RA concludes its week-long look back with our round-up of the best tracks of the past decade.

In his recent book, Berlin, Techno and the Easy Jetset, Tobias Rapp claims that techno in the ’00s was in many ways a reaction to techno from a decade earlier. “The nineties were about rave and everything that went with it,” he writes, “and then, after all the great successes and excesses, the whole thing collapsed as the end of the decade approached. Around the turn of the century, the music went back underground in order to revitalize itself.”
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RA begins its week-long look back at the past decade with our list of the finest long players.

There was a lot of hand-wringing in the ’00s about whether the album still mattered in the rock world. In our sphere, though, it’s hard to say that appeal has ever waned. Ask any artist that has spent their career releasing a crush of 12-inch singles and digital EPs, and they’ll tell you that it’s the only place to stretch out, the format in which they can truly showcase everything they have to say. The best albums, though, transcend context. And that’s largely what our top 100 records of the decade reflect. Whether it be house, techno, disco, drum & bass, jazz, trip-hop, ambient or all of it at once, these were the many sounds that made up the past decade for us.
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