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
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.
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Disintegration
1989
Robert Smith turned thirty, decided he was finished, and made the biggest record of the band's life about it.
★ 7.7
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
Mezzanine
1998
The three of them fell out badly making it, and Elizabeth Fraser sang Teardrop while grieving for Jeff Buckley, who had just drowned.
★ 7.6
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
Another Green World
1975
Eno arrived at the studio with nothing written and worked from a deck of cards printed with instructions. Only five tracks ended up with words.
★ 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
Discovery
2001
Daft Punk set out to make the music they had loved at ten years old, and had the whole album animated as a film.
★ 7.0
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
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
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