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Just two years ago, a now-infamous article in The Washington Post declared the “slow, secret death of the electric guitar”. It cited a decline in sales of the instrument, from 1.5 million a year in 2007 to slightly more than a million a decade later. The report then became the subject of a question put to Eric Clapton, one of the world’s most famous players, who said (almost certainly joking), “maybe the guitar is over”.
To the wide-ranging cluster of bands including Foals, Black Midi, Fontaines DC and Idles, the majority of shortlisted albums are all notable for their experimental and technically brilliant use of the instrument. So what exactly is going on?
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In the late Nineties and early Noughties, you couldn’t move for “guitar bands”, many of whom were lumped into the era that is now referred to as “landfill indie”. Razorlight, The Kooks, The View, The Pigeon Detectives, The Wombats, The Fratellis, The Libertines… and our token American friends, Kings of Leon. Mediocrity in British music had become synonymous with the image of the guitar-wielding white indie kid. Guitars were suddenly, impossibly, uncool.
Part of the problem seemed to lie in how the guitar had become so closely associated with one genre. Case in point, when Kasabian claimed they were going to “save guitar music from the abyss” during a promo for their latest album,
Responded by listing “10 new guitar acts to be excited about right now” – all of which were white, indie-rock bands who weren’t doing anything particularly revolutionary with the instrument.
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A new wave of British guitar bands was already being pioneered by the likes of The Libertines, Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand when the Sheffield-formed Arctic Monkeys arrived on the scene. But their 2006 debut – the defiantly titled Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not – is arguably the most generation-defining, by a band experiencing the kind of hype that hadn’t been seen since Oasis with Definitely Maybe. Alex Turner’s sardonic and keenly observational lyrics on songs like “Fake Tales of San Francisco” and “When the Sun Goes Down” had fans clamouring to get into their early shows. It was an early example of the power the internet would hold over the music industry – propelling them from an unknown indie band on MySpace to the top of the charts in the space of six months.
Please Please Me has a rhythm to it like little else released by The Beatles. Songs like “Twist and Shout” and “I Saw Her Standing There” have an energy that reflects the youthful vim of the band themselves, who were raring to go following the number one single from which the album takes its name. Their harmonies are thrilling to hear, and this is arguably the best album for capturing the band’s raw power.
In 2003, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs stuck a middle finger up to the naysayers who scoffed that they were little more than a bunch of posers. Their debut album Fever to Tell is a bristling record loaded with New York snark supplied by Karen O’s impressive vocal turns. Nick Zinner keeps the urgency going with roaring guitar licks while Brian Chase offers earth-shaking percussion on the likes of “Date With the Night” and “Y Control”. More than trendsetters – the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were the brains behind the smartest album of that year.
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Kanye West called it “white crunk music”. The band themselves called it “music for girls to dance to”. And songs such as “This Fire” certainly livened things up their irresistible hooks and disco energy, as frontman Alex Kapranos turned the male gaze on its head with lyrics like “I can feel your lips undress my eyes”. Fifteeen years later and “Take Me Out” still makes you swing your hips.
Blur versus Oasis is a battle music fans will be waging for decades to come, but when it comes to debut albums, Oasis emerge as top dogs. Definitely Maybe was exciting, aggressive and loaded with attitude: a 22-year-old Liam Gallagher spits and snarls over the reverb-soaked guitars of “Cigarettes & Alcohol”, and soars on that falsetto for “Live Forever”. Among the “too cool for school” alt-rockers who spurned the glitz and glamour of fame, Oasis asserted themselves as the definitive rock and roll stars.
Stefani Germanotta’s debut album The Fame brought maximalist pop back to the forefront of the late-Noughties music scene, in an industry that was desperately lacking in pop divas. Lady Gaga already sounded famous and she acted famous – but that doesn’t mean her music couldn’t stand on its own. Songs like “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich” and “Just Dance” seemed to convey Gaga’s love of fame and hedonism while remaining supremely self-aware of its superficiality. To top it off, it was masterfully produced and resplendent with slick, catchy dancepop and Eurodisco influences.
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Kendrick Lamar subtitled his debut record “A Short Film by Kendrick Lamar”, and indeed it feels as though you’re watching the movie of his early life – such is the autobiographical nature of this record. He raps in low, furtive tones, interrupted by voicemails from his family (his mother asks him pleadingly to return her car) that reinforce the familial themes. It is family, and faith, that keep Lamar on the outskirts of a world of violence and sin. Even this early on his career you hear the virtuosity and acute understanding of rhythm – Good kid, m.A.A.d City now stands as a classic album from a rapper who chooses the power of storytelling over a cheap punchline.
Not every great debut album is defined by whether the artist has landed on their “sound” by the first track. Led Zeppelin were still figuring things out when they released their self-titled debut, yet it is essential because it laid the groundwork for what they would go onto achieve the following decade. “We were learning what got us off most and what got people off most, ” Robert Plant said. You had the blues and folk notes on “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You”, and the chugging rock of “Communication Breakdown”; Plant’s yowling vocals and Jimmy Page’s guitar. It did the trick.
“It was the crap coming out of the radio that made us want to be in a band more than anything else, ” Jim Reid told Rolling Stone for the 30th anniversary of the Scottish alt-rocker’s debut album Psychocandy. “Because it was like, ‘Why is everything we hear so f***ing awful?’ That was the main driving force: how bad things were.” Psychocandy was certainly like nothing anyone else released at that time. Inspired by the Velvet Underground and The Stooges, the Reid brothers loaded their debut with buzzy guitars and hair-raising levels of feedback on singles like “You Trip Me Up” and “Never Understand”. It paved the way for countless shoegaze and alt-rock bands in the decades that followed.
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Grace is a masterpiece, and the only album the perfectionist Jeff Buckley was satisfied with before he drowned, aged 30, in a freak accident in Memphis in 1997. Yet had Grace been the only material ever released under his name (live recordings, covers and demos were released posthumously), it would have been enough to prove he was a rare and exceptional talent. His exquisite rendering of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, his melismatic singing on “Grace” and the church-like hush of “Lover, You Should Come Over” – all of this and more carved out a rich legacy that ensures Buckley’s music will never fade.
The whipsmart, cynical, outrageous young man on Eminem’s major label debut was a breath of fresh air – or perhaps more of a slap in the face – after a spate of soulful, conscious hip hop records. Of course, the rampant misogyny and homophobia his so-called “character” Slim Shady spat out caused uproar, regardless of how surreal the scenarios to which they were applied were. Arguably what stands out the most on The Slim Shady LP is the sheer technical skill and lyrical ability that few have been able to match since.
Not only did it lay the groundwork for so many punk, rock and heavy metal bands that came after them – but the manic rhythms and raw intensity of their power-chord ballads featured on The Who's my Generation propelled rock and roll to new heights in 1965.
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“Saviours of rock and roll!” “The greatest rock band since the Rolling Stones!” You have to pity The Strokes, who released their debut album under the biggest wave of hype imaginable. Yet it’s hard to deny the impact Is This It had on rock music – critics have argued that the Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand wouldn’t have existed if not for this band. They eschewed pre-programmed beats and autotuned vocals in favour of a gritty post-punk approach, and the result was an album that reinvigorated a floundering music industry, and inspired an entire generation of bands.
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