He’s been producing music for over 20 years. He’s worked with everyone from Björk, Madonna, Britney Spears, to Alanis Morissette, to name a few. Without a doubt, UK songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Guy Sigsworth is one of the most accomplished and well-respected people working in the music industry today.

His production trajectory can be broadly described as going from experimental to mainstream, though he recently got the chance to indulge in freakier sounds with Chinese artist SingerSen. Early Sigsworth productions, from the dawn of the ‘90s, are usually danceable; cloaked in thick, hazy atmosphere; featuring synth pads that pulse and recede like waves; laced with busy high-frequency percussion; and contain the harpsichord. He also liked to throw in some Indian flavor from time to time, featuring tabla, sitar, and Indian music scales; this habit continues today. It was clear from the beginning that Guy pays little regard for staying within genre boundaries.

From the late ‘90s on, Guy began to incorporate samples, reversed keys, scratchy distortion, pitch-bent basslines and glitchy sound effects into his pieces. He also has a propensity for working with female vocalists with distinctive tones, beginning with Imogen Heap in the mid-‘90s, then Björk, Kate Havnevik, and Diana Vickers.

By the time he was working with Madonna, Britney, and his duo Frou Frou in the 2000s, he had shifted much of his focus towards shiny, polished pop, tracks that sometimes seem to overflow with instruments. His sonic palette since the start has been heavily electronic, with repeated attempts at electric guitar parts usually sounding flat. This is compensated by his impressive skill at arranging string parts, whether they need to sound threatening, kinetic, or just plain pretty.

Capable of playing off-kilter or straight down the middle, Sigsworth can flip from aggression to beauty in his work without breaking a sweat. On the eve of his next major project release, Alison Moyet’s the minutes, here’s a countdown of Guy’s best productions based on creativity, complexity, and emotional connection.

Here’s a typical example of Sigsworth’s signature sound in the 2000s: pitch-bending electro bass squelches that spew sinister smoke in the verse, before cinematic strings bring sweeping sentimentality in the chorus.

Was there any way that this guy’s work on Björk’s best album wouldn’t come up? Guy’s production contribution for Homogenic—he also worked on the classic “All Is Full of Love” as an instrumentalist—is minimal compared to his regular tendencies, but effective an remarkable all the same. The airy organ, tumbling backwards keys and moaning percussion aurally approximate human breaths and heartbeats, as if we hear her bodily sensations along with her voice.

Before the Swedish DIY pop artist reminded everyone how awesome she was in 2005 (and rerecorded this track in a simpler style), Guy worked with Robyn on two tracks, both examples of edgy electronic pop. “Should Have Known” stands slightly above “Blow My Mind” thanks to its breathing, pumping sonics via a rubbery bassline and drifting synth pads.

Sigsworth’s duo with Imogen Heap only lasted for one album, but what an album it is. Concocting a heady mix from his favorite shades of pop, electronica, symphonic, Indian and jazz trumpet, and positively overflowing with instruments, you get the sense that the producer found a perfect match in Heap and together, they did whatever the heck they wanted. Impossible to pick just one representative from the album, “Must Be Dreaming” gets the spotlight for its varied instrumentation and shifting moods.

An excellently placed spoken word sample (delivered by Charlotte Gainsbourg) and a keening synth line immediately set the tone for Madge’s track as fashionably lonely. The producer then builds the song from a groovy verse section, driven by a cool beat and filtered bass licks, towards a dreamy chorus washed over by tidal keys and pads.

Paramore’s new, self-titled, album is its highest charting to date, debuting at number one on both the UK and US album charts. It is also one of the band’s more critically appreciated albums to date. This all comes in spite of the fact that this album, the fourth studio album of its career, is the first since the departure of founding members Josh and Zac Farro.

With the Brothers Farro gone, the band’s remaining members, Hayley Williams, Jeremy Davis, and Taylor York, are left to pick up the songwriting load that had typically been carried by Josh Farro. And the three have seemed to fare pretty well, crafting an album of 17 (!) pretty stellar tracks. Though it’s certainly the group’s poppiest effort to date, incorporating more pop production techniques and varied approaches to songwriting, Paramore still holds onto its pop-punk roots. Williams sounds as good as ever and amongst the softer pop tracks, the band shows they still know how to rock on songs like “Be Alone”, “Anklebiters”, and “Daydreaming”.

You shouldn’t feel bad if you find it hard to make it all the way to the end of Together We’re Stranger. While the album clocks in at only 47 minutes over seven tracks, it has a way of finding every emotional vulnerability a person could have and prodding at it until it opens up and bleeds until there’s nothing left but the “hollow thump of life that has no taste”. Yet if you’re still reeled in by the time “The Break-Up for Real” comes along, you might just find yourself able to breathe. Tim Bowness’ vocals and lyrics range from complete defeat to piercing pain throughout Together We’re Stranger, but on this track he sounds like he’s arrived at something close to peace. The three “short stories in song” that close off this LP get a reflective, almost optimistic conclusion in “The Break-Up for Real”, which finds Bowness able to articulate past heartbreak in a way unlike the six tracks that precede it. Many of the songs—“Things I Want to Tell You”, especially—are so devastating because they convey how people are often unable to express themselves under the weight of sorrow. Bowness’ lyrics capture this state through use of vague images and elliptic phrases—listen how he drags out the phrase “roll me over slow” on “Things I Want to Tell You”. In contrast, “The Break-Up for Real” finds Bowness expressing his past woes as someone who has let himself fall back into the rhythms of the real world.

Klinger: You know, for years I’ve been saying that punk created a dividing line among musicians, one that extended beyond just the musical differences. I’ve said that pre-punk musicians were basically people of somewhat above-average intelligence pretending to be a lot smarter than they are, while musicians who came up in the aftermath of punk were people of somewhat above-average intelligence pretending to be a lot dumber than they are. I may be overgeneralizing, but it does seem that in the 1960s and ‘70s, our rock stars seemed to have all the answers with their acid consciousness and their gurus and whatnot. Around the time punk hit, it became pretty clear to younger generations that easy answers only led to more questions. Which brings us to Nirvana, whom we last heard from way up top at No. 3 on the Great List.

His stage name translates as “Rotten World” but lately, life for Mondo Marcio has been pretty sweet. One of Italy’s top rappers, the artist has for the last decade been helping give form to a highly misunderstood genre of music in his home country and selling loads of albums in the process. A once callow teenager taken in by the world of hip-hop, he has now blossomed into a fully assured individual who works steadily to reinvent the genre through a particularly Italian perspective. Six proper albums into his career, Mondo (whose real name is Gianmarco Marcello) has now cultivated a style that incorporates everything from electronica and R&B to orchestral pop and dancehall reggae into his rumbling, bass-saturated brand of hip-hop.

Born in Milan, the 26-year-old struggled with a difficult upbringing that saw his home-life in disarray and at the mercy of Social Services. With such an inauspicious start in life, the rapper was left to fend for himself, trying to keep afloat, rather unsuccessfully, with school and the troubles of a broken family life until inspiration finally hit. With courage and a burgeoning sense of curiosity, Mondo abandoned the everyday routines of teenage life for the more dangerous and exciting turns of the music world. Adopting a stage name that would reflect the youngster’s outlook on life, Mondo quickly worked his way up, spitting rhymes and cutting tracks, honing his craft until he could manage to put together a solid collection of work to bring to the masses. After releasing a demo, which he shopped around to a number of music execs at independent labels, the young Italian soon caught the attention of those in the growing circles of the hip-hop communities in Italy. A proper debut was released in 2006 and since then, the platinum-selling artist has been churning out albums that have further carved a niche in the thriving and vibrant scene of Italian hip-hop.