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.
Revolver
1966
On Tomorrow Never Knows, engineers held five tape loops on pencils and mixed them live. No Beatle plays an instrument on Eleanor Rigby.
★ 9.9
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
The Velvet Underground & Nico
1967
Andy Warhol's only real production instruction was to leave the mistakes in. It sold badly enough that the band were dropped soon afterwards.
★ 9.4
Are You Experienced?
1967
Hendrix cut it on four tracks in stolen studio hours between gigs, and nobody had heard a guitar do any of it before.
★ 9.3
Electric Ladyland
1968
Hendrix produced it himself, and spent so long in the studio that his manager walked out. One track is thirteen minutes of imagined underwater life.
★ 8.9
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
Axis: Bold as Love
1968
Hendrix left the finished master of side one in a taxi and had to mix the whole thing again overnight.
★ 7.1
The Doors
1967
Light My Fire was mostly written by guitarist Robby Krieger, who had been in the band a matter of months and had never written a song.
★ 6.7
Bookends
1968
Side one runs from childhood to old age, and the voices in the middle of it are real people Garfunkel recorded in nursing homes.
★ 6.1
Disraeli Gears
1967
The title came from a roadie getting derailleur gears wrong. They recorded the whole thing in New York in under a week.
★ 6.1
Surrealistic Pillow
1967
Jerry Garcia played on it and is credited only as the band's spiritual adviser. The whole record took thirteen days.
★ 5.4
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
Buffalo Springfield Again
1967
The band was falling apart while they made it, recording their songs separately. Neil Young quit twice before it was finished.
★ 4.5
GRIS-Gris
1968
Recorded in studio time left over from a Sonny and Cher session, in secret, using whatever instruments the previous band had left behind.
★ 4.4
Oracular Spectacular
2008
They wrote the hits partly as a joke about wanting to be famous, and then the joke worked and made them famous.
★ 4.3
Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme
1966
The last track lays a Christmas carol over a real news broadcast, so the two get harder to separate as it goes on.
★ 4.3
Sounds of Silence
1966
Their producer added drums and electric guitar to an old acoustic track without telling them. It became a hit and the duo reformed.
★ 4.3
Z
2005
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.
★ 4.2
Fresh Cream
1966
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.
★ 4.0
Younger Than Yesterday
1967
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.
★ 3.9
Moby Grape
1967
Columbia released five singles from it on the same day, which made radio ignore all of them and effectively finished the band.
★ 3.6