Radiohead: Kid A (2000)

"Yesterday I woke up sucking on a lemon," warbles Thom Yorke on the title track of the album that began Radiohead's departure from the mainstream. What a nice sentiment to kick off a decade. Paranoid, brooding, sinister, jazzed up with anger, disillusionment and self-disgust; this was the sound of a band ripping themselves apart and starting again. The result was electronica that sounded more human and natural than anything they had ever done as a 'band'. Bravo.

Grandaddy: The Sophtware Slump (2000)

An album that seemed to draw a line under the 1990s and offer a dystopian view of our computerised, nine-to-five ennui. Of course, Y2K never happened, Facebook and Twitter were still years off, and Grandaddy didn't last the decade as a going concern. But they left this slice of spacey pastoral genius behind.

The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (2002)

An album that, once you start listening to it, becomes impossible to turn off before the end. Featuring absurd meditations on modern love, machine love, mortality and immortality, Yoshimi reconnected rock music to its pyschedelic roots, with a childlike sense of wonder and a large slice of humour.

Arcade Fire: Funeral (2004)

If one band captured the zeitgeist of the post-information age, it was this Montreal troupe. The proliferation of Canadian music in the middle of the decade really captured the imagination of Irish music fans like no other and, apart perhaps from Leonard Cohen's concerts, Arcade Fire's Electric Picnic and Olympia shows stand out as the decade's high water mark. Anything was possible.

Interpol: Antics (2004)

Some would suggest the New Yorkers' debut, Turn on the Bright Lights, is superior but Interpol's second album confirmed a band at the height of their powers. Interpol seemed the perfect embodiment of the revival of interest in Joy Division, and post-punk in general, and with Antics they honed this and made joyously dark meditative pop music.

Regina Spektor: Begin to Hope (2006)

The anti-folk scene in New York drew a lot of talent to the Big Apple during the decade and Russian-born Regina Spektor captured hearts with Soviet Kitsch and then Begin to Hope. Mining myriad influences from European folk, Klezmer, classical, and unusual voice and percussion techniques, Spektor became the quintessential nut-job with a piano – a kind of Tori Amos who didn't take herself so seriously. Begin to Hope is a masterful set of idiosyncratic pop songs.

Arctic Monkeys: Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not (2006)

These four kids from Sheffield who nobody had ever heard of reached a hungry post-Oasis generation through a site called Myspace.com, and passed out their CDs at their gigs, often for free. By 2006, when Domino signed them, they were outselling Oasis's debut. While nobody could understand how they'd managed to write so many flawless tunes, they just kept their heads down and made more music.

Amy Winehouse: Back to Black (2006)

Before all the Amy-smoking-crack-on-YouTube videos, there was an album of unique music that drew from ska, R&B and, of course, soul. Winehouse was already critically acclaimed for her debut album Frank, but Back to Black announced her arrival as a genuine star. Cue a plethora of soul divas including Adele and Duffy et al. But Amy was/is the real deal.

PJ Harvey: White Chalk (2007)

Six years on from winning the Mercury prize, Polly Jean locked herself in an attic, put on a Victorian dress and learned how to play the piano. The result was White Chalk, in which the Dorset skinnymalink sang in a dream-like falsetto as if she had become a vampire. The songs are unrelentingly violent, laden with sexual and political ambiguity, and soar with a kind of fragile beauty that makes you wonder what part of her mind she accessed to get there.

Florence and the Machine: Lungs (2009)

With a voice reminiscent of the late German Warhol babe Nico, Florence Welch's debut is the definition of how to confound expectations. Under industry pressure to deliver a poppy debut, the former art-school student delivered pop – with a dirty punch and a dark soul. Quite how she managed to mix all sorts of mediaeval witchery and musical sado-masochism into danceable music you might even hear on the radio is beyond me.