Funeral

A game-changing debut from a Montreal collective, Funeral turned a year of personal tragedy into an album of rare emotional scale. Critics greeted it with near-universal acclaim, drawn to the way it pairs intimate, homespun songwriting with towering arrangements of strings, accordion, organ, and a rhythm section that never lets up, and to a mastery of controlled dynamics that lets its anthems build through tension into release. The interplay between its two lead voices gives the songs a conversational, communal feel that most indie rock of the era deliberately avoided.

The album's maximalism is also its most disputed trait. Some reviewers have always found it too fond of drama, too eager to reach for a crescendo, and a couple of the mid-album cuts are routinely singled out as the weak links in an otherwise remarkably uniform tracklist. The vocals are raw and occasionally shaky; the dense layering can occasionally overwhelm its quieter moments.

Lyrically, the album circles death, grief, and the loss of childhood innocence, but its defining move is to answer grief with joy rather than resignation, and its best-known peaks are paradoxically euphoric rather than mournful. Critics largely agree on the album's emotional power; the genuine split is over whether its earnestness is earned or overblown. Time has sharpened that debate even as the album's influence has become impossible to deny, with retrospective decade-end lists regularly placing it among the defining records of the 2000s.