we've selected the 150 tracks that have meant the most to us over the site's lifetime.
You can also stream the whole lot as a Spotify playlist. From 1996 to the present day, it's a decade-and-a-half of incredible music.
Words: Priya Elan, Luke Lewis, Tim Chester, Mike Williams, Tom Goodwyn, Rebecca Schiller, Krissi Murison, Emily Mackay, Matt Wilkinson, Laura Snapes, Jamie Fullerton, Alan Woodhouse.
1-30 part
Released: January 2007
Released from the shackles of child stardom and the major label treadmill, Robyn got back to basics, releasing her self-titled album on her own label. But she wasn’t just an auteur of her own career, she was an auteur of her own sound; where swathes of glossy noughties pop were tempered by a lifetime’s worth of experience lived under the spotlight of the music biz. ‘With Every Heartbeat’ was typical of...
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Released: September 2006
This opening shot from the duo that used myth and obfuscation as their own media breadcrumb trail was appropriately strange and brilliant. A riddle waiting to be solved, it was an alien melding of Ethan Kath’s 8-bit video game synth rhythm and Alice Glass’ desperate punk rock squall. Allegedly, its creation was a happy accident, but in retrospect it seems to perfectly capture the duo’s modus operandi; a punk...
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Released: October 2009
A nocturnal proclamation of love (that veers into dangerous co-dependent territory) this was The xx’s finest moment thus far; a simple, effective take on dark, nocturnal love action. As guitars twirls like dance floor partners in the background, Olly and Romy skirt around their loyalty (“I am yours now, so I don’t ever have to leave,” they sing) sounding half in love, half bewitched by Stockholm...
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Released: January 2004
British indie-disco’s very own year zero. The Strokes and The Stripes might get all the credit for redefining rock music in the early 00s, but it was Franz Ferdinand who gave the UK its first homegrown guitar anthem in five years with ‘Take Me Out’. The fall-out? An unprecedented No. 3 in the Official Top 40 singles chart (back when those kind of things still really mattered), the re-establishment of the...
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Released: August 2004
Never has rawness of frayed emotion been captured on record as urgently and accurately as it was on the second-to-last single The Libertines would ever release. The frustration Pete Doherty and Carl Barat felt at the un-workability (to say the least) of their relationship was played out over arguably their finest musical moment. More frustrating than the ins and outs of their relationship was the fact that, as...
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Released: August 2003
It would be a hard challenge to go through this Top 150 song list and find a more influential British track than this one. Written at some point between Dylan Mills’ 15th and 17th birthday, ‘Fix Up, Look Sharp’ was more than just a breakthrough moment for Dizzee Rascal, it was the tipping point for the most important underground UK music scene of the noughties. Grime’s anti-bling clarion call (“Being a...
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Released: April 2004
There are few things more satisfying that publicly scoring a lot of points off someone who’s made you feel small. Like that time some gormless bint yelled “Lesbian!” at me in the street as if it was an insult and I yelled back “Yeah, you wish love” and all her mates laughed at her. ’99 Problems’ is kind of like that moment multiplied many times over and made into a song. Jay-Z’s tale...
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Released: March 2003
Surely the most maddeningly compulsive bassline of the decade, and not even actually played on a bass guitar. That’s just how Jackie rolls. A cocky, strutting, monster of paranoiac ego-puffing, Jack frets and frays (“And I’m talking to myself at night because I can’t forget/back and forth through my mind behind a cigarette”) then seethes and spits at mysterious adversaries in a strop-storm of...
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Released: November 2005
There’s a reason why six years on, ‘Wake Up’ still remains one of the biggest guns in the AF live arsenal. Well, there’s many. That surly, chugging riff and the way the ripple of keys introduces the chorus like a sunburst through the clouds. The way that Win Butler realized that the best thing he could do for that chorus would be to just get his whole band to sing “ohhhh, ohhh, woaaah-oh-oh-ohhhhh”...
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Released: March 1997
Too many DJs and producers misuse repetition, using the device to prop up their lack of ideas and innate creative laziness. Not so Daft Punk, whose genius manipulation of just three words and five instruments created an almost illegally infectious club classic that’s survived nearly fifteen years of so-called innovation in dance music. Michel Gondry recognised their smart manipulation of just a few noises and...
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Released: April 2005
The sound of New Cross exploding, ‘Banquet’ was a disorienting moment of disco-angst. From the off, Kele sounded hounded by the pressures of urban living. The opening swooshingly sounded like an airplane descending (memories of 9/11 were still percolating in our heads) and the track soared above our heads for the next three minutes, never quite coming into land. As Kele sang of fire and girls who didn’t...
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Released: March 2006
Some tracks, the very luckiest and rarest of tracks, hold a unique power in their opening seconds, a certain aural something that has the ability to shift huge numbers of people out of their seat to the very centre of the dancefloor. ‘We Are Your Friends’ was one of those. Anyone who DJ’ed this track in the mid-noughties will attest to the sheer force of those opening synth stabs; it was brainwashing of the...
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Released: November 2002
Few tracks announce themselves with quite such headbutt-to-the-face ooomph as Queens Of The Stone Age’s first single from their third album. In fact the track, their only single to top the US Modern Rock charts, makes itself known with the force of the US Army in total 'destroy nations' mode from the outset, all whipcrack crash cymbals and crunchy riffs that dissolve into a series of freefalling drum triplets...
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Released: March 2001
The 21st century might have started 15 months earlier, but nothing said 'welcome to the future' as audaciously and sexily as this. Every bleep, twang and spasm of Timbaland's minimal production blew a hole in the fabric of the pop tune as we knew it. Penetrating those holes was Missy Elliot, a spitting, throbbing, eyebrow-arching caricature of ultra-bling and booty wobble that sent a shiver down your back and a...
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Released: May 2003
An ever-so-slightly offbeat Go Go rhythm, some sparsely inputted horns and a lyric about a control freak undone by the instinctive, tempestuous power of love/lust. As Beyonce’s opening gambit it was accomplished, as her first single post-Destiny’s Child (a group known for their innovative run of singles in the R’n’B genre) it was jaw dropping. Jay-Z’s appearance on the track worked on one level as a...
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Released: February 2008
The dream team of Maya, Diplo and Switch created this anthem; at first listen it was the sound of M.I.A. slightly playing away from her strengths, dumbing down, even; wrapped in the gangsta hip-hop tradition but on subsequent rotation the track revealed itself to be so much more. A twirling chunk of The Clash’ ‘Straight To Hell’ gave the track a lilting sense of wanderlust; lifting MIA’s pan-globalism and...
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Released: March 2010
Whereas Foals’ debut, ‘Antidotes’, was packed full with strange, vaguely math-ish constructions, like a spiky game of Tetris, the introduction to its follow-up, ‘Total Life Forever’, gaped like a hole in the heart. It’s sparse, deathly chilling and emotionally naked – Yannis sings rather than barks, and whilst the lyrics are hardly explicit, his order, or invitation – “Forget the horror here”...
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Released: October 2009
The funniest thing about this song is that Katy Perry, bless her, actually believes that ‘California Gurls’ is some kind of Westside riposte to it. Smashing as she and Snoop’s ode to “Daisy dukes, bikinis on top” is, the heat of that wig is clearly going to the poor lassie’s head. So colossal you can’t even see the top, ‘Empire State…’ was the song of at least two summers. You can drop...
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Released: March 2008
Sure, ‘Electric Feel’ is probably the tune they’ll long be remembered for, but it was ‘Time To Pretend’ that really proved what MGMT had to offer. Y’know, writing songs about making money and marrying models, only to ultimately choke on your own vomit and die. But with lines like “This is our decision, to live fast and die young/We’ve got the vision, now let’s have some fun” and...
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Released: October 2005
Hurtling towards us on indie rock’s highway, ‘…Dancefloor’ came with its palms open. Guitars sounded like cars veering off the racetrack whilst Alex Turner’s lyrical dexterity hit with thrilling but entirely gob smacking levels of ingenuity. He seemed like he’d come from another time, a scholar amongst the knuckle dragging indie slackers who were rhyming ‘love’ with ‘dove’. His...
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Released: January 2003
The third single from The Libertines' 2002 debut album 'Up The Bracket', 'Time For Heroes' soon became its calling card ahead of the arguably more frenetically lapel-grabbing likes of 'What A Waster' and 'I Get Long'. Why? It encapsulated the grotty, on-edge romanticism that defined Pete Doherty and Carl Barat's band greater than any other of their songs – the poetic twists of "stylish kids in the riot"...
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Released: June 1997
Just when the world was crying out for a genuine protest song, we got one of the greatest ever. "You're a slave to money then you die," is Dickie Ashcroft's cruel payoff as he howls his way through his sermon of frustrated lament. Sounding at once beaten and yet furiously optimistic (that'll be Andrew Oldham's strings then), 'Bitter Sweet Symphony' is one of the saddest rabble-rousers of the 90's. (MW)Read More
Released: October 2006
On ‘Back To Black’ Amy Winehouse (aided by Salaam Remi and Mark Ronson) tied the sound of the past (“jukebox” as Winehouse called it) to the present with effortlessness. ‘Rehab’ was all Ronettes sass and Motown horns but at its heart was the memory of a very real conversation about Winehouse’s post-heartbreak addition and how best to deal with it. In life and in the song, her management wanted her to...
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Released: March 2006
So good it was released twice – and it was voted single of the year back in 2006 byNME staffers. “The single seemed to have a strange life of its own where people kept returning to it,” Alexis Taylor said of the track. And from student unions to clubs across the globe, you simply couldn’t escape this overly repetitive, so-annoying-it-couldn’t-leave-your-head song. Which is probably why it stuck...
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Released: April 2002
This was the one minute and 50 seconds that properly introduced Jack and Meg to the world, its frenzied assault on the senses convincing all but the most idiotic that the red and white-loving duo were the real deal and not some hyped-up bullshit. Mind you, following its worldwide success it would seem they didn’t care for this version much – when the track did make a rare live outing, it was usually the...
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Released: May 2004
How about this for serendipity? ‘Mr Brightside’ was the very first song The Killers wrote together, at their very first rehearsal session (you can hear the original 2001 demo version on YouTube). Imagine that: within hours of entering the practice studio you’re playing this: a song so melodically perfect, so surging, and so urgent, it will...
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Released: January 2001
Yeah, so it rips off Tom Petty's 'American Girl' like there's no tomorrow. It only uses about three chords. But I don't care about any of that. What 'Last Nite' did more than any other song from 2001 was prove that guitars could still be king, that the sound of some dude with greasy hair singing nonsensical guff about spaceships could come across like the most important thing you will ever hear. I'm listening to...
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Released: September 2003
It’s got the line we all know and love: “Shake it like a Polaroid picture.” This bizarre crackpot of a number will forever be remembered as the song that made Polaroids cool again (even though OutKast inadvertently gave us all bad information, seeing as shaking your Polaroids actually damages your pictures). But we’ll excuse the photography faux pas in an otherwise eccentrically excellent top tune...
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Released: September 2005
Win Butler’s never shied away from telling the truth to those kids he’s so obsessed with. He looks out for them. While others would let them sleepwalk blindly through life, here he’s urging them to be alert, to see and think for themselves, while the rest of the band while the rest of the band shout down his inconvenient truths with a chorus of “Lies! Lies!”.
BUT THE KIDS HAVE TO KNOW...
Read MoreBUT THE KIDS HAVE TO KNOW...
Released: May 1997
Where were you when you first heard it? I'll never forget. April 30, 1997, a Wednesday night: the first exclusive play on Radio 1's Evening Session. I'd expected'The Bends' part two. What I heard instead was bizarre and breathtaking: six and a half minutes of spiralling melodies, twisted-metal dissonance, robot voices, and...
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