The Best Albums of 2001
The best albums of 2001 — The Strokes, Jay-Z, Tool, Bob Dylan, System of a Down, Alicia Keys, and Weezer.
This week’s collection from 2001 feels a little more eclectic than the past few years. I don’t know if it was the chaos of 2001 itself or the culmination of multiple genres either discovering themselves or falling off a cliff, but 2001 feels like a year of pretty remarkable variety.
2001 was obviously the first of the seemingly dozens of once-in-a-lifetime tragedies witnessed by Millennial Americans; it was also the year I got contacts and started middle school, and when my music fandom started in earnest when I got my first Walkman CD player. Looking back through my CD collection, I was all over the place; the first CD I ever bought was a Bad Company greatest hits compilation, which my mother said “must be bad, it says so right on the cover!” (She was joking, but I was being dramatic and chose not to get it)
I can’t even remember how I discovered music at that age, or came to the conclusion that Bad Company’s “Feel Like Makin’ Love” needed to be the among the very first songs in my music collection. Classic rock was a somewhat obvious conclusion, I guess - my parents listened to primarily 70’s easy-listening soft rock, stuff like Jackson Browne and The Eagles and Meat Loaf. I kind of remember finding out about random songs from the classic rock pantheon like “We Are The Champions” and “Highway to Hell” in computer lab class, playing them from classmates’ CD’s and sitting mesmerized by the Windows Media Player visualizer. But beyond that, I think my preteen music discovery was sporadic and mostly unintentional.
Another thing that seems wild to me now is the fact I found all this music without the benefit of the internet, or at least not an internet we would consider usable today. I had dial-up internet until I was 18, meaning 1 page of a website took minutes to load, and downloading music was completely out of the question. I probably used top song websites or books, but I couldn’t name a single one. I also remember buying the occasional Guitar Player magazine and using its pages as inspiration, which explains why most of my musical exposure was guitar-driven rock, leaving other genres to pass me by completely.
Sometimes I look back with regret for the amount of great music I missed. But when I really think about the reality of the situation, what else could I have done? As kids we’re subject to a million restrictions (for good reason, obviously) that we often aren’t aware of. How could I help but be influenced by my parents’ music preferences? Or those of the people immediately around me, within the constraints of my childhood, which many childhoods of the 90’s and 00’s had? I had an interest in broadening my perspective, but not the means. And in my mind today, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Lack of interest in broadening my perspective? Now that might have given me some justifiable regret.
I think my interest in music discovery started as a result of the scarcity of my youth. But how would that have changed growing up with every song, every top-100 list, every musical algorithm available at the push of a button? How do kids of the Spotify/TikTok/Fortnite generations develop the curiosity that I consider one of the biggest blessings of my childhood? Musical variety to many of that generation must be such a pedestrian concept, taken for granted like the leaves on the trees. I’m sure many use this access as it was intended, but others probably do what all humans do - adapt to their surroundings and start treating amazing things as normal.
I think one silver lining for today’s developing music fans is the sheer volume of music available from the past. No algorithm will waste its computing energy pushing music to kids that doesn’t make someone, somewhere a dollar today. Old music, by and large, probably doesn’t fit this bill as well as the industry-backed music of the moment, which has largely been engineered to drive maximum profits. Older music, even the greats, seems destined not to make it into the musical vocabulary of the kids today; of course, this has always been the case, but at least in the past there were technological limitations that explained the loss of interest in old music. Today those limitations don’t exist; or rather, they are self-imposed by algorithms we created on purpose rather than lack of technology.
So in a way, today’s music fans are just as limited as I was in my internet-less basement blasting Lynyrd Skynyrd thinking it was the best thing ever made. They miss just as much great music as I did - just read today’s list of albums that never even crossed my radar growing up in the 2000’s and you’ll see what I mean.
Part of the reason I’m writing this re-exploration of music I missed is because I think many developing music fans, young and old, could relate to the fear of missing out that I’ve experienced. Whether you’ve missed out on music because industry algorithms pushed you away from it, or because you had to allocate your $10 a week allowance on music in the most economic way possible, the exercise of looking back can be just as interesting as looking forward to the new music of the day, and can scratch the itch of FOMO that builds up over time.
For me, it’s actually less of a FOMO (fear of missing out) and more of a FONK (fear of not knowing). I just want to know all the music from all the years, but it’s just not going to happen. However the difference between FOMO and FONK is that FONK pushes me towards good behaviors, like being curious and looking for new (and new to me) things. FOMO just leads to following the crowd; FONK leads to self-growth, and the only standard by which that’s measured is my own.
Long live the FONK.
Is This It — The Strokes
I would have loved these guys when I was 10, man. Guitar-driven pop rock with a satisfying classic rock sound was my kryptonite. Heck it still is - you get a kind of nostalgic feeling from listening to the Strokes, but they have a fairly fresh energy all their own. The album does get repetitive, but that's more a result of the stripped-down production and simple songwriting than any lack of energy. The lo-fi style vocals on tracks like "Last Nite" fit great - many were recorded by singer Julian Casablancas running his mic through a small Peavey guitar practice amp, something I've actually done a couple of times with my own Peavey amp (this was related to a slightly drunken karaoke session at home, and I don't think the results were anything like the Strokes... but you never know?). In the end this is throwback guitar pop-rock full of sexual references, not pretending to be anything else, and in that regard it's pure as a diamond. It's like if Oasis had sounded less pretentious, had worshipped the Velvet Underground instead of the Beatles, and hadn't felt so sorry for themselves all the time.
The Blueprint — Jay-Z
Jay-Z's NYC-style swagger is impossible to confuse for anyone else. This album is a work of production mastery, which pains me to say since part of the credit for that work goes to Kanye West, one of 2025's biggest jackasses. But you can't deny that the mix of soul samples and intriguing beats works here. It's full of the early 2000's rap hallmarks, lots of chest-thumping and diss tracks, but despite a few non-2025-friendly lyrics it's an absolute masterpiece. It's almost inconceivable to think that this album was released on 9/11/2001, by a New York artist through his New York label, and still performed so well. But if there were ever a time when a city needed some music to swagger to, that was it.
Lateralus — Tool
Tool albums always feel less like something you listen to and more like something you survive. Lateralus runs nearly 80 minutes of prog-metal built on time signatures I couldn't count if you held a gun to my head — the title track famously follows the Fibonacci sequence in its syllable structure, which is either the coolest or most insufferable thing a band has ever done depending on your mood. It's not an album I reach for casually; it demands the kind of focused, headphones-on attention that doesn't fit into a normal afternoon. But give it that attention and it's one of the most rewarding heavy albums of the decade — less about riffs you can air-guitar to and more about a genuinely unsettling, immersive headspace. Tool made "difficult" commercially viable, and Lateralus is the album where they proved it wasn't a fluke.
Love and Theft — Bob Dylan
Released, weirdly enough, on the exact same day as Jay-Z's The Blueprint (September 11th, 2001), this one caught me off guard from the first track. Dylan's voice has changed so much over the years — more of a guttural growl these days than the high, reedy whine I was expecting. Given that this is the album that helped land him a Nobel Prize in Literature, I went in expecting weightier, more "important"-feeling lyrics; instead it plays like nostalgic old-man music, decent poetry about a lost youth that might have felt urgent and timely if a young Dylan had written it in the 70's, but from a 60-year-old in 2001 it just feels wistful. The more I sat with it, though, the more I came around. This is an album that gives longtime Dylan fans exactly what they want, and I doubt it would have landed the same way as a debut from an unknown artist — but the fact its themes about growing older don't relate to me yet doesn't mean they won't resonate with someone else. Drawing imagery from everyday, plainspoken things is a hallmark of folk songwriting, and my lukewarm reaction here is probably more a personal-taste issue (and maybe an underdeveloped ear for witty folk poetry) than a real flaw in the record. It's actually helped me spot a pattern in my own taste: I don't connect as well with music from older or end-of-career artists, no matter the decade — I tend to like artists more when I'm hearing them young, something worth digging into more in a future issue. I can forgive this album for being made by an older artist; I hope people forgive me for being an old man myself one day. Note to self: revisit this one again in thirty years. For an artist most people my age only knew as "the guy your parents worship," Love and Theft is a genuinely great entry point.
Toxicity — System of a Down
Funny story about System of a Down - my mom legitimately asked for SoaD albums for Christmas one year, and my sister and I enthusiastically obliged. We thought she was either joking or was confused by them being another artist or something, but she was serious and those CD's were on rotation in the family minivan for an entire year. Pretty hilarious and wildly uncomfortable sitting in the back of a van with your middle school friends while Cigaro plays on the Sienna speakers, but I digress. Toxicity is the sound of a band that refused to pick a lane and somehow made that indecision into a signature — one second it's a thrashing metal riff, the next a weirdly catchy pop hook, the next Serj Tankian yelling about prison population statistics over a time signature that changes three times in one verse. By any normal songwriting logic none of this should hang together, and yet "Chop Suey!" and "Toxicity" became legitimate radio hits anyway. I have a soft spot for bands that are technically excellent musicians but refuse to take themselves too seriously about it, and this is one of the best examples of that from this era — weird, political, funny, and heavy record that I can't put down.
Songs in A Minor — Alicia Keys
I can only assume kids these days see this album title and think it's related to Drake. Jokes aside, Songs in A Minor is one of the most impressive debut albums of the decade — Alicia Keys was 20 years old, classically trained on piano since childhood, and somehow arrived on the pop scene fully formed and playing like she was born doing it. "Fallin'" is still one of the great vocal performances of the era, and the way she blends the piano-driven songwriting of someone like Carole King with contemporary R&B and hip-hop production is genuinely rare. This was a mesmerizing listen from start to finish.
Weezer (The Green Album) — Weezer
After years of internal drama and a scrapped, notoriously chaotic follow-up to the Blue Album, Weezer came back in 2001 with the Green Album — ten songs, twenty-eight minutes, almost defiantly simple compared to what came before. Rivers Cuomo reportedly wanted every song stripped down to just the essential hooks, no filler, no digressions, and you can feel that discipline in every track; "Hash Pipe" and "Island in the Sun" are the ones everyone remembers, and rightfully so. It's a much more radio-friendly record than the Blue Album, and some longtime fans never forgave it for that. But I, for one, am willing to forget and forgive. This album isn't trying to be a statement record, just ten solid (and a couple more than solid) pop-rock songs in a row, and to me that's enough.