Loudwire picks the best hard rock album of every year of the 2000s

Loudwire has published a retrospective naming the best hard rock album of each year of the 2000s, revisiting a decade in which no single style stayed on top for very long. The feature expands into a wider ranking of the 40 best rock albums of the era.

The rundown opens at the peak of nu-metal, when the genre ruled radio and labels raced to sign the next big act in the style. The band that comes out ahead in that crowded field is Linkin Park, credited with the best hard rock album in two separate years of the decade. According to the piece, the group changed direction before nu-metal's shelf life ran out, becoming one of the most commercially successful acts of the 2000s.

The early part of the decade also produced a strong crop of emerging pop-punk bands, though the album described as the decade's biggest statement came from '90s veterans. Green Day channeled their anxiety about the modern world into an ambitious rock opera released in 2004, a record that had both fans and critics talking.

The list also follows the fast rise of emo in the mid-2000s and the arrival, in the second half of the decade, of a wave of post-grunge bands that had been finding their footing in the years prior. The takeaway from the retrospective is that the decade never let listeners settle into one dominant sound, offering something for nearly every corner of the rock audience.