The Best R&B Albums of the 2000s

LaFace pushed it out in March 2004 and the RIAA has since certified it diamond. Spotify carries only the twenty-one-track Expanded Edition, which is where My Boo sits — it was not on the original pressing. Lil Jon built Yeah! as crunk with an R&B vocal bolted on top, but the spine is Confessions Part II, where Jermaine Dupri and Bryan-Michael Cox hand him a bare piano figure and let the guilt do the arranging.

Half of it was cut with the Dap-Kings in Brooklyn under Mark Ronson, with Salaam Remi producing the rest. Rehab opens on a horn figure that could pass for 1964 until her phrasing lands behind the beat and drags the whole thing somewhere ruder. Five Grammys followed in 2008. Border case: British retro-soul rather than American radio R&B, and the list is better for it.

Blackground put it out on 7 July 2001, seven weeks before the plane crash in the Bahamas that killed her at twenty-two. Timbaland and Static Major wrote most of it, and We Need a Resolution is the evidence: a detuned snake-charmer line, drums that keep dropping a limb, and a vocal that answers none of the questions it keeps asking.

Clive Davis built J Records around her and collected five Grammys in one night for it, Song of the Year included. Fallin' is barely arranged — a three-chord organ loop, a gospel choir dropped in late, and a voice that bends the last note of every line flat on purpose. She played most of the keyboard parts herself. Spotify capitalises the title as Songs In A Minor.

Columbia timed the release to her twenty-fifth birthday, 4 September 2006, which is where the title comes from. Swizz Beatz gives Ring the Alarm an actual siren and a shouted hook, and she sings the entire thing at the top of her range with no interest in sounding composed. Rodney Jerkins, Rich Harrison and the Neptunes take the rest.

Timbaland and Nate Hills built nearly all of it, and the trick is that SexyBack barely uses the falsetto everyone hired him for — the lead is a distorted, filtered growl with Timbaland answering it. That track took Best Dance Recording at the 2007 Grammys. Border case: a pop star's record, but the production language is R&B and half the decade copied it.

Geffen released it in December 2005 and it entered the Billboard 200 at number one. Be Without You picked up two Grammys and earns them in the second verse, where Bryan-Michael Cox thins the track down to a keyboard pad and she sings underneath it rather than over it. The U2 cover is the one obvious skip on an otherwise tight sequence.

Star Trak put her under the Neptunes' wing, and Milkshake is the leanest thing they made all decade: a small wooden percussion loop, one bass note, a handclap, and a hook with no business working as well as it does. Andre 3000, Nas and Raphael Saadiq all guest. Spotify's edition tags that single as a Radio Mix and lists Trick Me as a Club Mix.

Eight years passed between Love Deluxe and this, and the band returned quieter instead of bigger — more acoustic guitar, fewer keyboards, Stuart Matthewman's parts tucked almost under the drums. By Your Side never raises its voice, which is exactly why it still works at three in the morning. It won Best Pop Vocal Album at the 2002 Grammys.

Fourteen weeks at number one for We Belong Together, and Billboard later named it the top song of the entire decade. Jermaine Dupri and Manuel Seal hang it on two borrowed melodies — Bobby Womack and The Deele both sit in the credits — then strip the arrangement almost bare so the bridge has somewhere to land. Island Def Jam got the comeback of the decade out of it.

Timbaland produced the bulk of it and Kanye West turned up for one track, which tells you where 2004 sat. Who Is She 2 U is the best thing here: a two-note guitar figure, a beat that keeps stopping dead, and Brandy stacking her own harmonies until they crowd out the lead. Atlantic undersold it badly and it became a cult record instead.

Tony! Toni! Toné!'s old frontman went full 1966 here, and Columbia let him track it to sound like a Motown single, tambourine on every backbeat. 100 Yard Dash runs well under three minutes and never repeats an idea. Stevie Wonder plays harmonica elsewhere on the album. Border case: retro-soul, one of the two wings this list exists to cover.

A songwriter first: Irreplaceable and Mario's Let Me Love You were his before he had hits under his own name. Because of You won Best Contemporary R&B Album at the 2008 Grammys, and the title track is Stargate at their most restrained — a finger-snap, a muted guitar figure and a melody that never once shouts. Spotify capitalises it Because Of You.

Terius Nash wrote Umbrella and Single Ladies with Tricky Stewart before making this, and it shows in how little he cares about verses. Walkin' On The Moon floats a synth arpeggio over an almost-absent drum track for five minutes without ever resolving. Spotify renders the title as Love Vs Money, with no full stop, and lists the lead single under its explicit name.

First record as a trio, cut after two members left in 2000, with Beyoncé taking a writing and production credit on nearly every track. Bootylicious runs on the guitar figure from Stevie Nicks's Edge of Seventeen, slowed and looped, with the vocal arrangement doing the job a chorus would usually do. Columbia's sequence runs eighteen cuts and roughly a third of them are filler.

Rich Harrison took the drum break from The Meters' Oh, Calcutta! and let it run almost unaltered, so 1 Thing is go-go rhythm dropped into a pop single, with her vocal fighting the drums the whole way. Nothing else on the record gets near it. Spotify's edition appends bonus remixes, including a version of that single featuring Eve.