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.
1928 Sessions
Hurt cut these, sold almost nothing, and went back to farming. A folklorist found him thirty-five years later using a lyric as an address.
Elvis
His second number one album in a single year, cut in Hollywood between films, with Elvis himself at the piano on several tracks.
Masses
Byrd was a Catholic in Protestant England, and wrote these to be sung in secret at private houses. They were printed without title pages.
West Side Soul
Sam played through a tremolo unit that puts a shiver on every chord, and he sang in a high, urgent voice most bluesmen avoided.
The Bluegrass Sessions
Fleck plays banjo in styles bluegrass had no name for, surrounded by the best acoustic players alive, none of whom show off.
Missa Pange lingua
Josquin takes a plainchant hymn and dissolves it into four voices that imitate each other continuously, so the tune is everywhere and nowhere.
Leader of the Pack
Their producer Shadow Morton put real motorcycle engines and seagulls on the records, and the singers were teenagers from Queens acting out small tragedies.
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.
Ice Pickin'
Collins tuned his guitar to a minor chord and moved a capo around it, which no one else did, and it accounts for the sound.
Concert by the Sea
Garner could not read music, and the tape came from an amateur recorder someone happened to be running at the back of the hall.
Close to You
Karen Carpenter was the drummer, and sang from behind the kit until someone persuaded her to come out in front of it.
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.
After Midnight
By 1956 Cole was a pop star who rarely played piano. Here he sits back down at it, with a small group, after hours.
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.
Live Wire Blues Power
Recorded at the Fillmore in front of a rock crowd who had mostly never heard him, which is why he explains the blues between songs.
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.
Stand By Your Man
She and her producer wrote the title song in about fifteen minutes, and she spent the rest of her life explaining what it meant.
Uptown Saturday Night
Named after a 1974 Sidney Poitier film. Luchini is built on a Dynasty record, and the pair's slang was obscure enough that listeners traded translations.
No One Can Do It Better
He had written much of N.W.A's material, and a car crash months after this destroyed his voice permanently. He was twenty-one.
Ave Maria
The printer Ottaviano Petrucci issued it in 1502, in the first book of polyphony ever set in movable type. Four voices enter one at a time.
Bird and Diz
Parker and Gillespie's last studio meeting, with Monk on piano, playing fast enough that the rest of jazz spent a decade catching up.
Missa Papae Marcelli
The legend that it saved church polyphony from being banned is probably untrue, but the words really do stay audible through six voices.
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.
Where Did You Sleep Last Night?
He tuned his twelve-string low and struck it hard enough to carry bass and rhythm at once. Nirvana closed their unplugged set with the title song.
That Lonesome Song
Johnson had been dropped by his label. He recorded it himself and put it online before any label would touch it again.
Spem in alium
Forty separate voices in eight choirs of five, all of them independent, and at one point every single one sings at once.
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.
Songs for Distingue Lovers
Her voice had gone by then, and she sings behind the beat and around the notes, which turns out to be the whole point.
Power
The cover has his girlfriend in a swimsuit holding a shotgun, which got the record removed from a number of shops.
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.
Lonesome On'ry and Mean
Jennings had just torn up his contract and renegotiated it, winning the right to record his own way. You can hear him testing that.
Hoodoo Man Blues
Buddy Guy played guitar but was credited as Friendly Chap, because he was signed to another label at the time.
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.
Vespro della Beate Vergine
Monteverdi sent it to the Pope hoping for a better job, and it mixes plainchant with writing that would have sounded like theater inside a church.
Two Steps from the Blues
Bland took his trademark squall from a recorded sermon by a Detroit preacher, and worked it into nearly every song he sang afterwards.
The Paul Butterfield Blues Band
The band's rhythm section came straight out of Howlin' Wolf's group, and Butterfield had learned harmonica in Chicago clubs while still at university.
The Hurting
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.
The Complete Recordings
Smith recorded most of these by singing into a horn, before microphones existed, and still filled the room without any amplification at all.
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.
Sinatra at the Sands
Count Basie's orchestra behind him, Quincy Jones's arrangements, and a long unscripted monologue in the middle that is half the reason people keep it.
Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica
The drum figure that opens Be My Baby is four beats long, and Brian Wilson has said he played it hundreds of times over.
Red
Sly Dunbar plays an electronic drum on it, which almost nobody in reggae was doing, and it gives the whole record its metallic snap.
Plans
I Will Follow You into the Dark was recorded live in a hallway with one microphone, which is why you can hear the room.
Night Beat
Recorded across three consecutive nights in the small hours, with a sixteen-year-old Billy Preston on organ and the pop arrangements stripped away.
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.
Home
They made it after suing their own record label, on acoustic instruments, with no drums on most of it. It sold six million anyway.
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.
Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc.
Nashville would not have him, so Yoakam played Los Angeles punk clubs instead, on bills with X and the Blasters, in very tight jeans.
Duran Duran
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.
Diesel and Dust
The band toured remote Aboriginal communities in the outback first, and wrote the record afterward about what they had seen there.
Critical Beatdown
Ced-Gee had already programmed half of Criminal Minded for Boogie Down Productions before making this, and Kool Keith raps like nobody else at all.
Bo Diddley
The beat he hammered out here has been borrowed ever since, by Buddy Holly, the Stones and everyone after. He built his own square guitars.
Clandestino
Chao recorded it on a portable eight-track while moving around Latin America, singing in five languages about people crossing borders without papers.
Benji
Mark Kozelek uses real names throughout, and the deaths in it are real deaths in his family. Almost nothing is dressed up as metaphor.
Z
Jim James recorded the earlier albums in a grain silo on his grandfather's farm for the echo. This is the first made in a real studio.
Wanted! The Outlaws
RCA put it together from recordings already sitting in its vaults, and it became the first country album to sell a million copies.
Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
The band come from Versailles and had spent ten years making records almost nobody outside France bought before this one arrived.
Tumbleweed Connection
Neither John nor Bernie Taupin had set foot in America when they wrote these songs about it. Taupin had been listening to The Band.
The Woods
Sleater-Kinney have no bass player, only two guitars and drums, and here producer Dave Fridmann pushed the levels until everything distorts.
The Diary
Scarface came out of the Geto Boys and produced much of this himself. He talks over the beats as often as he raps.
The Crane Wife
The title song is in three parts, and they are scattered across the record out of order. The story is a Japanese folk tale.
Thank Me Later
Drake had been a teenage actor on a Canadian school drama, and made a record that raps and sings without marking where one stops.
Strictly Business
Both of them rap in the same flat monotone, over Zapp and Eric Clapton records, and somehow the lack of energy is the appeal.
Sublime
Bradley Nowell's dalmatian appears on the cover and in half the songs. He died two months before the record came out.
Sounds of Silence
Their producer added drums and electric guitar to an old acoustic track without telling them. It became a hit and the duo reformed.
Shotgun Willie
Nelson's house had burned down and he had moved to Austin. He wrote the title song on the wrapper of a sanitary napkin.
Shields
They threw away a year's work and began again. All four of them write, which is why nothing quite resolves the way you expect.
Regulate...G Funk Era
The hit is built on a Michael McDonald song from 1982. Warren G is Dr. Dre's stepbrother and got nowhere near his budget.
Section.80
He put it out himself with no label, about the generation born under Reagan, a year before anyone outside Los Angeles knew his name.
Reflektor
They recorded part of it in Jamaica with James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem producing, and David Bowie sings on the title track.
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme
The last track lays a Christmas carol over a real news broadcast, so the two get harder to separate as it goes on.
Pieces of the Sky
Harris wrote Boulder to Birmingham about Gram Parsons's death, which she was still not over. Everything else on it is somebody else's song.
Nashville Skyline
Dylan had stopped smoking and his voice came back completely different, which nobody was expecting. Johnny Cash sings with him on the opener.