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.
Thriller
1982
Quincy Jones and Jackson remixed the whole record because the first version sounded thin, and Eddie Van Halen played his solo for free.
★ 9.5
Songs in the Key of Life
1976
It took so long that Wonder and the band took to wearing T-shirts reading We're Almost Finished. Twenty-one songs, and no filler.
★ 9.2
The White Album
1968
Ringo Starr quit for two weeks during the sessions and Paul played drums in his absence. The cover is plain white with a stamped serial number.
★ 9.2
Hounds of Love
1985
Bush built her own studio at home so nobody could interfere, then gave over an entire side to a woman drowning through one night.
★ 9.0
Sign "O" the Times
1987
It was meant to be a triple album and the label refused. Some of it is sung by a sped-up alter ego called Camille.
★ 8.8
Off the Wall
1979
Jackson was twenty-one and wrote the two best songs on it himself. It won a single Grammy, which he took as an insult.
★ 8.5
Back to Black
2007
Producer Mark Ronson had a Brooklyn soul band play it live to tape like a sixties session. Winehouse wrote about the man she kept leaving.
★ 8.2
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
1973
They tried to record it in Jamaica, gave up, and made the whole double album in about two weeks in a French château instead.
★ 8.1
Graceland
1986
Simon recorded with South African musicians in defiance of the cultural boycott and was condemned for it. Bakithi Kumalo's fretless bass runs through everything.
★ 8.1
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
Speakerboxxx / The Love Below
2003
It is really two solo albums in one box, and the two of them barely appear on each other's halves.
★ 8.0
Bad
1987
Prince was supposed to sing the title track with Jackson and turned it down. Five singles from it went to number one anyway.
★ 7.7
Dusty in Memphis
1969
Springfield was so intimidated by the Memphis players that she could not sing in front of them. Her vocals were added later in New York.
★ 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
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
Ray of Light
1998
Madonna had trained her voice for a year to play Evita, which is why she suddenly sounds like she can sing. William Orbit did the rest.
★ 6.8
Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack
Various artists
1977
The Bee Gees wrote most of it in about two weeks in a French château, without having read the script or seen a frame.
★ 6.8
The Velvet Underground
1967
John Cale had left, taking the viola and the noise with him. They recorded it through small amplifiers because their equipment had been stolen.
★ 6.7
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
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
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
From Elvis in Memphis
1969
His first proper studio album in eight years of films, cut with a Memphis house band who treated him like any other singer.
★ 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
Like a Prayer
1989
Pepsi paid five million dollars to use the title song, then dropped the advert within a day when the video appeared.
★ 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
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
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 for Swingin' Lovers
1956
The trombone solo in I've Got You Under My Skin was played by a man standing on a box to reach the microphone.
★ 5.9
The Stranger
1977
Scenes from an Italian Restaurant is three unfinished songs stitched into one. The whistling at the start of the record is Joel himself.
★ 5.8
1989
2014
Swift named the record for the year she was born and dropped country entirely, writing straight synth-pop for the first time.
★ 5.8
Gold: Greatest Hits
Two of the four were married to the other two, and were divorcing by the end. The sadness sits under melodies in bright major keys.
★ 5.7
FutureSex / LoveSounds
2006
The producer Timbaland built most of the tracks in two halves, so the songs change shape halfway through instead of repeating a chorus.
★ 5.5
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
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
52nd Street
1978
Joel brought in jazz session players and a horn section, and this became the first album anywhere to be released commercially on compact disc.
★ 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
CrazySexyCool
1994
Lisa Lopes burned down her boyfriend's house while they were making it. The album sold over twenty million and the group still went bankrupt.
★ 5.1
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
Madonna
1983
Madonna fought the label for control of her own debut and got a club DJ brought in to remix it. It sold ten million.
★ 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
Pure Heroine
2013
Lorde was sixteen, recording after school in an Auckland studio, and the tracks are built from almost nothing but voice, bass and finger snaps.
★ 4.9
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
Whitney Houston
1985
Her mother sang backing vocals for Aretha Franklin. Arista spent two years and a great deal of money picking songs before releasing any of it.
★ 4.8
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
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
Come Away With Me
2002
A twenty-two-year-old on a jazz label made a very quiet record, and it sold twenty-seven million copies and swept the Grammys.
★ 4.4
If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears
1966
The four of them sang in a block harmony nobody had used in pop, and the first cover photograph had them all in a bathtub.
★ 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
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
Sinatra at the Sands
1966
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.
★ 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
Close to You
1970
Karen Carpenter was the drummer, and sang from behind the kit until someone persuaded her to come out in front of it.
★ 2.9