Right up there with OK Computer as one of those albums that comes around only once in a generation. It's earth-shattering in its understated, cadenced beauty, managing to limn the full breadth of our confused times in hums and whispers through eleven essential songs. Perhaps the album that saved the album, YHF is the measuring stick for musical richness and lyrical resonance in the new millennium.

After OK Computer, Radiohead could've easily churned out a clone—Thom Yorke certainly doesn’t want for angst. But instead, they chose to be bold. They chose to weave together sprawling paeans to confusion like “Everything in its Right Place,” “The National Anthem,” “How to Disappear Completely,” “Optimistic,” and “Idioteque.” And music is only the better for their unshakable creative valor.

With vocals that evoke Lou Reed and a garage rock, proto-punk esthetic that hearkens back to Big Star, Cream, and the Velvet Underground and peppers that sound with irresistible pop sensibilities, the garage rock revolution of the early 2000s began and ended here. Definitely download the title track, "Hard to Explain," "The Modern Age," "Barely Legal" and "Someday."

Never intended to be memorable, house music has always been about the moment. Here, seminal house-ers Daft Punk release their finest album, infused, from songs like ubiquitous and rousing opener “One More Time” to the sprightly “Digital Love” to the buoyant “Harder Better Faster Stronger,” with a hopefulness that reflects the spirit of the genre but lingers far beyond the first listen. Ask Kanye.

The only rap album to make the top 10, this album made a generational statement that reverberates even today. When one hears a song as abrasive and rousing and, well, true as "The Real Slim Shady," to get goosebumps is just natural. A modern classic and doubtless one of the finest rap records ever made, right up there with "Ready to Die" and "All Eyez on Me," but with vastly more popular appeal.

Spoon are to rock-n'-roll what Beckett was to high modernism--both manage to strip their work down to the bare minimum, and then wring out from it all they possibly can, crafting towering, titanic works of art from small, simple things. See "Small Stakes," "The Way We Get By," "Stay Don't Go," "Jonathan Fisk," "Paper Tiger," "Back to the Life" and "Vittorio E."

Drawing on a dizzying number of influences often thought to be contradictory, defying the sacred dictate of indie-dom that insists on the synonymity of ‘popular’ and ‘insipid,’ and threading together the whole of human poverty, from slum to shanty town, M.I.A. writes music that is electrifying, inspiring and, above all, fun. What “Arular” hinted at “Kala” delivers in every single track.

Slant puts it best: 'From its framing gimmick and its anti-folk folk songwriting to its he-has-to-be-kidding song titles and its show-offy instrumentation, Illinoise should reduce to a simple stunt performance. That it's pop-art of the highest caliber, instead, cements Stevens as one of the most vital voices in music today.'

Contains some of the Stripes’s lesser-known classics, among them “Truth Doesn't Make a Noise” with its amazing riff, “I'm Bound to Pack It Up,” the plaintive “Sister, Do You Know My Name?” and the unfussy but touching love song, “Apple Blossom.” It does not soar, it does not thunder; it is content instead to be a tight collection of thirteen vanishing but masterful tracks, not a whiff of filler.

What M.I.A. did for hip-hop Vampire Weekend do here for alternative rock, stitching together every imaginable musical tradition. But it’s not just the novelty of this cocksure debut that recommends it. Intoning lyrics about mansard rooves and oxford commas—which has prompted some critics to label them pretentious—the album frolics and skitters by with great vigor and a self-conscious panache.

No band dominated the first decade of the new millennium more than Radiohead, beginning a mere ten months into it with Kid A—Amnesiac’s conjoined twin, by the reckoning of some. But the disjointed nature of this brilliant set of songs, the addition of swingier soundscapes in cuts like “Life in a Glasshouse,” and what may be their very best, “Pyramid Song,” make this a masterpiece all its own.