It took about four months on and off to put 10 years' worth of music into a concise list - replaying albums, thinking about their impact, how the fans and critics raved. At the heart of it, I've tried to lay personal feelings aside and think objectively about the albums that shaped the Double-Os - the ones that shaped music, culture and really affected people. There's a couple of albums here I don't even like but can't ignore. But we all know deep down that musical taste is pretty subjective... oh well. Also I've limited each band to one entry only on the list so it doesn't fill up with Radiohead, Muse and Gomez albums.

1. Kid A - Radiohead (2000)

IN a decade when rock was revived, genres were melded and hip-hop went truly mainstream, Radiohead kicked off the millenium by sounding like nothing before or since. Sure, there are references in there - Krautrock, avant-electro, jazz, classical - but in the modern musical landscape, Radiohead stood out as the single most adventurous big band around, with Kid A being the landmark of their experimental nature. Struggling to find a way to follow up the critic love-in of Ok Computer, the band downed their guitars (mostly) and pieced together 60-something songs that didn't exactly have 'obvious chart-topping follow-up' written all over them (although Kid A and the part B of Amnesiac did actually top charts). The initial resulting release, Kid A, is a daring attempt to subvert everything they (and their doppelgangers) had done before - an album that ditches choruses for moods (it's four songs before a chorus kicks in), that throws guitars out the window and instead pulls amazing sounds out of laptops, drunken horn sections, woozy strings, antique keyboards and forgotten instruments such as the Ondes martenot. This emphasis on feel over hooks meant some of the recording sessions' best tracks - Pyramid Song and Knives Out - didn't see the light of day until Amnesiac because they didn't fit the vibe, which was one of isolation, fear, loneliness, fragmentation and occasional hints of hope, all unleashed in tiny grabs by the whine and wail of Thom Yorke. Sonically, it sums up the '00s perfectly - heavy with electronics, the lyrics and sound bytes came in chaotic grabs, but at the heart of the garbled messages filtered through technology there are still human fears and foibles, and a quest to find where we fit in in a rapidly changing and scary world that might be on the brink of collapsing. It's hindsight that allows us to say this, like Chuck Klosterman's awesome (half-joking) theory that the album predicted September 11, but when looking back on the decade, somehow Kid A makes even more sense than when it came out. It's a challenging and truly unique record, that's both ahead of its time and of its time. It's also an album that reveals more and more of itself as time goes on.

2. Since I Left You - The Avalanches (2000)

THE mash-up became big in the decade's latter half, but prior to that Melbourne's The Avalanches squeezed more than 3500 samples together to make the ultimate party album. Yes, The Dust Brothers and The Bomb Squad had smashed disparate records together for the likes of The Beastie Boys and Public Enemy in the '80s, but never had a plethora of turntables been used to create such layered technicolour beauty before, especially not in the post-sample clearing era. Since I Left You is inventive, post-modern and bold, but it's also damned good fun. Complete with vinyl crackle, cut-and-paste abruptness and a weird array of vocal samples, The Avalances pumped out dancefloor possibilities that occasionally worked as cafe backgrounders, and even managed a cheeky dialogue-intensive single in the form of Frontier Psychiatrist. It must have been a massive undertaking - especially considering the whole hour of music flows flawlessly, making it the ideal disc to put on and leave on at a party - but it all feels so effortless. It's an impressive melange of everyone from Madonna and Daft Punk to Raekwon and Prince Paul, from The Osmonds and The Mamas & The Papas to Debbie Reynolds and Blowfly, pinching fragments to paint an impressive new ode to the old. It's the freshest recycling since Paul's Boutique or It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back.

3. Franz Ferdinand - Franz Ferdinand (2004)

IF you can get the girls dancing, then the guys will soon follow. That was the maxim these Scottish lads adopted with great success as they borrowed jagged guitar sounds and disco beats from times gone by to form the basis for their immensely danceable tunes. Catchier than a cold and boasting more hooks than an angling competition, their self-titled debut is bursting with memorableness. When that Joy Division-style bass line kicks in 42 seconds into the record, that's where the fun starts as Jacqueline's slip-shod beat and those heart-monitor guitarlines kick in - a formula that follows in Take Me Out, Darts Of Pleasure, This Fire, Auf Achse, and The Dark Of The Matinee. It's a beguiling combination of wiry punk, dancey funk and arty-rock, with every song bursting with indie-disco awesomeness as Alex Kaprinos details oh-so-British boy-meets-girl travails. Maybe it's cliched now, but this is the new new-wave and post post-punk masterpiece, before the revival got old. Strangely this album doesn't feel tired. The hardest part is working out which bits are the choruses, because it's all so damned catchy - there's not an inch of fat or filler on this lean, mean guitar album which showed six-stringers didn't have to shoegaze, rage against machines, or play dumb. Amazingly, their second album was almost as good.

4. Is This It - The Strokes (2001)

SOUNDING like a sonic relic found buried in a disused tape deck left behind in a '70s rehearsal room, The Strokes showed that great songs don't need multi-million-dollar-sounding production to still sound great - something bands seem to have forgotten. With a narrow, overdriven edge and bursting with barely contained distortion and youthful exuberance, this very-New York album melds CBGB sounds and sociopathic tendencies into nifty three-minute pop-rock songs, like Television's intertwining guitar tunes filtered through The Velvet Underground and their dirty-sounding amps. Julian Casablancas's off-hand croon is passionate and careless at the same time, just as the band's sound ranges from methodical to raw, making for an album that is both effortless and calculated. Upon it's release, lo-fi guitars were out of fashion, as was this kind of simple songwriting, with its direct melodies and progressions and total lack of pretention, and that's what makes Is This It both refreshing and instantly classic. Plus when you've got this many perfectly formed little rock-pop songs on one album - ie. every track - it's hard not to fall in love with this lovingly crafted return to the rough-and-ready days of garage-rock. And, as with Franz Ferdinand, their second album almost topped it but with added keyboards.

5. Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots - The Flaming Lips (2002)

THEIR spectacular 1999 record The Soft Bulletin brought The Flaming Lips in from the fringes of lunacy and led to Wayne Coyne and his cohorts being crowned the current kings of psychedelic pop. Yoshimi was the confirmation that they deserved the throne - it's a lush, beautiful and wonderfully strange album that takes you on an LSD-fuelled journey through the rabbit-hole. It's been suggested its a concept album about a sick young girl who escapes into her imagination, but its kindred spirit is Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon (which the Lips covered in 2009). Like a futuristic metaphysical version of Floyd's epic, Yoshimi tackles some big life stuff, from violence (Fight Test) to mortality (Do You Realize??), from fate (In The Morning Of The Magician) to living in the moment (All We Have Is Now, Ego Tripping At The Gates Of Hell). Oh, and robots. With an increased reliance on electronics, bizarre noises and moody keyboard flourishes, the album is a passport to a weird new place that gives you plenty to think about as you take the journey. Just Do You Realize?? alone is potentially enough to make your head explode when mixed with the right level of hallucinogens as Coyne reminds us in his tremulous voice that we're all just floating in space and only here for a moment, but we're all still beautiful creatures. It's new millenial hippie, but it's still a nice sentiment.