Top 100 Albums of the Decade

Compiling a decade list is no small feat. 2000 to the present is compact enough to feel relevant to betterPropaganda's history, but stretches far enough back to include the artists who inspired us to start a site like this in the first place.

Nominating, ordering and solidifying the lists was nothing less than a loving clusterfuck of a process. After dumping all of our favorites into a spreadsheet, we shifted to wallpapering our office with a couple hundred post-it notes, arranged and (sometimes sneakily) rearranged from 1-100 over the course of a few months. The result is a pair of countdowns marked by eclecticism and charming quirks, entries which would be ten or twenty or forty positions higher than on other, safer lists. It is, we feel, more compelling than other countdowns of its ilk - we have avoided favoring the drudgery of rigid democracy and diplomacy that would have stamped out the sense of individualism that defines betterPropaganda.

In selecting our top 100 albums of the decade, we kept our eye on cultural and musical distinctiveness (yes, it's subjective - we know), innovation, longevity, and influence in the industry. Of course, in arguing for our favorites, we turned toward any number of intangibles, and in the end we went with our gut. It was a process driven by frequent spars, plenty of well-intentioned but biting sarcasm, a couple booze-fueled marathon ordering sessions, and - owing to our love of the music - a desire to get things just right. We're happy with the result.

View our Top 100 Artists of the Decade Countdown here.

Click on the below images to read our commentary and download mp3s.

#100 Kanye West - Graduation - Kanye West's progression from The College Dropout to Late Registration was extraordinary, despite the fact that his first album was incredible.

#99 Frog Eyes - The Golden River - The Golden River is intensely textured and yes, ultimately prophetic; it speaks greatly to its strengths that, like the wandering madman, you will never quite figure this whole thing out.

#98 BRMC - Take Them On, On Your Own - Take Them On... brought back everything that I liked about the rock genre: the grittiness, posturing, and political edginess that had been homogenized into a catalog of bland cliché.

#97 Badly Drawn Boy - The Hour of Bewilderbeast - Back in 2000, Damon Gough, a.ka. Badly Drawn Boy, snuck out of British coffee shops and landed at the podium to accept the Mercury Prize. The album that catapulted him to the main stage is our 97th best album of the decade.

#96 Xiu Xiu - Fabulous Muscles - Jamie Stewart, the mastermind behind Xiu Xiu, has always attempted to challenge the structures of rock music.

#95 OOIOO - Gold & Green - The OOIOO album Gold and Green (Thrill Jockey) is a collage of experimental ambient musical environments.

#94 Supermayer - Save the World - Supermayer's Save the World unites the seminal DJs Superpitcher & Michael Mayer, both longtime stalwarts of Cologne's Kompakt sound.

#93 Girl Talk - Night Ripper - This album made me love pop again, and indeed, most of the magic is that it connects listeners to genres they'd normally snub.

#92 Sigur Ros - Takk... - In 2005, Sigur Ros awoke from their peaceful slumber and marched down from the heavens with their best work to date.

#91 Dizzee Rascal - Boy in Da Corner - Dizzee built Boy in Da Corner on the pillars of Hip Hop, Drum and Bass, Garage, Dance Hall and Rock, and added his own unique variety of rhyme and production to the whole mix.

#90 M83 - Dead Cities, Red Seas, & Lost Ghosts - M83 was introduced to the world with 2003's Dead Cities... - an album that was effectively shoegaze, but significantly less guitar-driven.

#89 DJ Shadow - Private Press - Private Press brought more innovation, exploring entirely new territory. Shadow played with genres like they were going out of style.

#88 Orbital - Blue Album - Orbital's Blue Album is a sonic bath of sumptuous melodies that demonstrate a new level of sophistication and compositional excellence.

#87 MGMT - Oracular Spectacular - A few chosen artists - like these guys - are able to deftly mash truckloads of influences and churn them out into an emergent new sound.

#86 Blonde Redhead - Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons - Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons is an album skewered with haphazardness, populated by an army of curious tweaks and tics - both vocal and instrumental.

#85 Pop Levi - The Return to Form Black Magik Party - A former member of Liverpool electropop band Ladytron, Pop Levi (Pop is his real middle name) released his solo album, The Return to Form Black Magick Party, in February 2007.

#84 Murs - 3:16: The Ninth Edition - Murs is a breath of fresh air in an over-saturated world of angry MC's; all Murs wants is a nice girl who can appreciate his sensitive nature.

#83 Mum - Yesterday Was Dramatic, Today Is OK - Listening to their discography feels like watching old home movies cut through with glitches, tape hiss and nearly imperceptible melting around the edges of the screen.

#82 Wolf Parade - Apologies To The Queen Mary - Apologies to the Queen Mary has the persistence of an avalanche down a steep grade.

#81 Spoon - Kill the Moonlight - Kill the Moonlight, Spoon's fourth album, is lean and muscular, without a hint of any superfluous ornamentation.

#80 TV on the Radio - Return To Cookie Mountain - TV on the Radio's Return To Cookie Mountain is an aurally burdening confluence of a wide range of genres.

#79 Paris - Sonic Jihad - Paris' Sonic Jihad dropped harder than any album since Public Enemy's It Takes A Nation Of Millions, an album that Paris actually produced and penned material for.

#78 Herbert - Bodily Functions - Bodily Functions is the third album from experimental electronic music producer Matthew Herbert.

#77 Interpol - Turn on the Bright Lights - Turn on the Bright Lights is laden with metropolitan imagery, both in lyrical content and in the rushing instrumentation, which streaks by like a time-lapse of New York's downtown grid.

#76 Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere - Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo Green, aka Gnarls Barkley, broke the traditional industry record release mold with St. Elsewhere.

#75 The Free Design - The Now Sound Redesigned - The Now Sound Redesigned assembled some of the best production talent of our era to reinterpret the sounds of The Free Design.

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