“Massive Attack’s mix of influences — rock, hip-hop, house, dub, techno, etc. — constituted what was later dubbed trip-hop and laid the foundations for drum’n’bass,” SPIN wrote in 2002. “The definitive Massive vocalists — Shara Nelson, Horace Andy — are world-weary griots who’ve suffered for our sins,” noted Charles Aaron in 1998 when reviewing the album’s single, “but on ‘Teardrop,’ ex-Cocteau Twin Liz Fraser floats her guileless soprano through an ominous, womblike dubscape.” Groundbreaking and gloomy, this album’s effect on music’s recent history is hard to overstate.

Three discs, three hours, 69 songs. Lovelorn Stephen Merritt proved here that you don’t always have to choose between quantity and quality. A glowing SPIN review explored Merritt’s mission: to crawl inside every “love-song genre he can think of: the civic-pride anthem, the giddy cabaret number, the gospel paean that’s practically a come-on, the Motown/ABBA pocket symphony,” and a few dozen others. The sprawling result is both “grand gesture and a brilliant joke; art about the most personal emotion stamped out in bulk; and a love offering in its own right.”

Who knew that a diminutive firebrand with a revolutionary Sri Lankan family, impeccable taste in samples, and “jump-rope raps” could combine into such a perfect storm? “M.I.A.’s beats scream grimy dancehall party,” SPIN wrote in a March 2005 review. “Origami polyrhythms, electro-current sounds, and slinky squelches populate songs about child prostitution (‘Ten Dollar’) and political prisoners (‘Amazon’).” In naming Arular the second-best album of 2005, the magazine fondly categorized the new sound as a “homemade version of Missy Elliott’s life-affirming, dance-floor-scattering sex-funk gibberish.”