10-27-2026 – 25 Albums in 25 Years Pt.1 [2000-2005]
Recounting the 1st 25 years of the 21st Century through the music that made me.
25 Albums for 25 Years
As we enter the second quarter of the 21st century, it felt like time to look back upon this quinvigintennial of the turn of the millennium and retrace the steps of the years and their musical offerings. I love the medium of the LP, the Album; Side A-Side B (maybe a Side C & Side D on double records). I think the intention of presenting a group of songs labored at, curated, edited, tossed-out, put back in, and mixed and mastered to sound like a cohesive offering, even if each of them had their own separate meanings and journeys. The process of making and producing a record, promoting and touring it, while often fueled by a predatory and toxic industry, is a beautiful struggle. Against big odds, we end up with some incredible art made by a huge variety of weird and sometimes wonderful people (there’s a good number of assholes in there too… but hey, sometimes a creative asshole is important too).
So, this list is going to lay out for your reading/listening/viewing pleasure, a compendium of my favorite albums across each of the 1st 25 years of the 2nd Millenium of the Common Era. I’ll give my thoughts on the main pick from each year and throw out some Honorable Mentions as well.
This exploration will be done in 5 parts. Below is Part 1: 2000-2005.
Enjoy!
From the moment the first F chord is punched into that Prophit 5, analog synthesizer in the opening track, Everything In Its Right Place, we all knew that this was a new type of Radiohead record, and indeed a new take on what a Pop Music album could be.
With that song as a thesis statement, Thom Yorke and crew made it clear that the angsty, ironic & hopeful days of the 1990s were over. While OK Computer showed us a glimpse into the lonely world of working for technocratic MegaCorps and how groups of nerds would find newly minted, toxic, masculinity between lines of JavaScript. Kid A showed us what the mania of the New Millenium would look like, even though this record entered at its onset. The chaos of the wars that would erupt under the false banner of defending the West against the treats of ‘terrorism’, the disparate dissociation and reticence fueled by the disinformation overload flooding our screens and social spaces, and the Big Pharma-backed numbing of our youth through daily doses of emotion-sapping pharmaceuticals are all on display in this earie, arresting, yet stunningly beautiful sequence of songs.
This record takes us on a ride from synth-heavy, contemplations with a heartbeat to ambient soundscapes featuring strange, demented baby noises, to call to revolutionary action over a bassline that fuses rock’n’roll swagger with an electro-like danceability. Later Kid A finds cause to explore contemplative ballads about losing oneself while disappearing into catatonic ambiguity, alcohol-infused love songs of loss and regret, and even literal nightmares brought on by the pressures of balancing work & family. Each song is a statement in its own, but as a whole, feels like an essential piece of this rather horrifying puzzle.
One of the most exemplary pieces in this mesh is truly stellar track three of this record, The National Anthem. The cacophonous horns in this song, ring out nearly weekly in my head as I watch the country I live in descend into the grips of Christian Nationalist fascism. I see images of masked thugs killing American civilians and I hear Jonny Greenwood messing with his theremin and strange sounds of local radio fizzling in and out amongst the chaotic, Harmon Mutes of Andy Bush’s trumpet. It’s simultaneously the most hideous noise I’ve ever heard and a blood-pumping groove that makes you want to dance like Mon Mothma at the wedding on Chandrilla in the end of Andor Season 2. To borrow actor Genevieve O’Reilly’s phrase, this song makes you dance to stop yourself from screaming (in terror).
Idioteque, to this day is perhaps the most dichotomous song I’ve ever heard. On the one hand you have this otherworldly, cathartic chord progression layered with Thom’s ethereal vocals that brings tears to my eyes every other time I listen to this track. On the other, though, you have this gut-wrenching realization-brought forth by the song’s lyrics-that our world is dying by our hand and no one with the power to act is going to do anything to save it and contrarily will work actively against the masses efforts it in order to benefit something so trivial and fleeting as their investment accounts. And all this is somehow summed up in an outro that resonates now more than ever-as I am a father myself now-with the repetition of the phrase ‘We’re fathers to the children’ as the music and noise fades away into a ghostly ambience (as may our world).
This record pulls no punches musically, emotionally, or lyrically. It feels cohesive while also being explorative. And its importance to the band’s career and rebirth post-Ok Computer’s catalyzing of their meteoric popularity. This record remains one of the greatest left-turns in pop-culture history. The ability to go inward and reflect on stardom, humanity and identity in the technological age even while becoming the biggest band on the planet is one of the reasons I continue to admire Radiohead to this day. This record is and will forever be one that challenges me, inspires me, and fuels the flame of the organic love within me and warms my human soul as the cold creep of silicon spreads into every aspect of our reality. This is not only the best record of this year, but one of the best records on this entire list. 10 out of fucking 10!
This endeavor of embarking on this musical retrospective has been enticing and enlightening. In exploring this list chronologically, I’ve been able to gain perspective on how my music tastes have changed throughout my youth, to young adulthood to my more current mid-thirties state. I’ve discovered records more recently that have solidified themselves in my musical canon far after their debut. This is one of those records. While I always admired and appreciated Maynard James Keegan and his incredible musical cohorts Justin Chancellor, Adam Jones, and the machine that is Danny Carey for their thoughtful, powerful mathmetal; I never allowed myself to experience their records in the whole until much more recently. When I finally dove deep into the actual math and married themes that create the musical depth and weight that so many of their fans find singularly within their catalog and upon seeing them on the Fear Inoculum tour, I became an, often insufferable to many, TOOL fan.
Several years ago, I found myself in a heavy music mood and went down the path through TOOL’s catalog; giving each of their records a full squeeze. When I came out the other side, I was truly a different listener. I found patterns, moods, and catharses that exist-to my knowledge-nowhere else in music. This three-piece makes more out of three instruments and a voice than many symphonies and their careful consideration solidifies their highpoints as some of the most effective music ever.
Lateralus is their Magnum Opus and stands out as a singular triumph and perhaps the greatest metal (for lack of a better term) record of all time.
Music has always been a melding of math and magic. Those who do it best, understand the language with which to wield the aural medium but let go of the deep systems to allow the magic of human connection and emotion break through and hit our cores. Without a doubt, music is a universal language. I often think that were we ever to encounter another intelligent race in this universe, the one language we may be able to convey meaning to them with is sound.
With megaton musicians like Chancellor and Carey building the foundations of this band’s sound, TOOL explores the relationship between the math and the magic like no other. We all know the band utilizes sacred geometry, Fibonacci sequences, and incredibly intricate time signatures not only to impress us with their prowess over the medium, but also to explore the deeper connections between these numbers and the meanings of their songs’ purpose. Songs like the dynamic duo, Parabol & Parabola explore the experience of being human and the relationship between our corporeal form and the spiritual experience of the collective participation in this reality – fleeting or eternal as it may be. They do so while balancing a typically masculine sound with deeply vulnerable lyrics and an unparalleled dynamism in velocity and intensity.
This band’s contemplative reflection on the important themes of mortality, humanity, emotional turmoil between lovers, interpersonal communication and the ego are always communicated with somewhat surprising earnest. TOOL shakes up the stereotype of a very male-centric world view. Lead singer, Maynard can, and always has been, cheeky, contentious, and bit of a dick in many ways, but when he’s writing and contemplating what he wants to bring through in his music, he takes a much more measured stance and his lyricism often rises far above even the most emotionally intelligent artists we laud as pioneers in the psychedelic or singer/songwriter genres. It’s my hope that this band has challenged a bunch of bro-y, hypermasculine, meatheads to consider some of life’s bigger questions and reflect on what it means to be a man, and human overall.
Embrace your desire to feel the rhythm to feel connected, enough to step aside and weep like a widow, to feel inspired, to fathom the power, to witness the beauty, to bathe in the fountain, to swing on the spiral.
Lateralus feels like it’s taken out of the back pages of some Pythagorean tomb and brought forth to our modern era to help guide the modern man through this tumultuous time where the very core of our humanness is challenged. Spiral out --- keep going!
