Spiritual Machines by Our Lady Peace

Spiritual Machines, Our Lady Peace's fourth album, came out on Columbia in December 2000, and it turned into something the Toronto band never set out to make: a concept record built on inventor Raymond Kurzweil's 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines. Guitarist Mike Turner stumbled on the book in a bookstore, Raine Maida was writing songs at a furious clip, and the whole thing was written and cut in two months while they were still touring Happiness... Is Not a Fish That You Can Catch. Kurzweil himself turns up in short spoken interludes, and his own K250 keyboard is all over the record.

For all the futurism, it sounds warmer and more acoustic than the albums before it, less layered, with Maida's high, keening falsetto front and centre one last time. It also closed a chapter: the last album with producer Arnold Lanni, and the last with Turner for the whole ride. At home in Canada it went double platinum.

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