Legend has it that 1998 is the year we (in the UK at least) got a bit weepy and paranoid, looking for music to make sense of the pre-millennial angst we were feeling. Following the self-congratulatory high of Britpop, the celebrations which followed Labour's ousting of the Tories in the 1997 election and the bizarre public outpourings of grief at the death of Princess Diana, 1998 was one long hangover, complete with depression, ennui, a slight feeling of worthlessness and a strong urge to cuddle up under a duvet and ignore the world outside.

This theory is borne out by several of the year's releases. Albums from such era-defining acts as Pulp, Massive Attack and The Manic Street Preachers were by turns brooding and elegiac, each band expressing in its own way a desire to escape the phoney party of 90s culture, to recover a lost sense of self, of 'truth' as The Manics put it. Wonderfully, it was a year in which artistic integrity appeared to trump a desire for big sales – possibly the last such year to date.

An urge to confront and purge darkness and ugliness was detectable, mixed with a desire to revel in the filth and excess, not with the by-now tired ironic posturing of Britpop, but as a perverse form of protest. Witness the clattering, skeletal horrorshow of drugs, poverty, greed and hate charted by Tricky on Angels with Dirty Faces, possibly his most uncompromising work, or the labyrinthine, mockingly impenetrable evocations of madness on Mansun's second album, Six.

Then there were those for whom the party had all been too much: Sparklehorse's fragile, stuttering Good Morning Spider and R.E.M.'s Up are beautiful but numb, intent merely on surviving after major upheavals, retreating in the face of too much stimulation, be it from drugs, fame or media saturation. Of course, for those in a dodgy state, bursting into tears while clearing out the empties, the late 90s had the perfect prescription: chill out music, a crushingly dull non-genre which would soon become a multi-million-pound business to rival disco's heyday.

In 1998, there were pointers of where this desire to drop out from life's stresses would lead us, but those albums which fulfilled that function were gorgeous, genuine works of art, such as Air's wistful, undulating Moon Safari, Tortoise's post-rock/jazz fusion TNT, or Boards of Canada's arresting debut Music Has the Right to Children, a record whose pastoral sounds and burbling samples helped create a genre known as folktronica. And for those who wanted to keep on partying? Fatboy Slim's huge-selling You've Come a Long Way Baby, Beastie Boys' kaleidoscopic Hello Nasty and Hole's wham-thunk, glam rockin' comback, Celebrity Skin, made sure they were catered for, although even here, self-loathing and morbid thoughts were never far from the surface.

All in all, 1998 was an odd year for music. It was also fascinating, ambitious, compassionate and, above all, human. Pass the duvet.