Remain in Light
1980
Most of it is built on a single chord that never changes, with the interest coming entirely from layers of interlocking rhythm.
★ 8.8
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.
Purple Rain
1984
When Doves Cry has no bass on it at all, which Prince did deliberately. Several tracks were taped live at a Minneapolis club.
★ 8.5
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
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
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
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
Dirty Mind
1980
Prince made it at home as a set of demos, and Warner decided to put them out exactly as they were.
★ 6.5
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Songs from the Big Chair
1985
Everybody Wants to Rule the World was written last, in a few days, and the band nearly left it off the record entirely.
★ 5.9
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
Private Dancer
1984
Recorded in about two weeks in London on almost no budget, when Turner was forty-four and considered finished. Mark Knopfler wrote the title song.
★ 5.0
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
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
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
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