The Best Indie Albums of the 2000s

The album that started the decade. Five kids from New York making ragged, effortless guitar rock at a moment when no one thought guitar rock had anything left to say — and saying it so well that every indie band for the next five years was consciously or unconsciously responding to them. Is This It sounds like a party you weren't invited to and could hear from the street, and that distance is precisely the point. Julian Casablancas has never been more charismatic on record, and the guitar interplay between Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. is as good as anything in the decade.

Wilco made this record, their label refused to release it, they streamed it free online, and then it became one of the most acclaimed albums of the decade. The story is almost as good as the music — and the music is extraordinary: country-rock architecture pulled apart and reassembled with studio noise, dissonance, and Jeff Tweedy's most honestly despairing lyrics. "I am an American aquarium drinker / I assassin down the avenue" is one of the great opening couplets in rock. The album sounds like a transmission from somewhere between falling apart and holding together, which is exactly what it was.

Win Butler and Régine Chassagne made this album while relatives on both sides of their family were dying, and the grief is in every note — but so is something that refuses to be defeated by it. Funeral is a record about community and mortality and the specific feeling of growing up in a suburb that can't contain you, and it arrived at a moment when people were ready to feel those things loudly and communally. The build in "Wake Up," the violins in "Rebellion (Lies)," the entire arc of "Crown of Love" — it is one of those albums where every song earns its place and the whole is greater than the sum.

Conor Oberst was twenty-two when he made this double album and it sounds like every nerve ending he had was exposed during the recording. Lifted is sprawling and imperfect and completely alive — folk-rock that stretches to accommodate orchestras and spoken word and Oberst's voice breaking in real time under the weight of what he's trying to say. Steven Hyden, who has made defending this album a personal crusade against his co-host Ian Cohen's relentless mockery, is right: this is the most emotionally honest record of the decade, and the people who love it love it the way people love things that got to them when they were young and open.

Karen O at her most feral and Nick Zinner at his most economically devastating. Fever to Tell opened with "Rich," which sounds like the beginning of a fight, and didn't let up until "Maps" arrived near the end and turned everything inside out — a love song so raw and unguarded that it made the chaos around it feel like armour. Karen O is one of the great rock frontpeople of any era, and this is the record that proved it. The guitar sound throughout is one of the most distinctive of the decade: sharp, reverb-drenched, always one note away from feedback.

The fastest-selling debut album in UK chart history. Alex Turner was nineteen, writing about Sheffield nightlife with the precision of a documentary filmmaker and the wit of a songwriter twice his age. The band played fast and tight and with the confidence of people who had spent years playing the same songs in small rooms, and it shows: this is an album that knows exactly what it is and doesn't want to be anything else. "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor," "R U Mine?," "Mardy Bum" — the singles are exceptional, and the album around them holds up just as well.

Matt Berninger sings about middle-aged anxiety and dinner parties and the specific sadness of being a thoughtful person in a world that doesn't reward thoughtfulness, and somehow it is riveting. The National's fourth album is where they found their sound completely: the Dessner brothers' interlocking guitars, Bryan Devendorf's jazz-inflected drumming, Berninger's baritone dropping into every song like someone arriving late to an event he already knew he shouldn't have come to. "Slow Show," "Fake Empire," "Squalor Victoria" — this is the album that made The National one of the most important American bands of the century.

Released as a pay-what-you-want download with no advance notice, In Rainbows arrived at a moment when the music industry was still trying to work out what the internet had done to it, and promptly made all of those arguments feel beside the point. The album itself is Radiohead's warmest and most sensual: Thom Yorke singing about bodies and desire over arrangements that breathe rather than clatter. "Nude," "Reckoner," "All I Need," "House of Cards" — side two especially is as close to perfect as Radiohead have come. The album that converted people who thought Radiohead were too cold to love.

Five songs. The shortest is seven minutes. Van Dyke Parks arranged the orchestrations. Joanna Newsom plays harp and sings in a voice that critics spent years arguing about before realising the argument was beside the point — what matters is that no one else sounds like her, and no album of the decade is more singular than this one. Ys is a record about myth and loss and the natural world and whatever Newsom is thinking about at any given moment, rendered in language so dense and precise that it rewards rereading the lyrics the way poetry does. Not for everyone. For the right person, nothing else comes close.

Recorded in London in eight days with no bass guitar, Elephant is the White Stripes at their most maximal within their deliberately minimal framework. "Seven Nation Army" is one of the most recognisable riffs in rock history, and it was built from a guitar, a cheap octave pedal, and Jack White's absolute conviction that simplicity is a form of power. The album around it — "Ball and Biscuit," "Jolene," "Black Math," "I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself" — is equally good. Meg White's drumming, which people spent years condescending about, is the secret to everything: it creates space for Jack's guitar to do things that a tighter rhythm section would crowd out.

Jenny Lewis is one of the great songwriters of her generation and this is where people first understood it. Rilo Kiley's second album is indie rock with a country undertow, and Lewis's lyrics — about ambition and failure and desire and the specific difficulty of being a woman who wants things — are some of the sharpest of the decade. "The Execution of All Things," "A Better Son/Daughter," "Pictures of Success": three of the best songs on any album here. The album was made for almost no money and sounds like it was made by people who had nothing to lose, which is exactly the energy it needed.

Sam Beam started as a man with an acoustic guitar and a four-track recorder making hushed folk songs in Florida, and The Shepherd's Dog is where he arrived somewhere larger without losing what made him worth following in the first place. The arrangements — percussion, electric guitar, organ, horns — are richer than anything on his first two albums, but Beam's voice and his way with a lyric remain the constant. It is a record about the American South and religion and desire that manages to be simultaneously more accessible and more complex than what came before. His most fully realised album.

Colin Meloy writes songs about chimney sweeps and cabin boys and doomed sea voyages with the same earnestness that other songwriters bring to heartbreak and loss — because for Meloy, the historical and the literary are where the emotional lives. Picaresque is the Decemberists' best album: the arrangements are more ambitious than their debut, the songs are longer and stranger, and "The Mariner's Revenge Song" — a nine-minute murder ballad set inside the belly of a whale — is one of the most audacious things anyone put on an indie album in the decade. Deeply literary, completely original, slightly ridiculous in the best possible way.

Animal Collective spent a decade making increasingly strange music for an increasingly devoted cult audience, and then made an album that somehow appealed to everyone. Merriweather Post Pavilion is psychedelic pop built from samples and loops and Avey Tare and Panda Bear's harmonies stacked and processed until they sound like something between a choir and a synthesiser. "My Girls," "Summertime Clothes," "Brothersport" — the singles are joyful in a way that AC's music had never quite been before, and the album around them rewards the same depth of listening that the weirder stuff does. The decade's last great statement.

John Darnielle recorded this concept album about an alcoholic couple — the Alpha couple, recurring characters across his catalogue — on a boombox, and the lo-fi production is not a limitation but the whole point: it sounds like something overheard through a wall. Tallahassee is one of the most emotionally precise accounts of a failing relationship in American music, funny and devastating in equal measure, and Darnielle's literary intelligence is present in every line. The Mountain Goats have never made a bad album. This is their best one.

Produced by Isaac Brock of Modest Mouse, co-written by Dan Boeckner and Spencer Krug, Apologies to the Queen Mary is the most anthemic Canadian indie rock album of the decade and one of the most underrated. The two-songwriter dynamic — Boeckner's bruised romanticism against Krug's more abstract, philosophical approach — gives the album a tension that most indie rock of the period lacked. "I'll Believe in Anything" is one of the great songs of the era. "Shine a Light" is the one that made Steven Hyden want to write a 3,000-word defence of Canadian indie rock. He was right to.