15 Best Rock Albums Of The 2000s, Ranked

I've said it before about hip-hop. I've said it about classic rock. And I'll say it again today—I'll be riding the '90s till the wheels fall off. Britpop, grunge's last gasps, the whole beautiful, overproduced mess of it. But the 2000s? That's where rock music stopped playing nice and started swinging blind. The genre was backed into a corner—digital piracy was torching the old business model, nu-metal was burning itself out in real time, and then out of nowhere, a bunch of kids in leather jackets and thrift-store denim kicked the garage door open and reminded everyone what a guitar was actually for.