The 21 Albums from the 21st Century Every Man Should Hear

Remember when we argued about albums? When we listened to them straight through? When the last note of the radio single made us reflexively hum the intro to the next track? Us, too! Believe it or not, that’s not all gone. Even in the millennium that brought us quick-and-dirty downloads, these artists created fully immersive musical journeys of the highest order. This is a celebration of our hands-down, most emphatically favorite LPs from the past fifteen years—plus a few nominations from the artists themselves.

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1. _My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy _(2010)

Kanye West

BECAUSE: It could’ve been any one of the seven albums West released this century, as fascinating a catalog of celebrity, triumph, love, loss, terrible puns, pretty decent puns, that was ever fucking put together by a single artist. MBDTF was just the record where he talked about all those things at once—a portrait of a man seizing the spotlight, drowning in it, and then somehow finding a way to turn that harrowing experience into art. Anybody who wants to be famous or make music for a living—or do both at the same time—should be forced to listen to MBDTF first. The rest of us are free to enjoy it for the bloody, hard-won, titanic achievement that it is.

See Kanye’s cover story, including exclusive details about his forthcoming album—a certain contender for future versions of this list.

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2. Is This It (2001)

The Strokes

BECAUSE: When Y2K arrived, MTV VJs and saccharine-pop enthusiasts told us rock ’n’ roll was dead. But then, out of nowhere, came this back-to-basics guitar-driven record made by five leather-clad hipsters (before that was a thing). We’re not saying the album saved rock for millennials... Oh, wait, yes we are.

3. Stankonia (2000)

OutKast

BECAUSE: André 3000 with a perm, bleating Don’t pull the thang out unless you plan to bang? It wasn’t hip-hop. It was electric gospel, like the heavens had opened up and revealed that the angels were cyborgs and that the Pearly Gates were electrically charged. Yow! With _Stankonia’_s weird dimensions dominating radio—that’s "B.O.B.," as well as "Ms. Jackson" and "So Fresh, So Clean"—OutKast proved that hip-hop had no outer edges and was, in fact, so dominant and so limitless as to not even be a genre at all.

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4. _Discovery _(2001)

Daft Punk

BECAUSE: No one, including Daft Punk, has made a better dance record—big and bright and melancholy and the blueprint for damn near half the pop music that has come since, from Kanye to Skrillex to Pharrell, all of whom are still unashamedly ripping off Discovery today.

DAFT PUNK NOMINATE: The Strokes’ aforementioned Is This It. "Julian and his bandmates followed in the footsteps of the Velvet Underground, Television, Suicide, the Ramones, and Blondie, creating the fresh, distinctive sound we’d been waiting for for over a decade.

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5. _Sound of Silver _(2007)

LCD Soundsystem

BECAUSE: No other record—no other single song, in the case of "All My Friends," which should come packaged with the keys to your first New York apartment—better captured the disorienting thrill of being young and smart and heartbroken in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

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6. Voodoo (2000)

D’Angelo

BECAUSE: This preacher’s son and composing prodigy turned the spirits to his side, wedding rap and R&B and a yawning sense of the void into spooky, sensual art. Oh, and because Justin Timberlake says so.

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7. Channel Orange (2012)

Frank Ocean

BECAUSE: We’d been waiting thirty years for another Marvin Gaye. And then, suddenly, we had Ocean and his debut, Channel Orange—a fully realized instant classic from an artist who couldn’t be bothered with even a single one of the steps between "neophyte" and "master." We’re not waiting anymore.

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8. _Elephant _(2003)

The White Stripes

BECAUSE: Jack and Meg built out the raw garage rock from their first three albums into an entirely re-imagined sound, taking their pissed-off swagger and channeling it into ambition: blistering blues, whimsical folk, Stooges-esque punk, contemplative love tunes. In case we’d forgotten, we were reminded that Jack can fucking shred on guitar.

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9. Futuresex/Lovesounds (2006)

Justin Timberlake

BECAUSE: After all the SNL bits and Fallon appearances and movie roles, it’s almost hard to remember how radical this record was when it came out—the moment a 25-year-old boy-band survivor vaulted to the vanguard of pop music, making sex-soaked R&B over space-age production, courtesy of a resurgent, on-fire Timbaland. Serious actor JT and grown-ass soul man JT got nothing on this guy.

JT NOMINATES: "D’Angelo’s Voodoo and Radiohead’s Kid A. It may seem ironic that I’d pick two albums released in the first year of the twenty-first century, with all the great music that has come since then. But I was 19. I was ready to listen to music in a different way. Not only were they filled with great songs, but the sound of them really affected me. They were complete pieces of work—progressive and retro at the same time. They transformed whatever world I was in at the time. And eventually led to my desire to make my first solo record. I’ll always reference them as the inspiration that got me off of my ass. I always go back to them, and they still do (get me off of my ass)."

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10. Supreme Clientele (2000)

Ghostface Killah

BECAUSE: It’s the first and last classic that the anarchic, diabolically clever, and delightfully insane Wu-Tang Clan released this century. Twenty-one tracks here, and not one of them—including the skit about the guy trying to lowball Ghostface for drugs—is less than thrilling.

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11. Back to Black (2006)

Amy Winehouse

BECAUSE: Of the depth and pain in her voice—which sounded like something she’d left outside overnight one too many times and then wrung out in the morning. Also: because of the casual honesty she brought to inventorying her own flaws. And finally: because for one short moment, she pushed back the demons to make something this full of life.

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12. The Blueprint (2001)

Jay-Z

BECAUSE: We’ve spent the past three minutes shattering furniture at GQ HQ listening to the tireless anthem "U Don’t Know." It feels weird to even have to justify this one. It’s Jay-Z. And Kanye West and Just Blaze, and Eminem and Timbaland. Inventing—then immediately perfecting—the triumphant, breezy, bigger-than-rap mythology that Jay’s wrapped himself in ever since. (Jay himself rates this one second among his great albums, after Reasonable Doubt; nope, sorry, Jay!)

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13. _Sea Change _(2002)

Beck

BECAUSE: It was the moment when the snotty singer of "Loser" and "Where It’s At" broke up with his then girlfriend, left his own head, and mined his darkened emotional core.

BECK NOMINATES: "M.I.A.’s Arular. You could feel that album in the air a few years before she did it—just these incredible kaleidoscopic filters of different cultures coming together in a pure and innocent way. The record had a political feeling of early Public Enemy but a sense of fun and energy. She’s just a raconteur."

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14. _Let England Shake _(2011)

PJ Harvey

BECAUSE: Polly Jean could sing about a stapler and we’d be transfid—that deeply rooted voice, the way she weaves gritty melodies with poetic, take-no-prisoners lyrics. Here she takes on nothing less than the broken state of the modern-day English sociopolitical landscape, and the results are devastating.

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15. We’re New Here (2011)

Gil Scott-Heron & Jamie xx

BECAUSE: The vocals will crush you with the earned, weary sadness that Scott-Heron brought to his final album before his death in 2011; Jamie xx’s remix of the record—wobbly and gorgeous and steeped in adoration for Scott-Heron (pictured below)—will lift you back up.

JAMIE XX NOMINATES: "Number one is Original Pirate Material by the Streets. It was one of the first things I heard when I decided to make music using a computer. Although I could play some instruments, I wasn’t good enough to be original. With electronic music, it was different. Each song is basically a sample, a bass line and a beat to give Mike Skinner the space to do his thing. He just speaks and tells stories. It’s set around the area I grew up in—Brixton, in southwest London. Everybody my age was listening to it. Everybody got it."

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16. Fever to Tell (2003)

Yeah Yeah Yeahs

BECAUSE: Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh, ahhhhh! The low-tempo tracks ("Maps" broke out on the radio) on YYY’s debut are really more like water breaks during a thirty-seven-minute sweat-drenched sprint. Karen O + drums + guitar produces the effect of sticking your tongue into a wall outlet, only easier to dance to.

KAREN O NOMINATES: "Liars’ They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top. With gnarly absurdist hooks, it was for me the jewel in the crown of the New York music scene at the turn of the century. We questioned it then, but now I’m certain we were having an honest-to-God moment."

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17. _Modern Vampires of the City _(2013)

Vampire Weekend

BECAUSE: After making two solid albums about the sounds of spring semester in New York and summers on barrier islands, they over-delivered with a radical declaration of maturity that turned on an entirely new set of listeners. VW figured out what to chuck and what to cultivate. The lyrics are wiser and more worldly, the voices more flexible, the music more expansive. We figured they’d work their way to this place—it just came, like, ten years early.

EZRA KOENIG NOMINATES: "Besides Stankonia? How ’bout the Dirty Projectors album The Glad Fact. It came at this moment when people were really wondering where alt-rock was gonna head. Dave Longstreth had this uniqueness of voice—and I don’t just mean his singing voice, which is unique, but the perspective. Also: It was my one and only published music review. Ha."

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18. Beyoncé (2013)

Beyoncé

BECAUSE: The greatest female R&B artist of the century finally made a record as sexy, snarling, soft, strange, and outright superlative as she is. And by releasing it without warning or fanfare late one December night, she gave us something we haven’t had in a very long time—a moment when we all listened to the same thing, at the same time. (Watched, too.) We hope "the album" looks like this from here on out.

19. Donuts (2006)

J Dilla

BECAUSE: Before he died from a rare blood disease at age 32, James Dewitt Yancey—J Dilla—was your favorite producer’s favorite producer. And Donuts was his finest work: casual, conversational, and deftly composed. It’s all overlapping samples and off-kilter drums—without speaking a word, J Dilla made an album that still has so much to say.

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20. Up the Bracket (2002)

The Libertines

BECAUSE: When times were good, Pete Doherty and Carl Barât bottled rock ’n’ roll lightning. Sweating and spitting into each other’s mouths while singing "If you’ve lost your faith in love and music, the end won’t be long" into a shared mike. The drums set the tempo way too fast, like everything was out of control, like it could not last. And so it couldn’t.

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21. _Extraordinary Machine _(2005)

Fiona Apple

BECAUSE: After a six-year gap between records—due to contemplation of retirement, a lyrical drought, and record-label delays—Fiona was all of a sudden all grown up. With the help of producer Jon Brion, she built a sound so big and bright, it was as though all the sadness we’d come to expect had been shoved behind a floodlight.