templates of the Roots or DMX, Deltron 3030 avoided extremes at all cost and became a new, ambitious third thing. Their debut attests to that, with songs, like “Time Keeps On Slipping” and “3030,” that flourish alone but impress with context. And with guests like Prince Paul, Peanut Butter Wolf, Sean Lennon, Hafdís Huld, and Blur’s Damon Albarn on call, Deltron 3030 is as mystifying as the Perisphere on the record’s cover. —Matt Mitchell

27. King Krule: 6 Feet Beneath the Moon (2013)

Unlikely BRIT School graduate King Krule possessed the kind of drunken slurring tones that made Shane MacGowan sound like a coherent teetotaller, dealt in stream-of-consciousness lyrics which referenced everything from Winston Churchill to Jean-Michel Basquiat, and pursued a mish-mash of bedsit indie-pop, post-dubstep, jazz, and scuzzy punk. The man born Archy Marshall appeared to scream “acquired taste,” and yet, Frank Ocean, Tyler, the Creator, and Beyoncé were just a handful of the major acts who fell over themselves to champion his work back in 2013. Released on his 19th birthday, 6 Feet Beneath the Moon might not have been the game-changer his star-studded champions suggested—a fairly self-indulgent multimedia effort released under his own name two years later immediately halted any momentum. However, you’re unlikely to find a more intriguing, or idiosyncratic, coming-of-age album. —Jon O’Brien

26. Nourished by Time: Erotic Probiotic 2 (2023)

Describing anything as “DIY”—or, God forbid, “bedroom pop”—can conjure the sound of music made minimal by necessity, with its charm derived from its limitations. Though his full-length debut under the moniker Nourished by Time was entirely made in his parents’ basement in Baltimore, Marcus Brown’s blend of ‘90s R&B and ‘80s freestyle is so impressive because it appears to have arrived fully formed. For such a bare-bones operation, its fruits overwhelm. Planting himself at the midpoint between SWV and The Blue Nile, between heartbreak and life under late-stage capitalism, between dance floor bangers and deeply-felt pleas for understanding, Brown threads all of it together to create an idiosyncratic, well-crafted collection of songs that can’t help but attach themselves to you. The melancholic guitar fog of opener “Quantum Suicide” runs perfectly into the synth-driven bounce of “Shed That Fear” and “Daddy.” By the time he’s wringing your heart out with lines like “My prayer is for our clouds to collide / But I have to face the possibility that I’m wasting my time”—delivered in lush harmonic layers on “Rain Water Promise”—you’re ready to pivot with him wherever he aims Nourished by Time’s arrow next. Loving and losing are eternal themes for a reason, but in his isolation, Brown repurposes them into something strikingly original and frequently gorgeous. —Elise Soutar

25. Sky Ferreira: Night Time, My Time (2013)

Many in the acting and modeling fields also find their way into music, but Sky Ferreira’s foray was no ill-advised stunt. Ferreira had been putting out music on MySpace since she was a teen, which resulted in a major label bidding war and album deal with EMI that turned sour. She scrapped plans for her debut album and put out two EPs with Capitol instead—2011’s As If! and 2012’s Ghost. While electronic met acoustic on the disjointed Ghost, Night Time, My Time arrived with much more gusto than many would’ve thought. Equipped with soaring pop hooks and smudged textures, Ferreria sounds melancholy yet mature. “I Blame Myself” is a vulnerable display of self-loathing (“I know it’s not your fault / That you don’t understand / I blame myself”), “Kristine” is a biting roast of abhorrent rich kid behavior (“Stabbing pens in my hands / And I’m never working, I’m just spending”) and the title track is a glimmer of morbid transcendence (“I wouldn’t feel anything / When we burst into dust forever / And no angels will help us out”). Her dense, rough-edged pop proved both danceable and insightful. Despite its yearning melancholia, it’s a constant rush of instrumental and emotional uplift. —Lizzie Manno

24. Joyce Manor: Joyce Manor (2011)

It should be noted that Joyce Manor—a quartet that originated in 2008 in Torrance, California—came onto the scene in 2011 with a debut album that is just as good now as it was 14 years ago. Joyce Manor is what Pinkerton would sound like if a pop-punk band made it 20 years too late. It’s hard to fully comprehend just what kind of legacy Joyce Manor forged on this record, as it found a niche through Tumblr, MediaFire blogs, leaked physical copies, and word of mouth. Many entries on this list are important in their own right, but so few can claim to be as iconic as Joyce Manor’s first foray together as a band. At ten tracks and 18 minutes in length, there is no filler on this thing. Instead, it’s a head-rush of hooks and heavy choruses so catchy you’ll be humming them after only a few listens. “Constant Headache” is, likely, the cornerstone of Joyce Manor—but “Beach Community,” “Leather Jacket,” and “Call Out” are just as immediate. An ADHD kid’s (me) dream, you can digest and fall in love with Joyce Manor without having to set aside a chunk of your day to listen to it. It’s what dreams are made of, and the fact that the band is still churning out heaters in 2026 makes it all worthwhile and then some. —Matt Mitchell

23. DJ Rashad: Double Cup (2013)

When DJ Rashad passed away at just age thirty-four, Chicago’s historic house music scene was bestowed with a saint it didn’t ask for. What Rashad could have done in the following years is limitless and tragically unknowable; just six months prior to his death, he had released his debut studio album Double Cup to widespread praise uncharacteristic for an underground electronic dance record. A decade later, DJ Rashad’s contemporaries are touring globally and footwork has grown into a tour de force of influence and inspiration for a new generation of producers worldwide. While dance music rarely works within the LP format, Double Cup lives as one of house music’s few great full-length records. DJ Rashad presents a sweeping view of Chicago’s oft-overlooked electronic dance music history in effortless fashion, touring twenty years of footwork, juke, and house history and highlighting the innovation of fellow Teklife members; DJ Spinn, Taso, Manny, and more. Like its cover, Double Cup is a perfect image of Chicago, its tightly woven streets shimmering and alive. —Benny Sun

22. Jockstrap: I Love You Jennifer B (2022)

The debut album from London duo Jockstrap—Georgia Ellery, also of Black Country, New Road, and Taylor Skye—takes all of one minute to announce itself as something remarkable. Opener “Neon” draws you in with sparse acoustic guitar and Ellery’s lithe vocal, only to wallop you with rib cage-rattling bass, a film score-esque theremin sample and a ghostly chorus. It’s the first “holy shit” moment of many on the record, “a collection of Jockstrap tracks that have been three years in the making,” per the duo. Dramatic strings, synths, and chanting usher “Concrete Over Water” into EDM banger mode; harp plucks flicker between organic and artificial to introduce “Angst”; closer “50/50” feels like a club anthem for the end of the world. Euphoric and disorienting at once, their deconstructed dance-pop music brings cubist art to mind, assembling familiar shapes into structures that are altogether alien. As Jockstrap leaves the launchpad, you can either crane your neck at their dizzying ascent, or hold on for dear life and enjoy the ride, wherever it may take you. —Scott Russell

21. M.I.A.: Arular (2005)

Hounslow-born rapper M.I.A. would find huge success with her sophomore album Kala—thanks to the massive single “Paper Planes”—but her debut shouldn’t be overlooked, either. Released in 2005 by XL, Arular was a dashing, worldly affair that combined dancehall and hip-hop. Done in collaboration with Diplo, Richard X, Paul Byrne, Switch, and others, M.I.A. was able to exert an effortless amount of cockiness while maintaining a scattered and brilliant taste for pop-oriented rap instincts. Songs like “Sunshowers,” “Bucky Done Gun,” and “Galang” have come to define not just the record, but M.I.A.’s career altogether. She claimed that the album’s title is Sri Lankan for “enlightenment from the sunshine,” while “arular” is literally, Tamil for “who is.” It was an apt way to phrase your first record, as Arular became divisive in circles outside of music criticism: MTV refused to broadcast the “Sunshowers” video unless M.I.A.’s team included a disclaimer about the song’s lyrics—which reference murder, gun violence, and the Palestine Liberation Organization. M.I.A. set out to critique the Americanized dilution of terrorism and extremism while also sketching tales of sex, drug-dealing, and coming-of-age tropes. Arular was lauded by writers upon its release, and the record has since maintained its own appraisal. —Matt Mitchell

20. Janelle Monáe: The ArchAndroid (2010)

At long, long last, Janelle Monáe dropped their full-length debut onto the world in 2010. It only seems fitting to look back on the moment two years prior when we first encountered her: ”’This is a historic night,’ the emcee shouted to the crowd. Waving blue and white inspirational signs, the assembly chants louder. The excitement is palpable. The diversity of the crowd—young and old, black and white, male and female—is itself a sign of the hope offered. When the shouts reach a fevered pitch, the guest of honor emerges. Welcome Janelle Monáe. Sure, it’s only a club show, but—Barack Obama allusions aside—it does feel historic. You can’t help but feel you’re watching the birth of a superstar. “I’ve just watched Prince, Michael Jackson, Anita Baker, Judy Garland, and AC/DC all at once,” a friend exclaimed as we left the show. When I first saw the 23-year-old singer, I told my wife that I’d just had a Jon Landau moment—I’d seen the future of rock and roll. Monáe—barely five-feet tall and backed only by a guitar player and drummer—delivered a performance unlike any I’d ever seen. —Tim Regan-Porter

19. Frank Ocean: channel ORANGE (2012)

A mere few days before the release of his major label debut channel ORANGE, Frank Ocean published a letter on his Tumblr disclosing his affection for another man. The revelation of the enigmatic Odd Future vocalist’s queerness acted both as a major turning point for his still-nascent career and as an exciting primer for what was to come. Backed by gorgeous, sun-soaked R&B/pop production, channel ORANGE sounds like falling in love in the summertime. It gave us a swooning ballad (“Thinkin Bout You”), a 10-minute strip club epic (“Pyramids”), a sweet ode to his first love (“Forrest Gump”), and some clever class satire (“Sweet Life,” “Super Rich Kids”). Though Ocean has continued to maintain his mystique, having only churned out two back-to-back records in 2016 and a string of one-off singles, channel ORANGE paved fertile ground for other queer Black musicians to make unconventional, intimate pop music. —Sam Rosenberg

18. Dizzee Rascal: Boy in Da Corner (2003)

There’s no easing into Boy in da Corner. Dizzee Rascal’s still-iconic debut is restless, hyper-local, and dense with friction: beats that feel boxed-in and jagged, tempos that lurch rather than flow, and a vocal delivery that rarely settles. What gives the album its lasting force isn’t just its role in bringing grime into wider view, but the way it sounds fundamentally unconcerned with translation. Dizzee raps with a clipped urgency that reflects the album’s environments—tower blocks, street corners, bedrooms turned pressure chambers—where volatility isn’t dramatized so much as taken for granted. There’s craft here, but little polish, and no interest in smoothing the edges for accessibility. Rather than asking to be understood, the record forces a recalibration, shifting the center of modern rap toward spaces and voices that had rarely been treated as foundational—and somehow leaving the impression not of a scene beginning, but of one already in motion. —Casey Epstein-Gross

17. Sturgill Simpson: High Top Mountain (2013)

Though he makes music that keeps up with the outlaw forefathers who came before him, Sturgill Simpson has never adhered to any sort of country tradition. He’s the ultimate contrarian in life and song, which has gotten him a heap of praise in the last decade. But let’s go back to 2013, when his debut record hit the shelves. High Top Mountain is blue-ribbon country rock that’ll blast you sideways. The songs are honky-tonk rabble-rousers, heard in the boot-scootin’ fury of “Life Ain’t Fair and the World is Mean” and “Railroad of Sin.” Simpson burns down the barn and sells the land for weed and pills on “You Can Have the Crown,” and he serenades the old souls with “Hero.” Fuck your “Nashville Sound,” Simpson’s got the Kentucky juice here. The guitars’ll rip through your gut and his croons’ll power your car’s engine. The hot damn desert of High Top Mountain created a maverick to carry Merle’s torch and we’ve been following the light, trying to find a word that rhymes with “bronco” ever since. —Matt Mitchell

16. Kelela: Take Me Apart (2017)

I think of what Devon Chodzin wrote about Raven two years ago: “Kelela is no stranger to changing the game through her futuristic dance music.” That is entirely true in the context of her great debut album Take Me Apart, which landed eight years ago yet remains under-appreciated. The songs within it are sensual, vulnerable, and urgent. “Frontline” spreads out on its own time; “LMK” is undeniable at every breath; “Blue Light” is dripping from club splashes; “Turn to Dust,” backed by vibrating, wincing strings, is among Kelela’s smoothest ballads; the title track explodes in glitchy, cacophonous desire. With production from Bok Bok (!), Ariel Rechtshaid (!!), and Arca (!!!), Kelela’s voice goes from mantra to muscle, in rituals of divine, blown-apart R&B music. Devon was right all along; Take Me Apart still obliterates the present in 2026. —Matt Mitchell

15. Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes (2008)

Fleet Foxes constantly calls to mind images of wintry isolation and loneliness: Robin Pecknold seems to be a lonely traveler going through each of the songs’ worlds, focused more on nature and the introspection of his own existence that the boundless world around him causes him to contemplate than any interpersonal relationships he might have. What makes the band’s debut such a great record is that it’s a meditative look at nature and Pecknold’s relationship to it, but songs like “White Winter Hymnal” explore how that relationship actually affects his interactions with those around him. He seems obviously lost in the woods, on the outside of the “pack” that he follows; it’s a terrific examination of the manifestations that loneliness might take when projected into society at large. —Jeff Pearson

14. The Field: From Here We Go Sublime (2007)

Three years after hearing it for the first time, I still don’t yet know what to make of From Here We Go Sublime, Axel Willner’s phenomenal debut as the Field. The music makes no sense to me, but I can’t seem to go more than a week without listening to it. He micro-samples songs from artists I love, like Fleetwood Mac, and flips them sideways. And then he flips them upside down, and then sideways again until it’s no longer recognizable. From Here We Go Sublime is dub, trance, ambient, and techno, each element chopped, screwed, smoothed, and brightened. The hauntological rewiring of the Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes For You” in the title track sounds like a full-body high. Cicadas sound like drums on “Mobilia.” Willner’s ideas luxuriate in textural daydreams on “The Deal.” When I listen to From Here We Go Sublime and its strange, uncanny devotions, all I do is vibrate. —Matt Mitchell

13. Kanye West: The College Dropout (2004)

Every so often, an album rewrites the musical rulebook, and this one effectively murdered gangsta rap. It also redefined what a rapper could look and sound like, expanding the role an MC could play in popular culture. With his precocious debut, the collar-popping, Jesus-walking, beat-making provocateur Kanye West became a kind of hip-hop prophet, venting about his interior life in a way that spoke for millions. Witty, angry, and eminently quotable, The College Dropout kick-started a 4-album streak that made West the most important pop solo artist since Prince. —Nick Marino

12. Courtney Barnett: Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit (2015)

Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit hit me in middle school and completely knocked the wind out of me. I spent the next few years cycling its lyrics through my Instagram bio like they were personality traits: little fragments of self-loathing, boredom, irritation, panic, all delivered with a shrug that felt braver than confidence. It was Courtney Barnett’s Australian drawl that got me through the dregs of tweenagehood—in large part, perhaps, because she wrote songs that moved the way thoughts did: doubling back, getting distracted, fixating on the wrong thing and accidentally revealing the right one. “Avant Gardener” turns an asthma attack into slapstick until the joke curdles into fear. “Pedestrian at Best” reads like a rant you mutter to yourself and then surprise yourself by shouting. “Depreston” sounds casual until it suddenly isn’t, the weight of history and sadness pressing down through the most banal of adult rituals. The guitars follow suit—loose, conversational, never fussed about sounding impressive. They don’t interrupt her sentences so much as underline them, tightening when she spirals, easing off when she goes numb. Nothing here is precious, but nothing is throwaway. Plenty of debuts announce a voice, but in 2015 Sometimes I Sit and Think waltzed in like it had been here the whole time, trusting Barnett’s voice enough to let it ramble, contradict itself, and linger on discomfort. At a moment when indie rock prized either aloof cool or maximal sincerity, Barnett made room for something messier: intelligence without polish, vulnerability without confession, humor that didn’t deflect the pain so much as sit beside it. Even today, the album lingers—not merely as a time capsule of feelings, but as a blueprint for how ordinary thoughts can be shaped into something rough-hewn, hard-hitting, and utterly indelible. —Casey Epstein-Gross

11. Alvvays: Alvvays (2014)

Among the many things to love about Alvvays’ self-titled debut album is that the songs are so deceptively rich. Beneath the fuzztone guitars and Molly Rankin’s sadsack vocals on what sound at first like straightforward indie-pop tunes beats a droll heart shot through with a subversive streak. Rankin strikes an impressive balance in her lyrics between lovelorn woe and deadpan wit, tackling twenty-something romantic angst with a sly wisdom well beyond her (and, frankly, most people’s) years. She and her band of Toronto transplants draw on the wistful, plaintive sound of mid-’80s British indie-pop—jangling guitars, swirls of atmospheric keyboards—and twist it on songs that hint at the tumult lurking just below seemingly placid surfaces: she spins a full-life fantasy about an enigmatic stranger on “Adult Diversion,” adds to the catalog of dead-boyfriend songs on the yearning, darkly comic “Next of Kin” and makes her best case for a long-term, low-key commitment to a reluctant beau on “Archie, Marry Me,” the supremely catchy centerpiece of the album. Much has been made of the fact that Rankin comes from a celebrated Canadian roots-music family, but her genealogy is rather less noteworthy on Alvvays than her deft lyricism and knack for pairing it with memorable melodies.—Eric R. Danton

10. Vince Staples: Summertime ‘06 (2015)

Though Vince Staples’ proof was already in Stolen Youth, the 2013 mixtape he spit out with Mac Miller (Larry Fisherman), his major label debut—and first official full length—Summertime ’06 acts as an all-consuming testament to a talent far beyond its years. Not to sell Youth short, but Miller’s loosely saccharine production fit a Staples who’s cooled quite a bit since then. On Summertime, the rapper is all ice-cold edge, inside and out: refined, honed, sharp enough to cut subcutaneously. And so, on Summertime ’06, an older, wiser Staples digs in with Clams Casino, No I.D., and DJ Dahi, producers who represent the best of most generations of hip-hop, to help him carve out a sonic space better fit for his aging worldview. In turn, the album is more than an ambitious kind of coming-of-age chronicle—it’s a blithely sad thing, one in which institutional racism (“Lift Me Up”), addiction (“Jump Off the Roof”), and even loneliness (“Summertime”) feel impossible to overcome. Staples hasn’t gotten harder, just smarter—and his producers, balancing industrial clank with cloudy dope-scapes, have allowed him a sturdy vulnerability off which he can bounce his feelings. Though Staples hails from Long Beach—and shared a year of assured hip-hop releases with Boogie, another brilliant rapper from the area who’s finally getting his due—his tracks rarely feel exclusive. Here, he was ready to mine deeper bedrock. And rarely has the sound of an artist scraping bottom been this assured. —Dom Sinacola

9. Joanna Newsom: The Milk-Eyed Mender (2004)

I am convinced that anything Drag City Records touches turns to solid gold. When California harpist Joanna Newsom signed to the label, she released her debut album The Milk-Eyed Mender in 2004 to much deserved critical acclaim. It was produced by Noah Georgeson and spawned tracks like “Sprout and the Bean” and “Peach, Plum, Pear” and “The Book of Right-On.” Newsom’s gentle singing and angelic strums take their first steps here, as her arrangements and warm, quirky delicacy arrive in spades. Ys would take Newsom to uncharted heights, but not without first building upon the Milk-Eyed Mender’s world. To look back on a debut and be able to see exactly when a visionary unsettled is a gift. —Matt Mitchell

8. Clipse: Lord Willin’ (2002)

Clipse—the rap duo of twin brothers Pusha T and No Malice—are, perhaps, one of the most undersung talents in all of hip-hop’s long history. They began in Virginia Beach as far back as 1994, but their debut album didn’t come until 2002. Lord Willin’ is an ambitious, unbelievable first statement from, arguably, the greatest rap group of the last 25 years. The record was produced by the Neptunes, who ran point on Clipse’s Exclusive Audio Footage—the project that was initially supposed to be the duo’s debut, but later got shelved aside from counterfeit pressings and online leaks. Lord Willin’, however, was a proper first outing that dazzled, impressed—evoking gangsta, hardcore, experimental, and East Coast rap unlike anything oldheads had heard prior. Tracks like “Grindin’,” “Cot Damn,” and “When the Last Time” are all-timers and, when I play them back in 2026, they sound just as tightly wound. Knowing what we know now, that No Malice and Pusha T (especially the latter) would go on to have great solo careers, it’s a gift that we got Clipse when we did. —Matt Mitchell

7. FKA twigs: LP1 (2014)

FKA twigs’ debut full-length LP1 was a blend of glitchy futuristic R&B we hadn’t heard before. A music-video dancer turned singer, FKA twigs experiments with sound and space, her beats stuttering and stopping like a modern dancer. Although it may not sound like it, FKA twigs is essentially a singer-songwriter fearless in her approach to experimentation. Her vocal range forces a new take on desire, and puts her own personal signature on a theme we’ve heard before—sex. On LP1 we get all sides of FKA twigs: She sings to us digitized and Auto-Tuned from far off in space before whispering in our ear, intimate and bare. Beats drop in and out with no warning or obvious structure, and yet it’s catchy. Yes, these ten disjointed anthems somehow manage to be catchy songs. FKA twigs released a video for every song on the album, a testament to her clear vision for LP1, a truly unique and noteworthy debut. —Alexa Carrasco

6. Cannibal Ox: The Cold Vein (2001)

The Cold Vein is a great album to discover later in your life. I used to call myself a rap fan, but then I listened to Cannibal Ox’s debut. What the hell was I thinking? I didn’t kow shit about hip-hop back then. The El-P-produced The Cold Vein is one of the best albums of all time, debut or otherwise. I learned more about New York from these 14 songs than any history book. Vast Aire and Vordul Mega, especially Vast, write about the city like there’s an apocalypse going on. They rap like the streets are a battleground (“Ox out the Cage,” “Stress Rap”), and El-P’s beats beneath them are rust-tinted gothic down to a dystopian science. The love songs (“A B-Boy’s Alpha,” “The F-Word”) make for wonderful distractions in Cannibal Ox’s alien basement. The Big Apple’s grid system is dying but Vast and Vordul are restless, hopping turnstiles into the rot. The Cold Vein is still a portal all this time later. —Matt Mitchell

5. Women: Women (2008)

Women sounds like a rock masterpiece falling apart. Hold the tape in your hands and it might disintegrate. It’s not about science, it’s about feel—about mood captured in droning chords and fucked-up time signatures. Before Patrick Flegel turned the 2020s inside out with Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubilee, he and Women went crazy on some whizzing guitar madness. It’s noise-rock done up in vintage, obliterating ways. Perfection comes to mind when “Shaking Hand” and “Black Rice” start playing. It’s an anti-indie-rock indie-rock masterpiece; a Chad VanGaalen-produced lo-fi project as generous as it is mystifying. Flickers of Sonic Youth, Deerhunter, Wire, the Electric Prunes, and (if you want to be annoyingly on the nose) the Velvet Underground blast all throughout, in a syrup of de-tuned, frenetic, tick-tick-boom rock phenomena. —Matt Mitchell

4. SOPHIE: Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides (2018)

The emotional weight of SOPHIE’s maximalism is almost too much to bear now. In the years since the groundbreaking experimental pop musician’s tragic passing, her first studio record has come to embody a new form altogether—a vessel for a kind of transfeminine hyper-expressiveness, a body and being whose seemingly familiar chemical makeup of bubblegum bass and club music is so radically altered that it becomes greater than its boundaries can hold, an overflowing of self. By inverting, eroding, exaggerating, or otherwise completely blowing out traditional pop and electronic structures, SOPHIE arranges with a palette all her own. Songs as thundering as “Faceshopping” or “Immaterial” feel as if they contain as many sentiments and outlooks at once—elation, apprehension, corporeal anxiety, longing, and disarming vulnerability—while more abstract cuts like “Pretending” find shape in constructing narratives of self-actualization using a language all their own, outside limiting norms entirely. Oil is a record defined by its own active reshaping of the landscape—like the restless seismic shifts that close “Whole New World / Pretend World.” For all the overt references and imitators that have come in SOPHIE’s wake, no one can ever replicate the idiosyncratic ways she altered the terrain with just a single album. —Natalie Marlin

3. SZA: Ctrl (2017)

If you’re currently anywhere from twenty-two to forty-five years old, have even a teensy bit of taste and an ounce of anxiety, Ctrl likely has a residency in your headphones. It came out on my last day of high school, and has stayed with me through some of the most change-filled, formative, lesson-learning years of my life. Each listen shapeshifts with time, meeting you exactly where you are, even as you become someone new. The album’s lore is as chaotic as the album itself: SZA took so long deciding on the final tracklist (out of 150+ songs) that her label, TDE, stole her hard drive and released the record for her. What remained is a magically clandestine, gorgeous batch of songs that feel like a late-night journaling sesh set to warped R&B and stoned guitar loops. SZA captures the hyperspecific and makes it universal. Ctrl has been especially important for young Black women, for whom SZA’s honesty, hesitations, and contradictions felt like real, holistic representation. She makes self sabotage sound romantic and fear feel poetic, summing up a generation’s worth of anxieties into a few sparse lines. (“Fearing not growing up / Keeping me up at night / Am I doing enough? / Feels like I’m wasting time” off “Prom” couldn’t define my existential worries better.) Standouts like “Garden (Say It Like That)” and “Broken Clocks” are as confessional as they are catchy, perfect for when you’re getting ready to go out, or quietly unraveling once you’re there, while moments like “Go Gina” see SZA baring her frustrations a little more candidly (“Picking up a penny with a press-on is / Easier than holding you down, can’t be any / Harder than holding you up now” will go down in history as far as I’m concerned). When I listen to Ctrl, countless versions of myself are reflected back at me: the me driving aimlessly around my hometown, shouting along to “Normal Girl” like it’s gospel, the me quietly crying to “20 Something” from the bottom bunk of my freshman dorm. For as of-the-moment Ctrl can feel, it continues to unfold with time, changing meaning without losing impact. —Cassidy Sollazzo

2. Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Fever to Tell (2003)

It’s been a fun ride to be a Yeah Yeah Yeahs fan over the years. Although the trio of Karen O, Nick Zinner, and Brian Chase have formed an identity that’s hard to mistake for anything else, the band has tweaked and scrambled its own three-pillar foundation by experimenting with different instruments, song structure and arrangements. When it comes to “Maps,” your age, sex, relationship background, musical preference, opinion on Karen O’s voice, or thoughts on a bass-less garage-rock trio don’t matter. If you don’t feel anything by the time Zinner rips into his triumphant, octaved guitars or Karen O confides, “They don’t love you like I love you,” you might not have a beating heart. If you picked up Fever to Tell after only hearing “Maps” on the radio, the album opener “Rich” had the potential to be a blindsided, garage grease-stained fist to the kisser. And what better way to wind down a thunderous debut than with “Y Control,” a track that manages to put their identity under a microscope? We get Zinner looping and winding his guitar parts under Karen O’s now-lulled meditations on control, the band toeing a line between garage ferociousness and honest introspection. It’s moody but accessible, familiar but unpredictable—a road map for how the band’s catalog would unfurl for years to come. —Tyler Kane

1. The Avalanches: Since I Left You (2000)

Since I Left You set a precedent upon its release 24 years ago. The debut outing from Australian electronica outfit the Avalanches, the record is a daring, 18-track foray into the wondrous universe of sampling and a Phil Spector-style, bassless production scope. There are varying estimates of how many samples exactly emerged from the thousands of hours Robbie Chater and Darren Seltmann spent concocting Since I Left You—some say over 3,500, while others argue it’s closer to 1,000. The band had roots in punk scenes, and you can hear that rebellion throughout Since I Left You—notably in how Robbie Chater and Darren Seltmann (Bobbydazzler) cut up every piece of source material they had and fashioned it all into this ambitious, restless masterpiece. Standout tracks like “Frontier Psychiatrist,” “Electricity,” and “Radio” figure into some of the album’s rowdiest energy, while entries like “Summer Crane” and “Tonight” are much more subdued and sublime and whimsical—showcasing jazz elements as often as they are bits of pop and soul. But, the cornerstone of Since I Left You is its plundered title track, one of the best songs ever. The Avalanches wouldn’t make another record together for 16 (!) years, but not even their nearly two-decade hiatus could ever even come close to halting the legacy that Since I Left You began. Perfect records are like that—unshakable and effortless. Unavoidable even in stasis. —Matt Mitchell