This week, The Observer’s music critics and culture writers reveal their 25 best albums of the century (so far). Here are five tracks from the list that tell the story of the past quarter-century.
Listen to The Observer’s playlist of the week here.
Radiohead, Everything in Its Right Place
Imagine putting on Radiohead’s hotly anticipated 2000 album Kid A and hearing opening electronic synth burbles and looped vocal samples instead of ornery guitar music. The band’s epoch-changing album’s highly textured opening track found singer Thom Yorke assuring fans that everything was, in fact, in exactly its right place for one of the greatest bands of the century.
Amy Winehouse, You Know I'm No Good
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An epic noir miniature set in north London, via Jamaica and Spain, this masterful cut from Amy Winehouse’s 2006 album Back To Black mythologises the singer as a creature of glamorous, if dangerous, appetites. The devil is in the detail: Tanqueray, “chips and pitta”, and those “likkle carpet burns” that nail her infidelity. Mark Ronson’s production, with the Dap-Kings’ horns, lends timeless swing to proceedings.
Lorde, The Louvre
A track about a passion so great it could be hung in a museum, The Louvre made it possible for the New Zealander to make a generation dance to the beat of her heart. At once breezy and intense, this club track with no climax and barely any beats, from her masterpiece Melodrama, confirmed Lorde as a pop auteur like no other.
Dave, Black
UK hip-hop spent decades in the shadow of its US cousin. But artists such as Dave took gritty street music and bent it to the service of complex emotion and Black British culture. This tale of family, barbershops and systemic racism was never greater than when performed at the 2020 Brit Awards, where Dave incorporated references to Grenfell, the Windrush generation and the treatment of Meghan Markle.
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra, Movement 1
A preternatural calm exudes from this evolving six-minute cut, which opens Promises, the extraordinary 2021 collaborative album by electronic composer Floating Points, the late spiritual jazz hero, saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, and the London Symphony Orchestra. No part of this unlikely trifecta overplays their hand. But in his last recording, Sanders’s serene tones and surprise vocals leap out.
Illustration by Charlotte Durance