Nevermind
1991
The baby on the cover was paid two hundred dollars. Four months after release it knocked Michael Jackson off the top of the chart.
★ 9.7
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.
OK Computer
1997
Recorded in a fifteenth-century mansion the band rented from an actress, with one track narrated entirely by the computer voice on a Macintosh.
★ 9.4
Automatic for the People
1992
They set out to make a loud record and ended up with a quiet one. John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin wrote the string parts.
★ 8.9
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
In Rainbows
2007
They put it online and let people pay whatever they wanted, including nothing. Some of the songs had been played live for ten years.
★ 8.6
The Bends
1995
They were exhausted and sick of being the Creep band, and nearly fell apart making it. Nothing on it sounds anything like Creep.
★ 8.4
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
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
2002
Reprise refused it, so the band bought the tapes back, streamed the record free, and then sold it to another label owned by the same company.
★ 8.4
Blood Sugar Sex Magik
1991
Producer Rick Rubin moved the band into a Hollywood mansion they were convinced was haunted. Guitarist John Frusciante quit within a year of its release.
★ 8.3
(What's the Story) Morning Glory?
1995
Noel Gallagher wrote most of these songs in a fortnight. A year later, two and a half million people applied to see the band at Knebworth.
★ 7.8
Disintegration
1989
Robert Smith turned thirty, decided he was finished, and made the biggest record of the band's life about it.
★ 7.7
Elephant
2003
Recorded in eight days on equipment made before 1963, with no computers. The bassline everyone knows is a guitar pushed down an octave.
★ 7.7
Grace
1994
Buckley's voice covers about four octaves and he uses most of them. He drowned in the Mississippi three years later, aged thirty.
★ 7.6
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
MTV Unplugged in New York
1993
Cobain asked for lilies and candles on the set, refused to play the hits, and was dead five months later.
★ 7.5
Murmur
1983
Stipe's words are deliberately buried in the mix, and nobody could work them out. Rolling Stone still named it album of the year over Thriller.
★ 7.5
Odelay
1996
The Dust Brothers spent two years layering it out of junk-shop records. The dog on the cover is a Komondor caught mid-jump.
★ 7.5
Superunknown
1994
Singer Chris Cornell wrote Black Hole Sun in about fifteen minutes. Much of the rest is in time signatures that make nodding along hard.
★ 7.4
Ten
1991
The band were called Mookie Blaylock after a basketball player until the label objected, and the album is named for his shirt number.
★ 7.4
The Downward Spiral
1994
Trent Reznor made almost all of it alone. Johnny Cash covered Hurt nine years later and Reznor said the song no longer felt like his.
★ 7.4
Double Nickels on the Dime
1984
Forty-five songs, most under two minutes, and the title is a joke about obeying the speed limit. D. Boon was dead within eighteen months.
★ 7.0
Let it Be
1984
They called it Let It Be mostly to annoy people. The songs run from a joke about answering machines to Westerberg howling that he is unsatisfied.
★ 6.9
Loveless
1991
Kevin Shields plays with the tremolo arm held bent while he strums, which is what makes the chords sag. It nearly bankrupted the label.
★ 6.9
Siamese Dream
1993
Billy Corgan played nearly all the guitar and bass himself, and some songs carry dozens of layered guitar tracks stacked on top of each other.
★ 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
Weezer (The Blue Album)
1994
Ric Ocasek of the Cars produced it, and Spike Jonze cut the Buddy Holly video into an old episode of Happy Days.
★ 6.7
Document
1987
The record where the singer, Michael Stipe, finally sang loudly enough to be understood, though the words still come far too fast to catch.
★ 6.5
Sea Change
2002
Beck wrote it after a nine-year relationship ended and recorded it in about two weeks. His father wrote the string arrangements.
★ 6.4
Tim
1985
Tommy Ramone produced it, and the band got themselves banned from Saturday Night Live after one drunken appearance a few months later.
★ 6.3
Dirt
1992
Singer Layne Staley wrote most of it about his own heroin addiction, and the band recorded it in Los Angeles while the city was burning.
★ 6.1
Out of Time
1991
Losing My Religion is built on a mandolin guitarist Peter Buck had just bought and was learning. They refused to tour the album at all.
★ 6.0
Pinkerton
1996
Named after a character in Madame Butterfly. It failed so badly that Rivers Cuomo disowned it for a decade before everyone decided it was great.
★ 6.0
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
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
American Idiot
2004
Someone stole the master tapes for the album they had just finished, so Green Day started over and wrote a punk rock opera instead.
★ 5.7
Californication
1999
Guitarist John Frusciante rejoined after years of addiction, having to relearn how to play, and wrote the melodies that sold fifteen million copies.
★ 5.7
Badmotorfinger
1991
It came out two weeks after Nevermind and got buried. Soundgarden spent the tour opening for Guns N' Roses instead.
★ 5.5
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
Being There
1996
Singer Jeff Tweedy asked the label to sell the double album at single-album price and took the royalty cut himself so people could afford it.
★ 5.1
Hot Fuss
2004
Mr. Brightside was the first song Brandon Flowers and Dave Keuning ever wrote together, and they never managed to write a bigger one.
★ 5.0
Morning Phase
2014
Beck's father wrote the string arrangements, as he had on Sea Change. It won Album of the Year and Kanye West objected onstage.
★ 5.0
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
Transatlanticism
2003
One line repeats for eight minutes on the title track, with an instrument added at a time until the whole band is playing at once.
★ 4.8
Vs.
1993
The band refused to make videos for any of it, and it sold nearly a million copies in five days anyway.
★ 4.8
Vitalogy
1994
It came out on vinyl two weeks before the CD, and the sleeve reproduces an 1899 medical book the band found and liked.
★ 4.8
White Blood Cells
2001
Recorded in Memphis in about three days. Michel Gondry animated the video for Fell in Love with a Girl entirely out of Lego bricks.
★ 4.8
You're Living All Over Me
1987
J Mascis played much of the drumming as well as the guitar, and played loud enough that the rest of the band wore earplugs.
★ 4.8
Extraordinary Machine
2005
An earlier version leaked online and fans mailed apples to her label demanding its release. She rerecorded almost all of it anyway.
★ 4.4
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
Sublime
1996
Bradley Nowell's dalmatian appears on the cover and in half the songs. He died two months before the record came out.
★ 4.3
Diesel and Dust
1987
The band toured remote Aboriginal communities in the outback first, and wrote the record afterward about what they had seen there.
★ 4.0
Monster
1994
They plugged back in on purpose after two quiet albums, and for years it was the record most often found in second-hand shops.
★ 3.6
Surfer Rosa
1988
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.
★ 3.6
Aha Shake Heartbreak
2004
Three brothers and a cousin, raised on a Pentecostal preaching circuit, playing scrappy Southern garage rock. Britain loved it years before America noticed.
★ 3.1