When Air's Moon Safari arrived out of nowhere in early 1998, the prevailing opinion - wrong, but prevailing - amongst many pop listeners was that "electronic music" either meant "faceless techno bollocks" or icy robots like Kraftwerk. The duo of Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoit Dunckel proved them wrong, being masters of synthetic sounds both highly melodic and as warm as a summer breeze. Moon Safari wound up becoming one of the most acclaimed albums of the decade, even amongst "rockist" music critics who'd previously dismissed anything that had a whiff of "electronica." Ironically, many of those same critics would turn on Air when it remodelled itself as a prog-rock act on 2001's 10,000 Hz Legend. 

First listen: