I have created a small test setup in Drupal, containing six nodes with each having a year (integer) and a content (text) field.
The view's configuration is displayed below (sorry for the tinypic links, my reputation is still to low to post images):
http://tinypic.com/r/2zoav4y/5
The sort criteria is first on the year field (descending) and then on the content's text (ascending). The view generates the following result:
http://tinypic.com/r/315ir8m/5
Note that I have excluded the year field from the display. Instead I'm using the grouping option on year in settings of the unformatted list (however, this is not necessary, but the result resembles your question more closely).