Plans
2005
I Will Follow You into the Dark was recorded live in a hallway with one microphone, which is why you can hear the room.
★ 3.9
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.
Chutes Too Narrow
2003
James Mercer, who essentially is the Shins, recorded most of it in his own basement. A film later put an earlier song in front of everybody.
★ 4.5
XO
1998
Smith had just played the Academy Awards in a white suit, in front of an audience that had no idea who he was.
★ 4.8
Michigan
2003
The first of the fifty state albums, with Stevens playing most of the instruments himself and naming songs after towns nobody writes about.
★ 5.0
Figure 8
2000
Smith recorded much of it at Abbey Road with full arrangements, and titled it after the ice-skating figure, a loop that goes nowhere.
★ 5.1
Vampire Weekend
2008
Four Columbia students made it in dorm rooms and a church basement, and spent years answering for borrowing from African guitar records.
★ 5.4
Teen Dream
2010
Recorded in a converted church in upstate New York, and built almost entirely from an organ, a drum machine and a slide guitar.
★ 5.4
Merriweather Post Pavilion
2009
There is no guitar anywhere on it, which for a rock band was the point. It is named after a Maryland concert amphitheatre.
★ 5.7
Either/Or
1997
Smith doubles his own voice on almost every song, which is why it sounds like two people whispering the same thing slightly apart.
★ 6.1
The Smiths
1984
Johnny Marr knocked on Morrissey's door with a friend to propose the band. Morrissey had been writing letters to the music papers for years.
★ 6.7
Illinois
2005
Stevens announced he would make one of these for all fifty states, then made two and stopped. One song is about John Wayne Gacy.
★ 6.9
The Queen is Dead
1986
The band were in a legal fight with their label while making it, and the title track opens with a clip from a 1962 British film.
★ 8.4