3. Radiohead - In Rainbows (2008)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9IODJdi3GA Elbow are a band famed for their dull as dishwater, by-numbers turgid indie. In league with 6Music (who are in effect Elbow's political wing) they have become standard-bearers for what PopJustice's Peter Robinson dubbed "the new boring". Understandably, such a derogatory genre name never really caught on, but TNB neatly describes a group of artists who emerged in the mid to late 2000s, gaining hysterically over the top praise from the "real music" crowd, but sending everyone else to sleep. 2008 was the year TNB hit the Mercury Prize, with Elbow winning and another stalwart of that genre, Adele, on the shortlist. Also included were The Last Shadow Puppets, essentially a freelance internship programme run by Alex Turner to give substandard singers a leg up in the industry. That Radiohead's In Rainbows lost out against such uninspiring competition is frankly befuddling. It is arguably the best album of their career (yeah, we went there) but it also paved the way for online self-releasing that is so commonplace nowadays. Bands announcing new albums out of the blue seems to happen every month now, but when Radiohead did it back in 2008, it was genuinely ground-breaking. Perhaps this direct challenge to the music industry is precisely why it didn't win. The Mercury Prize is, after all, an industry knees up, so it's feasible they would want to suppress anything that threatens their power. Remember Napster? Case closed.