The best music of the last decade has been a pretty diverse mix. World music and nu country became hip, the term ‘indie” was applied to everything, and it became increasingly obvious that, musically at least, you sometimes have to look back to move forward. In no particular order, here are our favourite albums of the last ten years.
Gypsy Punks: Underdog World Strike
Gogol Bordello
Ukrainian Eugene Hütz leads his band through a frantic, anarchic and occasionally brutal trip through the streets of the immigrant centre of New York City. The album veers wildly between dark melancholy and sunny eccentricity, but somehow producer Steve Albini (Big Black, Shellac) keeps it all together. Lisa van Wyk
How to Sell Soul to a Soulless People Who Sold Their Soul
Public Enemy
Album title of the decade aside, it’s Chuck D and Flava Flav’s Molotov cocktail of socio-political sermons and banging old skool beats that proves that the future of hip-hop is now officially 40-something. Miles Keylock
Up the Bracket
The Libertines
Ah, Pete Doherty. What a car crash. He’s hard to dismiss, though, because when he’s good, he’s very, very good, and the band’s debut album proves it. It’s as relentlessly cheeky, nihilistic and unruly as punk ever claimed to be, and has a focus on melody driven songwriting that gives away the band’s English musical heritage. Lisa van Wyk
Grinderman
Grinderman
Bad Seed Nick Cave remembers how to rock, unleashing the raw, howling fury of the male id with an over-amped riot of devilish black humour, snarling sex mania and abrasive punk blues. Miles Keylock
Mirrored
Battles
Bafflingly complex, deeply structural quantum math-rock algebra deconstructed as deliciously danceable and gleeful metal-machine-music hypothesis of geomagnetic jazz riffs, extreme architectural beats and ecstatic Manga tongues for jazz junkies, IBM androids and robot rock riot police to party like its the apocalypse. Miles Keylock
Modern Times
Bob Dylan
Modern Times is an album of beautiful clarity. The ache of the blues, the wisdom of folk, and the joy of life are all writ large across the songs, and there’s never a moment that isn’t perfection. This is one of Dylan’s great albums, speaking immaculately of its present time, and superlatively to its inescapable history. Chris Roper
You Are a Woman, I Am a Machine
Death from Above 1979
The last decade has been a great one for stunning debut albums. Countless indie bands wowed us out the box, but failed to follow up with anything that really mattered. Canadian duo Death from Above 1979 went one step further, releasing an album as close to perfect as can be produced, and then promptly calling it a day. This album is loud, raw, noisy but ridiculously danceable, with dirty basslines that make even the nicest girls want to do very bad things. Lisa van Wyk
Frances The Mute
The Mars Volta
Packed with comfortably mind numbing Pink Floyd melodrama, string-laced post rock acoustics and a paranoid Radiohead flow full of surreal tempo changes and psychedelic fire, this is the sound of 21st century rock re-imagining itself as a spaced out spaghetti western. Miles Keylock
Double Booked
Robert Glasper
Glasper’s one young gun who knows his jazz history: hard bop harmonics and modal bop hop mathematics meet auto-tuned jazz-hop improvisations, genre surfing neo soul prayers and cosmic electro-jazz-hop space jams.
Miles Keylock
A Place to Bury Strangers
A Place to Bury Strangers
Being dubbed ‘New York’s loudest band” is quite a feat, but one listen to their debut album and you’ll have trouble denying it. Their shoegaze sound (think Jesus and Mary Chain in a particularly foul mood) is washed with feedback, and the bass will test any sound system. It’s probably not good for you, but it is addictive. Lisa van Wyk
Savane
Ali Farka Toure
The ‘godfather of the desert blues’ embraces roots-soaked reggae sketches and vintage African folk conversations to chart the call and response codes of an acoustic storytelling tradition of African guitar masters that goes way back beyond the blues to narrate the history of Mali itself. – Miles Keylock
Top Ten: your decade in review
Visit our special site for our review of the year and the decade in lists and multimedia. Books, movies, photos and politics — it’s all here.