Over what has already been many years, and will likely be a few more, I’ve been ranking and reviewing the top 5 albums - plus a fair few extras - according to users on rateyourmusic.com (think IMDB for music) from every year from 1960 to the present. If you want to know more, I wrote an introduction to the ‘challenge’ here. You can also read all the other entries I’ve written so far by heading to the lovely index page here.

And so we arrive in 2007: the year Gordon Brown replaced Tony Blair, the first iPhone went on sale, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows brought the series to an end, Northern Rock offered an ominous glimpse of the coming financial crisis, and the IPCC and Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize as climate change moved firmly into the mainstream. Elsewhere, Nicolas Sarkozy became president of France and former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. Music-wise, here’s what Rate Your Music users rate as the year’s best albums:

#1 Radiohead - In Rainbows
#2 Burial - Untrue
#3 LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
#4 Kanye West - Graduation
#5 Gris - Il était une forêt...

And here’s a few more:

#8 Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam
#9 Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago
#10 Steve Reich / Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble - Music for 18 Musicians
#26 The Field - From Here We Go Sublime
#28 The National - Boxer

Sound of Silver is the second studio album by American rock band LCD Soundsystem, released in 2007. It received widespread critical acclaim. - Wikipedia

At times I absolutely love Sound of Silver, generally when James Murphy’s vocals have that free, twitchy, David Byrne-style spontaneity to them. “North American Scum” is my favourite track here for exactly that reason: funny, sharp, loose-limbed, and full of the slightly sweaty panic-dance energy LCD Soundsystem do so well.

Elsewhere, though, I find the album a bit patchier than its reputation suggests. The beats are often interesting, and there’s clearly a lot of craft in the way they build and shift, but sometimes they don’t quite go anywhere exciting enough for me.

That said, the highs are seriously high. “Someone Great” is an absolute masterpiece, doing so much with that tiny repeated figure that it becomes almost hypnotic: one note, one pulse, one little emotional bruise pressed again and again until it blooms. There are moments here where the balance of dance music, melancholy and wit is perfect.

So all in all, I get why people love it. I adore bits of it too. But for every sparkling, nervy, brilliant passage, there’s another that leaves me admiring the architecture rather than moving in.

7/10

Strawberry Jam is the eighth studio album by American experimental pop band Animal Collective, released on September 11, 2007. It was the band's first album released through Domino Recording Company and marked a breakthrough in their wider popularity. - Wikipedia

A weird, exhilarating, and at times triumphantly noisy collection of songs, Strawberry Jam is packed with ideas bursting at the seams. Synths squelch, melodies collide, and every track seems determined to take the scenic route through some brightly coloured alternate universe. It's undeniably inventive, and there are moments where the sheer energy is infectious.

For me, though, it's often more technically interesting than absorbing. I admire it more than I love it - similar to the record above. The constant experimentation keeps my brain engaged, but it doesn’t quite get into my blood.

7/10

Untrue is the second studio album by British electronic producer Burial, released in 2007 by Hyperdub. Drawing on dubstep, UK garage, ambient and hardcore, it is especially marked by pitch-shifted, time-stretched vocal samples. - Wikipedia

The drums are jittering and deft, less like a conventional beat than someone finger-drumming half-remembered rhythms on a MIDI pad in the dark. The vocals rarely arrive as full performances, more as short utterances, sighs and fragments, reverbed to the hilt until they feel like ghosts passing through an empty grain silo. It is an album built out of traces: snatches of melody, damp concrete, distant lights and late-night loneliness. I admire the atmosphere more than I love every individual track, but as a world to get lost in, it is still remarkably vivid.

8/10

“Music for 18 Musicians” is a work of minimalist music by Steve Reich, composed between 1974 and 1976 and first performed in New York in 1976. It is organised in 11 sections, each based on a single chord, with marimbas, pianos, voices and winds carrying its steady pulse. - Wikipedia

I haven’t compared this 2007 version to the original, which I loved, but I imagine the essence is much the same. It’s still a meditative tip-toe round and round a dream that keeps flowering, each phrase blooming gently out of the last until time starts to loosen a little. At its best, it feels hypnotic and almost weightless, a soft-lit spiral of pulse, breath and repetition.

8/10

Boxer is the fourth studio album by American indie rock band The National, released in 2007 on Beggars Banquet. - Wikipedia

I’ve always struggled to get into The National, mostly because Matt Berninger’s voice can feel a little too sleepy and unengaging to me. A baritone lullaby, sometimes drifting so low and soft it sounds like it’s trying not to wake the furniture. Boxer, however, has changed that. His voice still doesn’t exactly burst through the door, but there’s a real delicacy to it here, a weary intimacy that slowly pulls you in.

It helps that he’s one of the more interesting lyricists in this sort of gloomy indie-rock world, with a literary feel that never gets too “man sadly staring out of a window and thinking about that pixie dream-girl that doesn’t exist.” The album is dark and melancholy, full of anxious rooms and late-night thoughts, but the instrumentation is surprisingly hopeful: the drums patter and shuffle, the pianos glow, and the guitars seem to keep a little lamp on in the corner. It’s not an album I expected to love, but I do. Oh, isn’t life unpredictable?

8.5/10

Gris were a two-piece from Québec, consisting of Icare and Neptune, and Il était une forêt... was their second album. Released in 2007 through Sepulchral Productions, it sits broadly in the depressive/atmospheric black metal world, combining long-form black metal with ambient and more delicate passages. It has subsequently become one of the better-known records associated with the depressive black metal scene. - Wikipedia

A constant, riff-laden fuzz provides the backdrop for a furious French existential meltdown. Every moment is dialled up to 11 - which would normally get exhausting, but somehow it works here. I’m getting strong Deafheaven vibes, which is never a bad thing. The vocals have enough character to pull them apart from standard roar-fare, too; there’s a palpable anguish to them that makes this feel less like a performance and more like someone genuinely coming apart.

8.5

In Rainbows is the seventh studio album by the English rock band Radiohead. Self-produced with Nigel Godrich, it has been described as more personal than Radiohead’s previous albums, with lyrics inspired by “anonymous, fearful, stuck in traffic, thinking, ‘I’m sure I’m supposed to be doing something else’. - Wikipedia

This is Radiohead in one of their prettiest modes: very electronic, colourful, and still melancholy, like someone has built a sad little cathedral out of glass, wires and nervous energy. It’s characterised, to me, by those crystal-clear beats gently pushing everything along, never quite thumping you in the chest but constantly keeping the whole thing moving. Thom Yorke’s vocals are quietly astonishing as always, floating about like a ghost who has somehow been given perfect pitch.

There are real melodic hooks here too. “Nude” is gorgeous and weightless, “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” has that lovely forward rush, and “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” does that classic Radiohead trick of sounding both intensely precise and like it might dissolve into mist at any second. Overall, it’s just a gorgeous, affecting soundscape to get lost in for the duration. It doesn’t quite blow me away like some other Radiohead albums, but that’s hardly a devastating insult.

8.5/10

From Here We Go Sublime is the debut studio album by Swedish electronic music producer Axel Willner under his alias The Field. Its sample-based production uses cut-up and resequenced snippets of other artists’ music. - Wikipedia

Rhythm on top of rhythm on top of rhythm: this is brain food for the soul, an album that somehow feels both pulsing and gentle at once. The loops glide forward with hypnotic patience, every kick drum another paving stone in a long run to nirvana. It’s also a reminder of how much can be done with so little; three- or four-note phrases repeated until they stop sounding mechanical and start sounding transcendent. At its best, it feels like a meditative crab rave on the beach at sunrise, tiny sideways shuffles ready to sneak under the sand as soon as the humans arrive.

9/10

Released in 2007, A Celebration of Hunger is the debut album by North Carolina band Spider Bags. Recorded over just two days in Chapel Hill, it established their scruffy mixture of garage rock, country and punk, with Dan McGee’s songwriting holding together a deliberately loose cast of musicians. - Wikipedia

This is one I listened to a lot some years ago, although I am no longer entirely sure when I first found it, definitely a while after its release. Coming back to it, the appeal is immediately obvious. A Celebration of Hunger is one of those records that seems to burst with charm from every slightly wonky corner.

Here, that charm takes the form of ragged alt-country, huge choruses, endearingly off-kilter vocals and songs with an irritatingly effective habit of sticking around in your head for days after the record has gone back in its sleeve. It sounds loose without ever feeling careless: half the pleasure is in hearing songs that seem as though they might wobble apart at any moment somehow stagger triumphantly towards another great hook.

There is sadness and self-destruction lurking underneath much of it, but the music wears them with a drunken grin. Imagine the Beatles having several drinks too many and deciding to bash out an album before anyone sobers up. Melodies arrive constantly, voices crack in exactly the right places, and even its rough edges seem strangely lovable.

It is scruffy, funny, tuneful and enormously human - the sort of album whose imperfections become the very reason it’s damn near perfect.

9.5/10

Graduation is the third studio album by Kanye West, released in 2007 by Def Jam and Roc-A-Fella. Primarily produced by West himself, it moved his sound toward a bigger, brighter pop-rap style, with singles including “Stronger,” “Good Life” and “Homecoming.” - Wikipedia

I think Graduation is underrated in Kanye’s catalogue. It doesn’t have the underdog hunger of The College Dropout or the maximalist grandeur of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, but it has something else: a sun-bleached, laid-back and yet enormous pop-rap confidence. It sounds like a million dollars taking a golden stroll down a city beach, sunglasses on, not especially worried about where the afternoon is going.

That glow will always be tied to my own life, too. I listened to it extensively while travelling around Vietnam and Cambodia, and that inevitably colours how I hear it. “Good Morning” felt like the perfect start to every sun-soaked day: warm, open, gently triumphant, with the rest of the album naturally following behind it like a very expensive parade.

For me, Graduation remains tied to a version of Kanye that feels a long way from what he is now: younger, brighter, full of movement, sun and possibility. The person who made it was not untouched by ego or mess, obviously, but he was also making music that felt open, joyous, hungry and alive. I can hold on to what the record itself means to me without pretending the later ugliness from its artist does not exist.

9.5/10

For Emma, Forever Ago is Bon Iver’s debut album, famously written during Justin Vernon’s winter retreat to a cabin in Wisconsin after the end of a relationship and a period of illness. Which is the sort of origin story that can sound a bit mythic and beardy, but in this case, annoyingly, the myth is completely justified. - Wikipedia

This is one of those albums that will probably always be in my top ten, regardless of how many million albums I listen to. It just means too much to me. I came to it completely randomly, after a friend casually commented “next Bon Iver” on a picture of me with a guitar. At the time, I had no idea who this ‘Bon Iver’ was. I put it on in my university room, lay on the carpet, and sobbed for 40 minutes.

The timing was probably everything. I was still carrying the pain of being dumped months earlier, and this album seemed to find the little trapdoor where I’d hidden most of my feelings. Those falsettos, the guitars, the quietness, the way the songs feel like they’re being sung from the next room and from inside your chest at the same time. I wasn’t especially good at talking about my feelings then, and For Emma felt like a conversation with someone who didn’t need me to explain. It just sat next to me in the grief and let saltwater come out.

And beyond all the personal baggage, which is admittedly doing a lot of heavy lifting here, I still think it’s perfect. The melodies are gorgeous, the production is tasteful and lonely without ever becoming dreary, and every song feels like it belongs exactly where it is. It also made me want to write music, which is about the highest compliment I can give anything.

A small, wounded, falsetto-powered masterpiece.

10/10