14 Albums TURNING 25 IN 2025!
What were you doing back in 2000? Were you watching Mad Men or The O.C. on TV? Were you watching the 24 hour cameras on the first ever Big Brother? Texting on your Nokia 3310?
It’s a sobering thought to realise that the millennium was a quarter of a century ago. Not just a couple of years! Now, whilst I don’t recommend living in the past for too long, it does sometimes pay to take stock of things. Even if it’s just as a snapshot of a particular time, it can be really interesting to look at a period of time and see what was going on.
As we move into the second half of 2025, it got me thinking of music from this century, since there’s now loads of it. I narrowed my focus to the year 2000 itself, to see what kind of music would be turning 25 years old in 2025. The results are…well, we can talk about that later. Here’s a curated, subjective list of the music that made a difference back in 2000. How will this music feel to us today? Let’s find out! Enjoy the trip!
Albums Turning 25 in 2025
Rated R - Queens of the Stone Age
Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavoured Water - Limp Bizkit
Oops!...I Did It Again - Britney Spears
All That You Can’t Leave Behind - U2
Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia - The Dandy Warhols
Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea - PJ Harvey
Mer De Noms - A Perfect Circle
Rated R - Queens of the Stone Age
John Homme’s desert rockers hit the jackpot with the album after this one, Songs for the Deaf, but they were already making a reputation for themselves with this one. The main reason was the drug-referencing Feel Good Hit of the Summer, which strikes me now as both somewhat juvenile and hardly worth getting worked up over. Still, outside of these moments, the band can be heard crystalising their sound into its most famous form.
Marshall Mathers LP - Eminem
This simultaneously feels like an ancient album and a more recent release than 2000! It’s not the music that does this, it’s that cultural zeitgeist moment which propelled Eminem into superstar status. Those moments tend to live frozen in their own time, forever dating the art that accompanies it.
The album itself was a cultural sensation. Rap fans, rock fans, everybody loved at least half of this record, thanks to Eminem's wry and witty rhymes that told truths alongside fanciful fictions. He went beyond the usual showboating self-referencing of the genre and delivered a classic hip-hop record. The Marshall Mathers LP also put British songwriter Dido on the musical map for about a second, on the runaway hit song Stan.
White Pony - Deftones
Is it fair to say that White Pony has aged more gracefully than most of the music on this list? I wonder how that might seem to younger people who weren’t around in 2000, but to my ears, this is still a pretty fresh listen.
Not only fresh but epic, ambitious and timeless. Deftones were lumped in with the Nu Metal masses at the time, despite their protestations, and time seems to have proven the band right. This isn’t new metal at all (it never was): it’s metal for a new millennium. The single Change (in the House of Flies) has a claustrophobic ‘Se7en’-like atmosphere and Elite brings an alien brutality that keeps the album from descending into cookie-cutter metal.
Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavoured Water - Limp Bizkit
Back in 2000, Limp Bizkit were arguably the biggest hard rock band in the world. Nu Metal had exploded thanks to the efforts of Korn and Slipknot, but Fred Durst and his crew were the ones wearing the crowns.
This third album was jam-packed with hits, and as divisive as they were, it was difficult not to get caught up in all of the delirious fun. Durst baited label-mate Trent Reznor with lyrics that quoted his band Nine Inch Nails in a negative manner, which required Reznor to give legal permission for Durst to use! (He allowed it!). The Bizkit wrote a song for Mission Impossible II (as did Metallica for the same movie, weirdly) and Wes Borland continued to be the creative genius/arty freak that we all loved him for.
Maybe you had to be there?
Oops!...I Did It Again - Britney Spears
Years before the creepy conservatorship drama, multiple marriages and the head shavings, Britney was the true Queen of Pop. Her second record, Oops!...I Did It Again was released in May 2000, and quickly became the fastest selling album by a female artist ever ever ever. We’re talking nearly 1.5 million sales in the first week alone! Overall, this one album has sold over 20 million copies, so not having it on this list today would be absurd.
There were 15 producers credited on this record, which is more than than the number of songs. If you weren’t a fan, you’d only know singles Oops!...I Did It Again, Stronger and Lucky. This means you might not realise that there’s a Rolling Stones cover on there! Yes, I wouldn’t call it the most obvious thing in the world but Brit does indeed cover (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, including a rewrite of Jagger’s lyric ‘how white my shirts can be’ to ‘how tight my skirts should be’! The world gets weirder by the minute.
All That You Can’t Leave Behind - U2
Back in 2000, Irish megastars U2 had already had a couple of comebacks and were considered elder statesmen of rock. They’d be roughly 40 years old by this point, but the world was a different place back then.
Anyway, All That You Can’t Leave Behind saw the band leaving aside their recent electronic dabblings to return to the classic U2 sound that had made them huge in the first place. What was that sound? Chiming guitars, skyscraping choruses and huge amounts of backing vocals. If the songs themselves weren’t as strong as those on, say, The Joshua Tree, then at least they sounded like they were from that era. For some, this was the start of the band becoming bland; for others, it was another home run.
Parachutes - Coldplay
It’s hard to believe that Poundland U2 have been a huge band for 25 years now. Parachutes was their debut record, and whilst it was played during many a polite dinner party, nobody realistically believed that it would become the behemoth that it was.
Maybe I’m being a bit hard on ol’ Chris Martin and pals. They’ve made a huge amount of people very happy over the years, and it all started here with the song Yellow. I just feel like we all deserve… more. What are the other band members even called? Next!
Kid A - Radiohead
Radiohead created two of the 90s most beloved albums in The Bends and OK Computer. Feeling that they’d driven into something of a creative cul de sac, the band did something that almost no bands seriously attempt: a complete re-invasion of their sound.
Honestly, if it wasn’t for Thom Yorke’s distinctive vocals, you’d never think Kid A was created by the same people. From their previously pioneering guitar work, they plunged into otherworldly electronica and ambient soundscapes with totalled commitment. Radiohead did a complete creative 180 and boldly pushed ahead. At the time, consensus was 50-50 on the move being genius and creative suicide. In the intervening 25 years, the latter opinion has been proven pretty wrong.
Figure 8 - Elliott Smith
At one point, Elliott Smith was a white-suited Oscar-nominee playing his song Miss Misery at the Academy Awards. He was a critical darling, a hip name to drop in conversations and a serious talent with a bright future.
In 2000, he released Figure 8, the first album of his since his 1998 Oscar nom. It presented a slightly more power pop influence on his otherwise acoustic troubadour style. If anything, it was less dark and troubled than his previous work. The rest of Elliott’s story is dark and genuinely mysterious, but I’ll leave that for you to check out yourself.
Thirteen Tales From Urban Bohemia - The Dandy Warhols
There was a point in time when Bohemian Like You was inescapable, thanks to a big vodafone ad campaign that used it and used it. In earlier times, this could be seen as selling out, but nobody minded the Dandy Warhols seeing a bit of cash, finally. They are an eternally cool band, and are not only enjoying a 30 year-long career but have also been immortalised in cult music documentary Dig.
It’s well checking out but so is this album from 2000, which summarises the band’s 1990s output and hints at the direction they were moving in. Grooves, vocal harmonies and an inimitably laconic attitude are in abundance here.
The Virgin Suicides - Air
This wasn’t maybe the most massive release of 2000 in terms of sales, but the French duo’s soundtrack to Sofia Coppola’s haunting movie was certainly one of the most influential.
Based on the Jeffrey Euginides novel, The Virgin Suicides was a movie rooted in the nostalgia and otherness of 70s suburban America. The era - and the tripped out ennui - is perfectly represented by Air’s score, which evokes the time with a sense of heartbroken inevitability. It’s evocative and hypnotic stuff.
Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea - PJ Harvey
When PJ Harvey won the Mercury prize for this album, it shone a light on a career that was already quite amazing. Polly Jean Harvey had released 4 records already, each with a different palette of sounds that included grungy guitars and abrasive electronics.
This fifth album was inspired by Harvey’s time in New York, and represented a fresh burst of energy in her music. Opting for directness and simplicity, the songs on this album are vital and poetic, borrowing vibes from Patti Smith at some points, Siouxsie Sioux at others.
Unlike some Mercury Prize-winning albums, this one doesn’t sound like it’s rooted to the year in which it was released.
Hybrid Theory - Linkin Park
Were Linkin Park a Nu Metal boyband? It almost felt like that back in 2000, when they arrived freshly dressed and bleached with their debut album Hybrid Theory. They seemed to tick every box: crunchy riffs? Check. Angsty lead vocalist? Rap bits? Check! Edgy-yet-photogenic image, with just enough piercings and tattoos to attract an audience and annoy that audience’s parents? Check!
Hybrid Theory was released in October 2000, making it somewhat late to the Nu Metal party, too. With all of this premeditation holding against them, why are they on this list?
Because the tunes were undeniably excellent. They may have seemed like a fabricated band but they were a typical high school band who simply added vocalist Chester Bennington after their original singer left.
Bennington was easily the band’s main talent. A supersonic singer whose angst was born of genuine troubles, he was a real-deal talent who fit the bill of generational icon. The critics had it wrong, and the fans didn’t listen anyway. Hybrid Theory was huuuuge.
Mer De Noms - A Perfect Circle
A Perfect Circle was supposed to be a small, independent release from little-known guitarist/tech Billy Howerdel. His day job was fixing guitars for the likes of Nine Inch Nails and Tool, so it’s maybe less of a surprise that his demos were heard by Tool vocalist Maynard James Keenan. Howerdel initially wanted female vocals on his songs, but who’s going to turn down Maynard?
The resulting record was like some lost goth metal album from an alternative past. Gleefully out of step with the prevailing musical trends of the day, Mer de Noms was instead a multi-layered artwork with depth and mystery. A band was created around the music, with players like Troy Van Leeuwen and Josh Freese joining to tour. Goth-Indie-Metal supergroup? Kinda, yeah!
25 Years Young
What did you think of that list? Did it fire up your nostalgia cylinders? Did you feel a little queasy at the brisk passage of time? Were you appalled at my choices, and what I’d left out?
I understand. It’s not easy to look back a quarter of a century (I said it again, I’m sorry) without intense emotions arising. It’s the equivalent of our year 2000 selves gazing back to 1975, after all, and that seemed like a million years ago!
