Albums are one of the newest art forms overall, as despite music being around for who knows how long, packing a collection of songs together and declaring they should all be listened to from start to finish, and in order? It’s a newer phenomenon that you might expect, not really being a thing until around the middle of the 20th century, and becoming particularly popular, as a way to buy/consume music, in the 1960s and ‘70s, often thanks to conceptual albums by the likes of The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and The Who.
Also, depending on who you ask, the era of the album might well be over, since the last decade or so has seen streaming be the way most people listen to music. And you can listen to albums in full on streaming services, of course, and artists still release albums, but it’s never been easier to skip around or jump to something else altogether (even easier than when iTunes gave you access to hundreds or thousands of songs you might’ve purchased; with streaming services, there are millions). But to help further the idea that albums aren’t totally dead, even with advancements in technology and changes in music distribution, here are some of the best albums released in the 21st century so far, also with a limit of one album per artist to stop a few artists from dominating the ranking too badly.
25
‘American Idiot’ (2004)
Green Day
It’s strange to feel nostalgia for American Idiot, since it’s a largely angry album about a confusing and politically charged time in history, but maybe it was a simpler sort of anger and confusion, compared to the also confusing and politically charged times everyone is living through right now. “Quaint” isn’t the perfect word used to describe it, but if you were around in 2004, it does seem simpler now. That’s just how time and memory work.
So, nostalgia. It’s there for American Idiot, but also, you could probably listen to this album for the first time in the mid-2020s and, assuming you’re into rock, enjoy it without necessarily considering the political context. It’s an easy album to feel, and be energized by, and then it’s lyrically more interesting than you might realize if you want to dig into all that. Green Day fans might be more likely choose Dookie as the band’s best album, but that one was from the 1990s, so here, it’s American Idiot. It’s great, as both a time capsule and a rousing rock album in its own right.
24
‘Dear Science’ (2008)
TV on the Radio
TV on the Radio rode a line between indie and popular for a good many years, so they might well have been a bit too approachable for the hipsters, and a bit too weird for more casual listeners. Also, it’s odd to speak about the band in the past tense, but at the time of writing, their last release was in 2014, so… well, never say never.
It’s hard to imagine something topping Dear Science, though, TV on the Radio’s 2008 album, which is so wonderfully hard to describe genre-wise, since it really is a bit of everything. The slow songs, the faster songs, and the in-between songs… they’re all bounced between perfectly, and the entire album is just a ton of fun to explore as a whole. Return to Cookie Mountain (2006) is pretty much just as good, too, so Dear Science besting it here might raise some eyebrows, but it was close. That’s the main thing.
23
‘The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess’ (2023)
Chappell Roan
One of those artists who seemed to come from nowhere relatively recently (but who was actually doing a lot all the while; it just took a good deal of time to get noticed), Chappell Roan’s The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess was the album of both 2023 and 2024. 2023, because that’s when it first got released (with some of its songs, admittedly, being released even earlier, as singles), but 2024 was the year when Roan’s music started being everywhere.
And it deserved to be everywhere, you know? Just about every song on The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess is the right kind of catchy, the lyrics are great at walking right up to the line of being too much, but not crossing it, and Roan’s confidence – as a vocalist, and also with her overall unique presentation – also goes a long way. It’s everything that pop music in the 2020s should be, and hopefully will be, going forward, should The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess become noticeably influential in hindsight.
22
‘Forced Witness’ (2017)
Alex Cameron
Of all the albums here, Forced Witness is probably the one that’s least likely to be for everyone, but if you can get behind what Alex Cameron is doing here, it’s a beast. Cameron plays a series of characters throughout the album, maybe even one for each song, and they’re all a little weird, outcast, perverted, or all of the above. But each of them is going through a uniquely 21st-century kind of angst, usually because of love, or lack thereof.
That’s all to say that the songs are surprisingly funny, and even if the humor here isn’t to your liking, Alex Cameron’s knack for writing and singing great melodies is on display from the first song through to the last. Forced Witness is one of the best and strangest pop/rock albums in recent memory, and it might well be one of those albums people look back on in a few decades from now and be all, “Hey, why the hell wasn’t this at least a little more popular?”
21
‘Helplessness Blues’ (2011)
Fleet Foxes
Helplessness Blues isn’t quite like a warm hug, since lots of it’s also pretty downbeat, but it feels like a hug of decent temperature received on the coldest of days. It’s the effort that counts, and the feeling that things could be icier and far harsher. It’ll take you out of winter and make you feel more like you’re in fall instead, or maybe even the very early stages of spring, if you want to feel a little more optimistic.
That’s how much of Fleet Foxes’ discography sounds, with the variety and songwriting found in Helplessness Blues being particularly strong. “Montezuma” and “Lorelai” are two of the band’s best-ever tracks, the title track might well be the band’s single best song, and then “The Shrine / An Argument” sees Fleet Foxes at their most ambitious and surprising. To have all those highlights on the one album, and then to have the other eight tracks here all sound as great as they do? Yeah, everything adds up and makes Helplessness Blues a modern classic.
20
‘Fetch the Bolt Cutters’ (2020)
Fiona Apple
Fetch the Bolt Cutters is one of a fair few acclaimed albums by Fiona Apple, whose discography to date is very consistent, but also sparse when it comes to actual releases, with Apple being a quality-over-quantity kind of artist. This album, her fifth, might well be her best, and it’s also an interesting mix of approachable and experimental, with some songs being punchy and easy to appreciate straight away, and others proving a little denser and less immediate.
There’s another 2020 album by a solo female artist that’ll be mentioned in a bit, with that one – and Fetch the Bolt Cutters – feeling very fitting for the year in question. There’s an energy to the whole thing that feels intense, or maybe even a little mad, but in a good way; in a 2020 kind of way.
19
‘The Black Parade’ (2006)
My Chemical Romance
There was a good deal of love for My Chemical Romance’s The Black Parade back around the time it came out, though appreciation for it has grown immensely in the years since. The release date is, at the time of writing, distressingly close to 20 years ago, so that is kind of enough time for things to change and shift, and enough time for something to now be a full-blown classic. Also, it’s not just nostalgia talking here.
Maybe nostalgia has some impact, but not wholly. The Black Parade is a genuinely great concept album dealing with all sorts of heavy things, and it goes more in-depth on those topics than you might expect more ordinary/stereotypical “emo” music to do. The Black Parade was just operating on a whole other level compared to all the comparable albums from around this time, and it’s aged easily the best out of anything from that whole emo movement, too.
18
‘Folklore’ (2020)
Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift keeps on pivoting throughout her music career, maybe not as dramatically as someone like David Bowie, who was about as chameleonic as artists came… but Swift does also like having new sound albums, or phases. Eras, if you will, emphasized by a world tour that was just a little popular; you might’ve heard of it. And Evermore sure was a switch-up, and a very successful one that did perfectly match the times it was released during.
It’s Taylor Swift’s lockdown album, kind of, but not in an overly depressing way. It’s mellow and reflective, and also a good deal more focused on singer-songwriter-type songs – and even a little by way of folk – than the sort of pop sphere she’d been operating in for the back half of the 2010s, and the pop/country zone she’d been situated in during the years before that. Evermore was perhaps her most successful pivot to date, and it’s often seen as the critical favorite within her discography so far for good reason.
17
‘Skeleton Tree’ (2016)
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
If you don’t listen to a lot of modern-day/experimental rock, but you like Westerns and you’ve got a strong stomach, you might well be more familiar with Nick Cave’s work in the world of film, as he’s scored a bunch of movies, and has worked as a screenwriter, too (namely, for The Proposition). Music-wise, though, he’s done even more, and though that music career goes back decades, some of his best work has been quite recent, in the overall scheme of things.
Take Skeleton Tree, which is minimalist, eerie, and tremendously sad, as well. It’s a difficult listen emotionally, and then it’s also odd at times musically, yet it’s all in service of tapping into something unique and hard to explore in anything other than music. Alongside the sadness, you do get traces of catharsis, and so Skeleton Tree isn’t just non-stop despair for all of its duration, even if that’s what you end up feeling for much of it.
16
‘Emotion’ (2015)
Carly Rae Jepsen
If The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess was pop music perfectly suited for the 2020s, then Emotion, by Carly Rae Jepsen, was the same, but for the 2010s. Listening to it now, it does very much feel like it was from a different era, perhaps more so than some other mid-2010s albums being covered in this ranking, but it doesn’t feel old in a detrimental way.
It’s still vibrant, fun, and infectious, with “Run Away with Me” being a contender for the title of the century’s best pop song so far. And that’s just the opening track, with the other 11 that follow being almost just as great. Even those who think they’re particularly good at resisting good, bouncy, unambiguously approachable pop music will likely be won over by Emotion, even if they might not want to admit such a winning over has indeed occurred.
