Pet Sounds
1966
Brian Wilson made it with session players while the rest of the band toured, using bicycle bells, dog whistles and a Coca-Cola can.
★ 9.9
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.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
1967
It took about seven hundred hours of studio time when their first album took one day, and no singles were released from it.
★ 9.6
Forever Changes
1967
Arthur Lee was convinced he was about to die and wrote it as a goodbye. Session players were hired when the band could not play.
★ 7.6
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
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
The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society
1968
The Kinks were banned from touring America for four years, which is part of why Ray Davies spent this record writing about English villages.
★ 6.7
Fleet Foxes
2008
The singer Robin Pecknold layers the harmonies so thickly, and drowns them in so much reverb, that it sounds recorded in a stone church.
★ 6.4
Five Leaves Left
1969
The title comes from the warning near the end of a packet of cigarette papers. A college friend with no professional credits wrote the string parts.
★ 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
Pink Moon
1972
Twenty-eight minutes, recorded in two late-night sessions with nobody else playing. Drake left the tapes at his label's reception desk and walked out.
★ 6.0
Bon Iver, Bon Iver
2011
Every song is named after a place, and some of the places do not exist. The cabin has been replaced by horns and pedal steel.
★ 5.7
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
Bryter Layter
1970
It sold fewer than three thousand copies. John Cale played on two songs, and Drake barely performed any of it in public.
★ 5.5
Helplessness Blues
2011
Singer Robin Pecknold scrapped a finished version and started over. The title song is about not wanting to be anyone special.
★ 5.4
The Suburbs
2010
Win Butler and his brother grew up outside Houston, and the record is built around driving through places like it as teenagers.
★ 5.4
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
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
Neon Bible
2007
They bought a church in Quebec and recorded in it, using the pipe organ, a military choir and a Hungarian orchestra.
★ 5.0
The Notorious Byrd Brothers
1968
David Crosby was fired partway through the sessions, and the horse on the cover has been read ever since as a joke at his expense.
★ 4.9
A Christmas Gift for You
1963
Spector put the Wall of Sound behind sleigh bells and Darlene Love. It came out the day Kennedy was shot and sank without trace.
★ 4.5
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
Funeral
2004
Three of the band lost close relatives while they were making it, which is where the title came from. Everything is played as though shouted.
★ 4.4
Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica
1964
The drum figure that opens Be My Baby is four beats long, and Brian Wilson has said he played it hundreds of times over.
★ 3.9