The 2000s were the last decade when an album sold on a shelf first. The cover was still doing its job as a selling point, and it shows.
The rock that restarted the decade
The Strokes · Is This It (2001) and Arctic Monkeys · Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not (2006) share the same choice: a raw, almost amateur photograph, the opposite of the studio work of the 1990s. On release, the latter set the record for the fastest-selling debut album in a week in the United Kingdom.
Muse · Absolution (2003) goes the other way with a constructed image of silhouettes and cast shadows.
The records that crossed every audience
Linkin Park · Hybrid Theory (2000) is certified diamond in the United States and remains one of the best-selling rock albums of the decade; Meteora (2003) followed three years later.
Coldplay · A Rush of Blood to the Head (2002) and Amy Winehouse · Back to Black (2006) both went far beyond their original audience. The cover of the latter, a black and white portrait, has become inseparable from the artist.
Illustration takes over again
Gorillaz · Demon Days (2005) is drawn entirely by Jamie Hewlett: the band has no face to photograph, its members are characters. It is one of the rare cases where the cover comes before the band.
Daft Punk · Discovery (2001) pushes the same logic in electronic music, with two helmets standing in for two faces for twenty years.
Why this decade holds up so well on a wall
Because it is the last one to have designed for the physical format. From 2010 on, the cover is thought out for the streaming thumbnail: legible small, often centred, more rarely composed. Records from the 2000s take enlargement because that is what they were made for.