The year was 2006. Alexa Chung was still the face of “indie sleaze,” Topshop skinny jeans ruled the high street, and Myspace was where bands lived or died. Every house party had someone clutching an iPod Nano, queuing up Arctic Monkeys or The Killers while insisting you “had to hear this new band.”

For me, 2006 was also the era when print media still reigned. Magazines gave away free CDs! Discovering music wasn’t an algorithmic TikTok trend — it was either from those CDs or (illegally) downloading random things off Limewire, which took hours..

And at the centre of it all was NME.

Why NME Felt Like the Coolest Magazine on Earth

With a run spanning 66 years (1952–2018), New Musical Express was the major music influence for generations of teenagers, including me.

I will admit, even then NME was (and excuse my French) a status symbol for wankers. It thrived on sarcastic witticisms, tongue-in-cheek insults, and the thrill of printing swear words in bold type. For my teenage self, it was a portal into a world where cool people smoked outside dingy venues, name-dropped obscure bands you pretended to know, and drank Red Stripe ironically (I supposed, I was 16).

And for just £1.99, you could buy your way into that world. A world built on skinny jeans, arrogance, and copy dripping with irony.

NME didn’t just cover music. It published the cool adverts, the cool outfits. Vogue might have ruled the catwalks, but NME ruled the student union bars. Those scrappy street-style back pages made “normal” feel aspirational. Check this absolute 2006 diva:

NME’s 2006 Track of the Year List: The Real Taste-Maker

The real currency of NME wasn’t just outfits or sarcasm. It was the lists.

The “Track of the Year” rundown was gospel. Forget the Top 40 churned out weekly on TV l, this was the real hierarchy of taste.

If you knew the number one song, you were in. If you recognised the top ten, you were practically fluent in cool. And if you could casually drop something from the bottom half of the list then congratulations, you were basically the coolest kid at school.

Here’s NME’s full Top 50 Tracks of 2006. You can even listen along on this Spotify playlist

• Hot Chip – Over And Over
• Peter, Bjorn and John – Young Folks
• The Gossip – Standing In The Way Of Control
• Muse – Supermassive Black Hole
• Gnarls Barkley – Crazy
• CSS – Let’s Make Love And Listen To Death From Above
• Amy Winehouse – Rehab
• The Horrors – Sheena Is A Parasite
• The View – Wasted Little DJs
• Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Cheated Hearts
• Klaxons – Gravity’s Rainbow
• Metric – Monster Hospital
• Arctic Monkeys – When The Sun Goes Down
• The Raconteurs – Steady As She Goes
• The Long Blondes – Once And Never Again
• The Holloways – Generator
• Klaxons – Atlantis To Interzone
• Justice Vs Simian – We Are Your Friends
• The Streets – Pranging Out
• Jarvis Cocker – Running The World
• Gnarls Barkley – Smiley Faces
• Muse – Starlight
• Midlake – Roscoe
• Lupe Fiasco – Kick, Push
• The Flaming Lips – The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song
• Maps – Lost My Soul
• Primal Scream – Country Girl
• Hot Chip – Boy From School
• The Dresden Dolls – Backstabber
• Ali Love – K Hole
• Be Your Own Pet – Adventure
• Mates Of State – Fraud In The ’80s
• Nelly Furtado – Promiscuous
• To My Boy – I Am X-ray
• Dan Sartain – Replacement Man
• Kasabian – Empire
• Panic! At The Disco – I Write Sins Not Tragedies
• Muse – Knights Of Cydonia
• The Strokes – You Only Live Once
• The Rapture – Get Myself Into It
• The Sunshine Underground – Put You In Your Place
• Kelis – Bossy
• The Rumble Strips – Motorcycle
• Regina Spektor – Fidelity
• Secret Machines – Alone, Jealous And Stoned
• TV On The Radio – Wolf Like Me
• Howling Bells – Setting Sun
• The Young Knives – She’s Attracted To
• Pull Tiger Tail – Animator
• Larrikin Love – Happy As Annie

Reviewing NME’s Top 5 tracks of 2006

1. Hot Chip – Over and Over
“Like a monkey with a miniature cymbal…” Admittedly, I didn’t come to this track until my early 20s, but that just shows its staying power. Hot Chip’s Over and Over was everywhere, a weird, repetitive, almost hypnotic track that somehow managed to feel both ironic and genuinely brilliant. The kind of song that made you feel instantly cooler for knowing it, even if it was mostly art school nonsense.

2. Peter Bjorn and John – Young Folks
Ah yes, the whistling song. A track so inescapable that adverts, films, and indie discos still dust it off. I both love the innocence of it and hate that it reminds me of ‘Match of The Day’, football commentary style programs.

3. The Gossip – Standing in the Way of Control
This. Was. Cool. Beth Ditto screamed into our souls and we loved every second. Standing in the Way of Control was a queer anthem, a sweaty club staple, and a reminder that not everything had to be skinny jeans and floppy hair. This track still slaps, and Beth remains criminally underrated.

4. Muse – Starlight
Before Muse went full space-opera conspiracy theorists, there was Starlight. Anthemic, dramatic, and written for the moment you stand in an arena, arms aloft, pretending you too are saving the world. For teenage me, this was “serious music”, but now it mostly makes me want to belt along while doing laundry.

5. Gnarls Barkley – Crazy
Maybe the only track on this list your gran would recognize. Crazy was truly everywhere in 2006: radio, clubs, buskers on the high street. It was retro soul blended with hip hop flair, and it felt unstoppable. Still does.

Some names are timeless (Amy Winehouse, Muse, Hot Chip). Others feel like relics of a MySpace-flavoured moment (CSS, The Horrors). Together, they form a perfect time capsule of mid-2000s indie sleaze.

The Collapse of NME Print in the 2000s

Here’s the twist: while I thought NME was gospel, the magazine itself was already in crisis.

Researching this post shattered my teenage illusions. From my bedroom floor, NME looked like the pinnacle of success and cool but the reality? Print was collapsing.

The early 2000s were the last gasp of profitable print. By 2006, circulation was already in freefall. What felt like the glory days to me were actually the beginning of the end for the wider industry.

Editor Charlotte Gunn later admitted: “From the moment we closed the print mag we were a profitable business again.” In other words the glory days I thought I was living through were really the last gasp of print media before the internet swallowed it whole.

By the late 2000s, NME’s site was clogged with banner ads and autoplay videos. The money was no longer in newsstands; it was in clicks.

What NME in 2006 Tells Us About Music in 2025

Looking back, the 2006 list mattered because it made taste.

In 2025, taste is set by algorithms, TikTok trends, and YouTube reacts. Music discovery is faster, wider, but also less… opinionated. Nobody’s telling you what’s cool with sarcastic certainty.

It’s progress, that’s for sure. Democratisation of the musical space gives more space to smaller artists and those outside the UK/USA (notably white) binary. Check the expertly curated data below (I learned how to do pie charts on Canva.)

That all said, I miss the pretentious, £1.99 authority of NME declaring that Hot Chip was the greatest song in the world. Maybe that was ‘easier’, being given the answers to a difficult question.

It was snarky. It was skinny-jeans cool. And god help me, I loved it.