The Best Post-Rock Albums of the 2000s

Two discs, four tracks, and a sleeve you had to unfold like a map — Constellation shipped it with hand-assembled inserts because the band wouldn't have it any other way. 'Storm' begins with a brass fanfare that sounds like a marching band gathering in a field, then spends twenty-two minutes taking that fanfare apart again. Nothing else that year moved so slowly on purpose.

Five pieces, forty-five minutes, not a word sung, made by four Texans who had spent the previous year fielding questions about their last sleeve. 'Your Hand In Mine' became the one everybody knows — it carries Friday Night Lights, a hundred thousand graduation videos and at least one marriage proposal I have been told about personally. It still holds when you sit with it properly.

An untitled record by a band singing in an invented language, packaged with blank pages so buyers could write their own lyrics in. Half the press treated the whole thing as a prank. 'Untitled #8 (Popplagið)' ends it with Jónsi screaming over a collapsing band for four straight minutes, and two decades on it is still how they finish concerts.

Named for the drummer's dog and recorded with Dave Fridmann, fresh off Flaming Lips duty, who pushed the band toward strings, banjo and — heresy — audible singing. It is their shortest album by some distance. 'Take Me Somewhere Nice' has Stuart Braithwaite murmuring a vocal buried so deep you can miss it, and I prefer it to most of their louder work.

Steve Albini recorded it, the sleeve carried a hand-drawn diagram linking record labels to arms manufacturers, and the band spent the promotional cycle refusing to explain either decision. 'Rockets fall on Rocket Falls' is the one I keep returning to — a long build that stays quiet far past the point of comfort before the strings finally arrive. Colder than the record before it, deliberately.

A Toronto band with two drummers who recorded in farmhouses and outbuildings rather than studios, which explains the room noise sitting under everything. 'Classic Noodlanding' opens with brushed snare and a horn line before the guitars work out what they are doing. Constellation put it out, it never got the Godspeed attention, and it is by far the warmer record.

Takaakira Goto's Tokyo quartet play sitting down with their heads bowed, which reads as a gimmick until you watch them hold it for ninety minutes. 'The Flames Beyond The Cold Mountain' takes eleven minutes to travel from one clean guitar figure to something close to physical assault. Albini engineered this one and left all the air in the room where it was.

Efrim Menuck's side project started as a chamber trio and had swollen to nine people by this record, most of whom could not really sing and did anyway. That is the charm: ragged group vocals, sour violin, hope you can hear straining. 'The Triumph Of Our Tired Eyes' closes it with the whole room singing at once and I have never once got through unmoved.

Aaron Turner's band came out of hardcore and spent this record inventing what critics soon started calling post-metal — riffs repeated until they stop registering as riffs at all. 'The Beginning and the End' opens with a wordless female vocal drifting over a downtuned churn, and the concept album about drowning follows from there. Heavy the way weather is heavy.

Spotify files this as 'S/T' and dates it 2007; most people will tell you 2008, and the band from San Marcos, Texas have never seemed remotely bothered which. 'The Mighty Rio Grande' is the reason anyone outside Texas knows them — it is the one that keeps turning up in film trailers and sports montages, and it earns the placements within ninety seconds.

Sheffield, a laptop, and a drummer determined to play the breakbeats himself rather than trigger them — that argument is the whole record. 'Retreat! Retreat!' is the four-minute one they still close sets with, all stuttering programmed drums and guitars arriving like a door being kicked in. The band later scored a video game, which makes a certain sense.

Their second album shipped with artwork reading 'This plane will crash tomorrow', printed weeks before September 2001, and they have been answering for it ever since. 'Greet Death' opens the record with the loudest thing on it, which is backwards and exactly right. Rawer and far less patient than the album that eventually made them famous.

A Chicago trio who build everything from loop pedals in front of you — Mike Sullivan starts a figure, stacks it live, and the other two climb aboard once there is something to climb. 'Harper Lewis' is named for a friend and travels from near-silence to genuine violence inside six minutes. Their second record, and the one where the method clicked.

From Beverly, Massachusetts, which nobody associates with anything, and they built an audience by touring relentlessly in a van with no label help worth mentioning. 'Sea Lawn' shows what they were reaching for: patient, bright, considerably more major-key than most of their peers dared be. The whole thing still sounds like a band overachieving on limited means.

Jimmy LaValle recorded this in Sigur Rós's converted swimming pool in Iceland, with members of that band wandering in to play on it, a sentence that could only describe 2004. 'Twentytwofourteen' is four minutes of Rhodes, brushed drums and something like contentment. Sub Pop picked it up, television licensed it heavily, and suddenly everyone knew him.

Chicago's most restless band opened this one with 'Seneca', a blast of distortion apparently designed to frighten off anyone who had turned up for the dinner-party version of them. John McEntire engineered at Soma, as ever. Their fourth album, made once everybody had decided they knew what Tortoise did, and it spends fifty minutes arguing otherwise.

Members of Isis and the wider Neurosis circle gathered in a Los Angeles room around a pedal steel guitar, which is the detail separating them from everyone else here. Every title reads like a line from a collapse narrative: 'Alone and Unaware, the Landscape Was Transformed in Front of Our Eyes' opens the thing, and yes, they all run on like that.