The best albums of 2005: the year the blogs did the A&R

Out 4 July 2005 on Asthmatic Kitty, the second and final installment of a fifty-state project that everyone except Sufjan Stevens seemed to know was a bit. Strip away the marching band and the song titles that run to two sentences and what is left is arrangement writing nobody else in indie rock was attempting: banjo, oboe, vibraphone and choir all moving on their own schedules. DC Comics made him paint a balloon over Superman on the cover, which is the most 2005 legal problem imaginable. Twenty years later it is still the record that decides whether you find him unbearable or unmatched.

Secretly Canadian, February 2005, and then the Mercury Prize that September, which nobody had predicted. Anohni, then recording as Antony, sings ten songs about transformation and dying over piano and very little else, with Lou Reed, Boy George, Rufus Wainwright and Devendra Banhart filing through as guests. The cover is Peter Hujar's photograph of Candy Darling on her deathbed, and the record earns the right to use it.

The second album, 30 August 2005 on Roc-A-Fella, and the one where Kanye West hired Jon Brion, a producer whose day job was orchestral pop for Fiona Apple and Paul Thomas Anderson soundtracks. The soul-loop formula from The College Dropout got an orchestra bolted to it: strings, harpsichord, a Curtis Mayfield horn line dragged to half speed under "Touch the Sky". "Gold Digger" is the hit everyone remembers. "Roses" and "Hey Mama" are why the album still works.

John Balance died in November 2004 after a fall at home. Peter Christopherson finished the record alone and put it out that December on Threshold House, assembled from material recorded between 1993 and 2004, including sessions at Trent Reznor's Nothing Studios in New Orleans. It plays like a wake built out of twelve years of tape. "Going Up" closes it with Balance's voice from Coil's last live performance, and after two decades of industrial ritual music the goodbye turned out to be the most tuneful thing they ever made.

XL, March 2005, named after her father's alias in Tamil militant politics, which should tell you how little interest Maya Arulpragasam had in making a normal pop debut. She built most of it on a Roland MC-505 that Peaches gave her: Baltimore club drums, dancehall, Tamil chants, and a voice that manages to sound bored and armed at the same time. Every argument of the next decade about Western pop borrowing from the global south starts here, and the album wins most of them by being better than the people having it.

DFA put out James Murphy's debut in January 2005, packaged with a second disc collecting the singles that had already made him famous in New York. Which means "Losing My Edge", the best thing he will ever write, arrived as an appendix to his own first album. The record is a man who spent fifteen years behind the counter finally admitting he wants to be in the band, and it swings a lot harder than the punchlines suggest.

Southern Lord, 17 October 2005, the album where drone metal stopped being a Melvins in-joke and started frightening people who had never listened to metal in their lives. Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson brought black metal singers in, including Malefic of Xasthur, who is claustrophobic and recorded his vocal for "Bathory Erzsebet" locked inside a casket in the back of a hearse. There is an Immortal cover buried somewhere in the murk. Play it at the volume it asks for and the building starts answering.

Released 27 June 2005 on 679, made by a twenty-year-old East Londoner who had already spent two years as the sharpest MC on the N.A.S.T.Y. Crew pirate sets. It peaked at 36 on the UK chart and went gold anyway, which is the whole grime problem in one line: too big for the underground, too strange for daytime radio. "P's and Q's" is still the most casually devastating verse the scene produced.

FatCat, October 2005, and the warmest thing they ever made. Sung Tongs the year before was two men and an acoustic guitar; Feels is the full band with Deakin back, and it sounds like a party happening in the next room that you badly want to be let into. "Banshee Beat" runs nine minutes without wasting one of them.

Sub Pop, May 2005, produced by Dave Fridmann, who buried the band in red distortion and let Janet Weiss hit the drums like she was trying to get through the floor. "Let's Call It Love" runs eleven minutes and turns into a guitar duel halfway. They went on hiatus the following year, which makes this the loudest exit in indie rock, and the reunion records have never got near it.

Recorded over a few afternoons in a room at the Hotel Mandé in Bamako with the Niger outside the window, Nick Gold producing for World Circuit. Ali Farka Touré on guitar, Toumani Diabaté on kora, mostly first takes, no anxiety about overdubs anywhere on it. It took the Grammy for traditional world music in February 2006 and Touré died a month later. Put it on when you have decided that nothing important is going to happen today.

Warp, October 2005, the album where Boards of Canada picked up guitars and half their audience filed a formal complaint. The acoustic strums go through the same degraded tape process as everything else the brothers do, so the record sounds like a memory of a summer that keeps skipping. It is their least loved album and their most underrated one, which is usually the same sentence.

Thirty-five years after Just Another Diamond Day sold nothing and she left music for a horse-drawn wagon, Vashti Bunyan came back on FatCat in October 2005 with Max Richter producing and Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart playing on it. The voice has barely aged, which is genuinely unsettling, and the songs are mostly about the decades she spent not writing them. The freak folk revival had spent two years citing her as an ancestor. She turned up and out-wrote the lot of them.

A Boston producer with a shelf full of 1960s psych records made the strangest rap album of 2005 for Lewis Recordings, and at barely half an hour it never repeats itself. Fuzz guitar, backwards tape, Mr. Lif and Percee P guesting, and "Fumbling Over Words That Rhyme" compressing the entire history of MCing into one verse. Nobody has made a record that sounds like this since, Edan included.

The Jon Brion version leaked to BitTorrent in March 2005, fans built a Free Fiona campaign and picketed Epic, and the story everyone told was that a cowardly label had shelved a masterpiece. Mike Elizondo, who produced most of the version that came out on 4 October, has since said the decision to redo the record was Apple's own. So the year's great martyrdom narrative was largely wrong, and the album people were marching against is meaner and better sequenced than the one they were marching for.

Rajko Müller's second album, Playhouse, 2005, and the record microhouse never beat. Loops fray at the edges, chords land slightly behind where you expect them, and nothing repeats quite the way it did last time, which is a hard trick to sustain for over an hour without the listener catching you doing it. This is dance music for people who mostly listen at home, and the honest ones admit that covers nearly everybody.

Out of a major label deal and unwilling to make the record they wanted, Robyn started Konichiwa Records and released this herself in Sweden on 27 April 2005. "Be Mine!" is the best breakup song of the decade and "Konichiwa Bitches" is a rap track, and the album's refusal to pick one of those lanes is exactly why it took two years to reach anyone outside Scandinavia. Everything the 2010s called a sad banger comes from this record.

Kill Rock Stars, October 2005, twenty songs, the longest album they have made and the one that finally won the argument that they are a pop band. Satomi Matsuzaki sings about rabbits and blood in the same untroubled register while Greg Saunier's drumming keeps arriving a beat early and somehow landing. Hand it to anyone who thinks noise and prettiness are opposites.

Self-released in June 2005 for under five thousand dollars, walked into record shops in Philadelphia and New York by the band themselves, given a 9.0 by Pitchfork, then pushed around the mp3 blogs until it had sold over 125,000 copies with no label behind it and no radio anywhere near it. It is not the best album on this list. It is the most important object on it: the first time the new distribution system picked a winner without asking permission, and every A&R department spent 2006 trying to work out how.