Yesterday, Vanyaland posted a list of 1993 albums turning 25 in 2018. It started as a simple exercise, with matching numbers: 25 albums turning 25. It immediately expanded to 50 albums, then to 70 albums. It could have extended 100-plus deep, because ’93 was such a killer year for music. Today (January 3), we’re keeping the initial rules about this annual series of posts intact, aligning the number of records with its anniversary. As we shine a light on the paranoid, scattered time of 2003, we’re limiting our picks to 15 albums, all turning 15 years old this year. The twist, then, is we turn the attention to you to fill in what’s missing. While 2003 offered some classics, and a handful of records that defined the strange decade known as the aughts, there were plenty dark horse LPs across a changing musical landscape that saw the underground rise and the mainstream twitch. Much like today, Radiohead, Beyoncé, and Jay Z reigned supreme, and a whole lot of bands had “The” in their names (from Strokes to Rapture to White Stripes to Yeah Yeah Yeahs to Shins to Wrens; that last one providing a common pick for Album of the Year in The Meadowlands). So go into your closet and dust off that iPod, because 15 years ago wasn’t as far back into the past as it feels, and tell us what you have on your own 15th anniversary list. Apologies to spirited efforts by The Darkness, Kylie Minogue, The Dresden Dolls, and Deftones for just missing our cut. [Note: Release dates are pulled from a variety of online sources.]
February 19: The Postal Service, Give Up
