LCD Soundsystem - Sound Of Silver

The masterpiece. Released on March 20, 2007 and recorded at Longview Farm in North Brookfield, Massachusetts, with the studio walls covered floor to ceiling in silver foil and tin to help James Murphy overcome his deep discomfort with recording his own vocals, Sound Of Silver is LCD Soundsystem's defining statement and one of the greatest albums of the 2000s. The Guardian gave it five stars and named it album of the year. Pitchfork scored it 9.2 and later ranked it the 17th best album of the decade. Drowned in Sound named it album of the year. Mixmag named it album of the month. It received a Grammy nomination for Best Electronic/Dance Album. And yet none of those accolades quite capture what makes it so remarkable.

Where the debut established LCD Soundsystem's dancefloor credentials with wit and energy to spare, Sound Of Silver went deeper. Murphy stripped away the rock posturing he despised and focused on radical emotional specificity, writing about real moments, real losses, and real people with a conversational honesty that landed differently than anything happening in indie music at the time. The coffee not being bitter. The horror of lovely weather during grief. The DFA studios, the frayed DJ, the friends who have drifted. Nine tracks across 55 minutes that are simultaneously less silly, funnier, less messy, sleeker, and more touching than anything that came before.

"All My Friends," Murphy's own attempt to chase the feeling of Joy Division's "Transmission," built entirely in solitary layers rather than with a live band, remains one of the most emotionally overwhelming seven minutes in recent popular music, its piano loop and building momentum arriving at a point of cathartic release that has made it a fixture at milestones and farewells ever since. Time magazine named it one of the ten best songs of 2007. "Someone Great," the devastating meditation on grief disguised as a dancefloor track, and "New York, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down," the weary love letter that would close the band's farewell Madison Square Garden show four years later, complete a record that grows only more resonant as its audience ages alongside it.

Dance-rock for grown-ups. Extraordinary.