Apple Music 100 Best Albums

Is This It

The Strokes

Stylish nü-garage rock for a generation trying to have a very good time during a very bad time.

Few albums in modern rock history can match the instant, game-changing impact of Is This It in 2001. Seemingly overnight, rock ’n’ roll turned grittier, haircuts grew shaggier, and the secondhand-blazer section at your local thrift store got a lot more crowded. It’s impossible to separate The Strokes from the wave of like-minded turn-of-the-millennium bands at home in NYC (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, TV on the Radio) or further afield (The Hives, The White Stripes, The Libertines), but Is This It bore a singular mix of grime and glamour that felt like a sea change.

Most importantly, carefree kiss-offs like “Someday” and “Last Nite” refashioned the left-field sounds of previous generations—the streetwise swagger of The Velvet Underground and Iggy Pop, the wounded romanticism of The Smiths and early Cure—into immediate, dance-floor-ready pop music. In another, better universe, the first thing that would come to mind when thinking about New York City in autumn 2001 would be The Strokes. Instead, their debut and all its trappings became emblematic of a generation trying to have a very good time during a very bad time.

Dummy

Portishead

The Bristol, UK, band’s debut forged the soothing, discomfiting sound of trip-hop.

Few debuts have arrived as distinct and fully formed as Portishead’s 1994 release Dummy, a downtempo template for the eerie sound that would go on to become known as trip-hop. Named after a ’70s British TV drama about a deaf woman who becomes a prostitute, the record is replete with turntable scratches, shuddering drums, and scrapes of fragmented guitar, all anchored in vocalist Beth Gibbons’ crystalline falsetto singing about “the blackness, the darkness, forever” (“Wandering Star”).

“We had to kind of be strong with our ideas about what we did and didn’t want to do.”

Geoff Barrow

Portishead

Standout tracks like “Sour Times” and “Glory Box” lull the listener into a trance of cinematic string swells, crisp drum grooves, and Gibbons’ velvet vocals—a sound that became ubiquitous among contemporaries like Morcheeba, Mono, and Sneaker Pimps, and even led Dummy to be misclassified as pacifying music. But don’t be fooled: It luxuriates in discomfort, as capable of soothing the listener with its warm melodies as it is of jarring them. Dummy is a record for night dwellers, everywhere and always.