Oracular Spectacular
2008
They wrote the hits partly as a joke about wanting to be famous, and then the joke worked and made them famous.
★ 4.3
The Albums canon
Sourced and spun.
Every record chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 542 records or filter by genre, artist, and year.
Browse all 542 records or filter by genre, artist, and year.
Arular
2005
Named after her father, a Tamil militant she barely knew, and built largely on a cheap secondhand sequencer in a London flat.
★ 4.5
Homework
1997
Made in a bedroom on borrowed equipment and never meant to be an album, just a run of tracks that kept getting finished.
★ 5.4
Kala
2007
Denied a visa to work in America, she recorded it instead in India, Trinidad, Liberia and Australia, with whoever was in the room.
★ 5.4
Amnesiac
2001
Recorded at the same sessions as Kid A and held back eight months. The band spent years insisting it was not a collection of leftovers.
★ 5.7
Sound of Silver
2007
All My Friends is one piano figure repeated for seven and a half minutes while everything else is built up around it.
★ 6.7
Ray of Light
1998
Madonna had trained her voice for a year to play Evita, which is why she suddenly sounds like she can sing. William Orbit did the rest.
★ 6.8
Random Access Memories
2013
They put the drum machines away and hired session players who had made the records they grew up on. Giorgio Moroder narrates his own life.
★ 6.8
Discovery
2001
Daft Punk set out to make the music they had loved at ten years old, and had the whole album animated as a film.
★ 7.0
Kid A
2000
Singer Thom Yorke pulled the lyrics out of a hat because he could not write, and the band released it with no singles and no interviews.
★ 8.8