Sourced and spun.
Browse all 542 records or filter by genre, artist, and year.
Franz Ferdinand
The band said they wanted to make records girls could dance to, and rehearsed in a derelict Glasgow warehouse they had taken over.
Elvis
His second number one album in a single year, cut in Hollywood between films, with Elvis himself at the piano on several tracks.
Live Bullet
Seger had been playing for ten years with no national hit when this was taped over two nights at Cobo Hall in Detroit.
Alive!
It is billed as a live album but a good deal of it was rebuilt in the studio afterward. It saved the record label from bankruptcy.
Modern Vampires of the City
Rostam Batmanglij pitched the vocals up and down until they sound like other people, which is why the record keeps slipping out of focus.
Aha Shake Heartbreak
Three brothers and a cousin, raised on a Pentecostal preaching circuit, playing scrappy Southern garage rock. Britain loved it years before America noticed.
Uh-Huh
His label had made him record as Johnny Cougar for years, and this is the first album with his real surname on the cover.
Surfer Rosa
Steve Albini recorded the drums in a bathroom to get the echo, taped studio chat between songs, and finished the whole thing in ten days.
Monster
They plugged back in on purpose after two quiet albums, and for years it was the record most often found in second-hand shops.
Moby Grape
Columbia released five singles from it on the same day, which made radio ignore all of them and effectively finished the band.
Bring the Family
Cut in four days with a band of Ry Cooder, Nick Lowe and Jim Keltner, by a man who had just got sober and had nothing.
Is This It
Singer Julian Casablancas sang through a guitar amplifier to get that flattened, distant voice, and the whole thing was recorded in a basement.
Younger Than Yesterday
Chris Hillman had never written a song before and suddenly wrote four, because Gene Clark had left and Crosby could not fill the gap alone.
Slippery When Wet
They played demos to groups of New Jersey teenagers and cut the songs the kids liked least. It sold twenty-eight million copies.
Night Moves
Half of it was cut with the Muscle Shoals house band, and the title song is Seger remembering a summer twenty years earlier.
New Gold Dream
Herbie Hancock turns up to play a keyboard solo on one track, which nobody expected on a Scottish post-punk record.
Hospice
A song cycle set in a hospice ward, about a worker and a dying patient, that most listeners take as being about something else entirely.
Fresh Cream
Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker had already been throwing things at each other in a previous band. Baker's drum solo takes up five minutes.
Diesel and Dust
The band toured remote Aboriginal communities in the outback first, and wrote the record afterward about what they had seen there.