New Forms

New Forms won the Mercury Prize and made drum & bass briefly respectable, a double album with a live band that brought the genre a mainstream legitimacy it had never quite had. 'Brown Paper Bag' was everywhere in 1997, and the record's breadth is real. The prize is not a ranking, which is why it sits just below Modus Operandi rather than above, but as a statement of the genre's arrival it stands alone. It made D&B legible without dumbing it down.

Drum and bass played as a band, with upright bass and live percussion, when the genre was almost entirely machines. Two hours long and occasionally sprawling. It took the Mercury and dragged the music onto the national news for a fortnight.