Black British folk music is an underserved genre, but Angeline Morrison’s The Sorrow Songs (Folk Songs Of Black British Experience) (2022) goes some way to addressing that. With a soft beauty, Morrison crafts a tapestry of different black perspectives across history, bookending each track with spoken word pieces from prejudiced white people to prove that diversity (and a resistance to it) has existed forever on these isles.

The album that pushed Outkast into the mainstream, Stankonia (2000), remains a hell of a lot of fun, combining Big Boi’s old-school bars and André 3000’s art-school weirdness with a fusion of rap, funk, acid jazz, rave and seemingly anything else that caught their fancy in their newly purchased Stankonia Studios. They made superlative work afterwards, but this is arguably the last album where Outkast were a hivemind rather than a vehicle for 3000 and Boi to indulge their individual whims. And let’s lay our cards on the table: ‘Ms Jackson’ remains the best single of the 2000s. 

Other S albums: Switcheroo by Gelli Haha (2025), Songs To Learn & Sing by Echo & The Bunnymen (1985), Strictly Personal by Captain Beefheart (1968). 

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