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
Highway 61 Revisited
1965
Al Kooper was not the organ player and sat down at it anyway, which is the sound everybody remembers from Like a Rolling Stone.
★ 9.8
Abbey Road
1969
The last album they recorded together, with side two stitched out of songs nobody had finished. The cover shoot took about ten minutes.
★ 9.7
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
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
Blood on the Tracks
1975
Dylan finished it, then rerecorded half the songs in Minneapolis with local musicians his brother rounded up, days before it was due out.
★ 9.5
The Dark Side of the Moon
1973
They asked people around the studio questions on cue cards and used the answers. It then stayed on the American chart for fourteen years.
★ 9.5
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
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
Blonde on Blonde
1966
The Nashville session men sat around for hours while Dylan finished writing. Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands was cut at four in the morning.
★ 9.3
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
Led Zeppelin IV
1971
There is no title and no band name anywhere on the sleeve, just four symbols the members chose. The label thought it was commercial suicide.
★ 9.3
Rubber Soul
1965
Norwegian Wood has the first sitar on a pop record. The stretched cover photograph happened when a slide slipped during the projection.
★ 9.3
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust
1972
Bowie announced from the stage in 1973 that it was the last show Ziggy would ever play, without telling his own band first.
★ 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
Blue
1971
Mitchell was so exposed making it that she asked visitors to leave the studio. Kris Kristofferson told her to keep something back for herself.
★ 9.1
Rumours
1977
Two couples in the band were breaking up while they recorded, and kept writing songs about each other that the other had to sing.
★ 9.1
Exile on Main St.
1972
Recorded in the basement of a rented French villa while the band were dodging British tax, in heat so bad guitars would not stay in tune.
★ 9.0
Astral Weeks
1968
Morrison sat in an isolation booth and barely spoke to the jazz players hired to back him. The whole thing was done in three sessions.
★ 8.9
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
Bringing It All Back Home
1965
One side plugged in, one side not. A few months later Dylan took the electric half to Newport and the folk crowd turned on him.
★ 8.9
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
Hotel California
1976
The two guitars at the end of the title track were worked out note for note in advance, and have to be played identically every night.
★ 8.9
Let It Bleed
1969
Merry Clayton was called in at midnight, heavily pregnant, to sing on Gimme Shelter. Her voice cracks on the third take and Jagger whoops.
★ 8.8
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
London Calling
1979
Their producer motivated the sessions by swinging ladders around the studio and pouring wine into the piano. The sleeve copies Elvis's first album.
★ 8.8
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
Who's Next
1971
What survived an abandoned science-fiction project became this record. The keyboard figure opening Baba O'Riley was generated by a machine rather than played.
★ 8.8
The Wall
1979
Roger Waters got the idea after spitting at a fan in Montreal and being appalled at himself. A school near the studio supplied the children's choir.
★ 8.8
Appetite for Destruction
1987
It sold almost nothing for a year until MTV agreed to play Welcome to the Jungle once, at four in the morning. Then it never stopped.
★ 8.7
Born to Run
1975
Springsteen spent six months on the title track alone and hated the finished record so much he wanted to throw it in a swimming pool.
★ 8.7
Aja
1977
Becker and Fagen ran seven guitarists through the solo on Peg before they kept one, and worked the rest of the record the same way.
★ 8.7
Back in Black
1980
Their singer had died five months earlier. They hired Brian Johnson, put out a record in an all-black sleeve, and sold fifty million.
★ 8.6
Born in the USA
1984
Reagan's campaign tried to borrow the title song, which is sung by a veteran who cannot get a job. Seven singles went top ten.
★ 8.6
Bridge Over Troubled Water
1970
Simon wrote the title song and gave it to Garfunkel to sing alone, and spent years regretting it. They had broken up by release.
★ 8.6
Harvest
1972
Young had hurt his back and recorded much of it sitting down in a brace. The London Symphony Orchestra plays on two of the songs.
★ 8.6
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
Led Zeppelin II
1969
Written and recorded in snatched hours in studios across two continents while touring. Willie Dixon later sued over the words to Whole Lotta Love.
★ 8.6
Led Zeppelin
1969
Guitarist Jimmy Page paid for the sessions himself and the record took about thirty-six hours of studio time. Nobody had heard drums recorded like that.
★ 8.6
Music From Big Pink
1968
They wrote it in the basement of a pink house near Woodstock, and Bob Dylan painted the picture on the front.
★ 8.5
Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols
1977
Sid Vicious barely plays on it, and a record shop was taken to court over the word bollocks and won.
★ 8.5
Physical Graffiti
1975
They did not have enough songs for a double album, so they raided outtakes from three earlier records to fill it out.
★ 8.5
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
Ramones
1976
Fourteen songs in twenty-nine minutes, recorded for about six thousand dollars. Nothing on it is longer than two and a half minutes.
★ 8.5
The Band
1969
They converted the pool house of a rented Hollywood home into a studio. Most of these songs about the American South were written by a Canadian.
★ 8.5
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 Joshua Tree
1987
Where the Streets Have No Name took so long to record that Brian Eno considered wiping the tape to force them to start again.
★ 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
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
Highway to Hell
1979
Bon Scott was dead six months after it came out. It was the first record they made with a producer who cared about choruses.
★ 8.3
Achtung Baby
1991
They went to Berlin just after the Wall came down, argued badly enough to nearly break up, and got the song One out of it.
★ 8.3
A Night at the Opera
1975
The most expensive record ever made at the time, and they layered the Bohemian Rhapsody vocals until the tape went nearly transparent.
★ 8.2
After the Gold Rush
1970
Recorded mostly in the basement of his Topanga house, with an eighteen-year-old Nils Lofgren on piano, an instrument he had not played before.
★ 8.2
Beggars Banquet
1968
The label refused the original sleeve, a photograph of a graffitied lavatory wall, and held the record back for months over it.
★ 8.2
Darkness on the Edge of Town
1978
Three years of litigation kept Springsteen out of a studio, and when he got back in he gave away most of the catchy songs.
★ 8.2
Deja Vu
1970
It took roughly eight hundred hours of studio time, and by the end the four of them were barely speaking to each other.
★ 8.1
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
Hunky Dory
1971
Rick Wakeman plays the piano throughout, and Bowie wrote Kooks in an afternoon for his newborn son. Ziggy Stardust was still a year away.
★ 8.1
Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs
1970
Clapton wrote it about his best friend's wife. The long piano ending was brought in by the drummer, and he was paid for the co-write.
★ 8.1
Marquee Moon
1977
The two guitars never play the same part, and the singer, Tom Verlaine, refused to double-track anything, so you hear what happened in the room.
★ 8.1
Master of Puppets
1986
No singles and no videos, and it sold millions anyway. Bassist Cliff Burton was killed when the tour bus crashed in Sweden months later.
★ 8.0
The Black Album
1991
The producer Bob Rock made them play together in one room instead of tracking separately, which took a year and nearly ended the band.
★ 8.0
Paranoid
1970
The title song was written in about twenty minutes as filler. Tony Iommi plays with plastic fingertips after losing his in a factory.
★ 8.0
Sticky Fingers
1971
Andy Warhol's sleeve had a real working zip, which scratched the records stacked behind it in the crates. The tongue logo starts here.
★ 8.0
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
(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
American Beauty
1970
The bassist Phil Lesh wrote Box of Rain while his father was dying, and sang it himself. The Dead had never written this plainly before.
★ 7.7
At Fillmore East
1971
Recorded over two nights in March 1971, and Duane Allman was dead in a motorcycle crash before the year was out.
★ 7.7
Court and Spark
1974
Mitchell hired a working jazz band to back her and made the best-selling record of her life without simplifying a single thing.
★ 7.7
Daydream Nation
1988
A Gerhard Richter candle painting on the sleeve, a double album made on almost no money, and the last thing before they signed to a major.
★ 7.7
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
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
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
Horses
1975
It opens by announcing that Jesus died for somebody's sins but not hers. Robert Mapplethorpe took the cover photograph in a friend's apartment.
★ 7.6
Houses of the Holy
1973
The song called Houses of the Holy is not on Houses of the Holy. The cover children were photographed at the Giant's Causeway.
★ 7.6
In the Court of the Crimson King
1973
The Mellotron carries most of it, a keyboard that plays back tapes of a real orchestra instead of synthesizing the sound.
★ 7.6
Moondance
1970
Morrison arranged the horns himself and has spent decades saying he does not much like the record. Everyone else disagrees.
★ 7.5
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
Plastic Ono Band
1970
Lennon made it straight after four months of primal scream therapy, with almost nothing on it but piano, bass and drums.
★ 7.5
Rage Against the Machine
1992
The sleeve insists there are no samples or keyboards anywhere. Every strange noise is Tom Morello working the pickup switch and scraping the strings.
★ 7.5
Rain Dogs
1985
Waits had Marc Ribot play guitar as though he had never been taught, and Keith Richards turns up on three tracks.
★ 7.5
Slanted and Enchanted
1992
Recorded for about eight hundred dollars in the drummer's garage in Stockton. He later took to greeting the audience with handstands.
★ 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
Sweetheart of the Rodeo
1968
Gram Parsons sang lead on much of it and his vocals were wiped for contractual reasons. The Grand Ole Opry audience booed them off.
★ 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
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
Black Sabbath
1970
Recorded in a single day for a few hundred pounds and released on a Friday the thirteenth. The riff is a devil's interval.
★ 7.1
Close to the Edge
1972
Bill Bruford finished the drums, decided he never wanted to work that hard again, and left the band before the tour.
★ 7.0
Closer
1980
Ian Curtis killed himself two months before it came out. The sleeve, chosen beforehand, is a photograph of a tomb.
★ 7.0
Cosmo's Factory
1970
The band called their rehearsal warehouse the factory, because John Fogerty had them in there every day. Five singles came out of it.
★ 7.0
Crosby Stills and Nash
1969
The three of them first sang together in a living room and knew immediately. The house on the cover was demolished before they could reshoot it.
★ 7.0
Damn the Torpedoes
1979
Petty declared bankruptcy in the middle of making it, to get out of a contract he had signed without reading properly.
★ 7.0
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
Exile in Guyville
1993
Phair wrote it as a song-by-song answer to Exile on Main St., in the same running order, from home cassettes she had made alone.
★ 6.9
Imagine
1971
Recorded at his home in Ascot on a white grand piano, and one of the songs is a straight attack on Paul McCartney.
★ 6.9
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
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
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 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
The Great Twenty-Eight
1955
Berry trained as a beautician and worked on a car assembly line in St. Louis when Muddy Waters told him which Chicago label to try.
★ 6.7
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
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
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
Time Out of Mind
1997
Dylan had not released an album of new songs in seven years, and recorded these in Miami with a dozen musicians playing at once.
★ 6.7
Transformer
1972
Herbie Flowers played two basses on Walk on the Wild Side, one upright and one electric, and was paid an ordinary session fee for it.
★ 6.7
Toys in the Attic
1975
The title of Walk This Way came from a line in Young Frankenstein, which the band went to see during a break in the sessions.
★ 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
Here's Little Richard
1957
The words to Tutti Frutti were too obscene to record, so a local songwriter rewrote them in fifteen minutes over a lunch break.
★ 6.4
Greatest Hits
1981
The best-selling album in British history, with roughly one copy sold for every three households in the country. Almost every track was a single.
★ 6.4
Live at Leeds
1970
They burned the tapes of every other show on the tour and kept this one, packaged deliberately to look like a bootleg.
★ 6.4
Raw Power
1973
David Bowie mixed it and everyone including Iggy Pop hated the result. Iggy remixed the whole thing himself twenty-four years later.
★ 6.4