Franz Ferdinand
2004
The band said they wanted to make records girls could dance to, and rehearsed in a derelict Glasgow warehouse they had taken over.
★ 2.3
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.
The Hurting
1983
The two of them had played together in a Bath mod band as teenagers, and named this one after a line in a psychology book.
★ 3.9
New Gold Dream
1982
Herbie Hancock turns up to play a keyboard solo on one track, which nobody expected on a Scottish post-punk record.
★ 3.9
Fresh Cream
1966
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.
★ 4.0
Duran Duran
1981
John Taylor's bass carries the tunes the way a lead guitar normally would, which is what separates this from the synth-pop around it.
★ 4.0
Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
2009
The band come from Versailles and had spent ten years making records almost nobody outside France bought before this one arrived.
★ 4.2
Tumbleweed Connection
1970
Neither John nor Bernie Taupin had set foot in America when they wrote these songs about it. Taupin had been listening to The Band.
★ 4.3
Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me
1987
Eighteen songs across a double album, deliberately in as many different styles as the band could manage, recorded in a French farmhouse.
★ 4.4
Discreet Music
1975
Eno was bedridden after a car accident with a harp record playing too quietly to hear properly, and got the idea for ambient music.
★ 4.4
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
The Who Sell Out
1967
One sleeve photograph left Roger Daltrey sitting in a bath of cold baked beans long enough to catch pneumonia. The radio jingles between songs are real.
★ 4.8
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
1974
Peter Gabriel wrote all the words alone against the rest of the band's wishes, and left the group as soon as the tour ended.
★ 4.9
Parachutes
2000
It cost a few thousand pounds to make. Chris Martin has said Yellow came from looking up at the stars outside a Welsh studio.
★ 5.0
Outlandos d'Amour
1978
Made in scraps of studio time for about fifteen hundred pounds, and Roxanne is named after a poster the band walked past in Paris.
★ 5.0
Madman Across the Water
1971
Paul Buckmaster's orchestra was recorded live in the room with the band rather than added afterward, which is why the strings breathe with them.
★ 5.0
Made in Japan
1972
The band thought a live album was a waste of time and only agreed because it was for the Japanese market alone.
★ 5.0
Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!
1970
Recorded on the 1969 American tour, weeks before Altamont. Charlie Watts posed for the cover with a donkey carrying the band's instruments.
★ 5.1
Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy
1975
The songs run in order through the years Elton John and Bernie Taupin spent failing. It was the first album ever to enter at number one.
★ 5.1
Out of Our Heads
1965
Keith Richards wanted horns on the Satisfaction riff and used a fuzz pedal as a placeholder. The placeholder is what got released.
★ 5.4
Meet the Beatles!
1964
Capitol assembled it themselves from a British album and some singles. The half-shadowed cover photograph came from a hotel session that took barely an hour.
★ 5.4
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
Aftermath
1966
Their first album written entirely in-house, with Brian Jones reaching for the marimba, the dulcimer and the sitar between the blues numbers.
★ 5.5
Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
2006
The band's early demos spread on burned CDs and file-sharing sites, passed around by fans rather than the band, long before any label appeared.
★ 5.6
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
A Rush of Blood to the Head
2002
The piano figure in Clocks turned up so late in the sessions that it nearly missed the record. Everything here is built to fill arenas.
★ 5.8
Selling England by the Pound
1973
Gabriel performed these songs in costume, sometimes as a flower. John Lennon mentioned on the radio that he rather liked the band.
★ 5.9
Rio
1982
The videos were shot in Sri Lanka and Antigua on a yacht, which was the point. Patrick Nagel painted the woman on the sleeve.
★ 5.9
Please Please Me
1963
Recorded in a single day. Lennon had a heavy cold and sang Twist and Shout last, in one take, because his voice was about to go.
★ 5.9
Peter Gabriel
1980
Gabriel banned cymbals from the entire record, which forced the drummers into the gated sound that the whole of the eighties then copied.
★ 6.0
My Aim is True
1977
Costello recorded it on days off from his job at a cosmetics factory, backed by an American bar band that included Huey Lewis.
★ 6.0
Imperial Bedroom
1982
Geoff Emerick, who had engineered Sgt. Pepper, produced it, and the lyrics were printed on the sleeve as one unbroken block of text.
★ 6.0
Electric Warrior
1971
Marc Bolan sings everything with the same wobbling vibrato over two-chord boogie, and producer Tony Visconti buried strings underneath it.
★ 6.1
Every Picture Tells a Story
1971
The mandolin on Maggie May was played by a session man paid fifteen pounds, whose name Stewart admitted he had forgotten in the sleeve notes.
★ 6.1
Disraeli Gears
1967
The title came from a roadie getting derailleur gears wrong. They recorded the whole thing in New York in under a week.
★ 6.1
Dare
1981
Singer Phil Oakey found two of his backing vocalists dancing in a Sheffield nightclub and put them on stage within weeks. Neither had sung professionally.
★ 6.1
Brothers in Arms
1985
The first album to sell a million copies on compact disc, and one of the first recorded digitally start to finish.
★ 6.1
Avalon
1982
Roxy Music's last record, made partly in the Bahamas and finished so smoothly it barely sounds played. Bryan Ferry never made another with the band.
★ 6.1
Live at Leeds
1970
They burned the tapes of every other show on the tour and kept this one, packaged deliberately to look like a bootleg.
★ 6.4
This Year's Model
1978
Costello had been working as a computer operator two years earlier. The sleeve was printed deliberately off-center with the camera and tripod showing.
★ 6.7
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
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
Pretenders
1980
Chrissie Hynde moved from Ohio to London, worked in Malcolm McLaren's clothes shop and wrote for the NME before getting a band together.
★ 6.8
Odessey and Oracle
1968
The misspelling on the sleeve was the cover artist's mistake and they left it. The band had broken up before it came out.
★ 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
Closer
1980
Ian Curtis killed himself two months before it came out. The sleeve, chosen beforehand, is a photograph of a tomb.
★ 7.0
Close to the Edge
1972
Bill Bruford finished the drums, decided he never wanted to work that hard again, and left the band before the tour.
★ 7.0
Black Sabbath
1970
Recorded in a single day for a few hundred pounds and released on a Friday the thirteenth. The riff is a devil's interval.
★ 7.1
Another Green World
1975
Eno arrived at the studio with nothing written and worked from a deck of cards printed with instructions. Only five tracks ended up with words.
★ 7.1
Plastic Ono Band
1970
Lennon made it straight after four months of primal scream therapy, with almost nothing on it but piano, bass and drums.
★ 7.5
Mezzanine
1998
The three of them fell out badly making it, and Elizabeth Fraser sang Teardrop while grieving for Jeff Buckley, who had just drowned.
★ 7.6
In the Court of the Crimson King
1973
The Mellotron carries most of it, a keyboard that plays back tapes of a real orchestra instead of synthesizing the sound.
★ 7.6
Disintegration
1989
Robert Smith turned thirty, decided he was finished, and made the biggest record of the band's life about it.
★ 7.7
Violator
1990
The band announced a signing at a Los Angeles record shop and around seventeen thousand people came, which ended with riot police.
★ 7.9
Synchronicity
1983
The three of them recorded in separate rooms because they could no longer stand each other, and then made the biggest album of the year.
★ 7.9
So
1986
The Sledgehammer video was shot frame by frame with Gabriel lying under glass for sixteen hours. Youssou N'Dour sings the end of In Your Eyes.
★ 8.0
Paranoid
1970
The title song was written in about twenty minutes as filler. Tony Iommi plays with plastic fingertips after losing his in a factory.
★ 8.0