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
Kind of Blue
1959
Davis handed the players sketches on the day and most of what you hear is a first take. Two sessions, and it was done.
★ 9.8
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
What's Going On
1971
Berry Gordy called it the worst thing he had ever heard and refused to release it until Gaye said he would never record for Motown again.
★ 9.8
Symphony No. 9
1824
Amateur players filled out the orchestra at the premiere after only two rehearsals, and the singers complained that the high notes were unsingable.
★ 9.7
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
Goldberg Variations
1741
The pianist Glenn Gould plays it fast and dry and hums audibly throughout, which the engineers could never get him to stop doing.
★ 9.6
St Matthew Passion
1727
Two choirs and two orchestras face each other across the church and answer one another, while a boys' choir cuts through both from above.
★ 9.6
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
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
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
Requiem
1791
An anonymous stranger commissioned it and Mozart died before finishing. A pupil completed the rest, and arguments about which bars are his continue.
★ 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
Mass in B minor
1749
Bach assembled it late in life partly from music he had written decades earlier, and never heard the whole thing performed in his lifetime.
★ 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
5th Symphony
1808
Four notes, then half an hour that never lets up. It premiered in an under-rehearsed, freezing four-hour concert that nobody enjoyed.
★ 9.3
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
The Rite of Spring
1913
Noise from the 1913 premiere audience drowned out the orchestra, so Nijinsky stood in the wings shouting the counts at his dancers.
★ 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
Illmatic
1994
Ten tracks, under forty minutes, made by a twenty-year-old with the best producers in New York each giving him one beat.
★ 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
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 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
Don Giovanni
1787
Mozart is said to have written the overture the night before the Prague premiere, and the orchestra sight-read it at the first performance.
★ 9.2
Messiah
1741
Handel wrote it for a Dublin charity concert, and the hall asked women to come without hoops in their skirts so more people could fit.
★ 9.1
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
Ready to Die
1994
The opening traces his life from the delivery room to prison in about three minutes. Puffy made him rewrite half of it for radio.
★ 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
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
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
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
1988
The producers used sirens, squeals and feedback as rhythm instruments, which is why it sounds less like music than like an emergency.
★ 9.0
A Love Supreme
1964
Coltrane recorded it in one December session and meant it as a prayer. On the last movement he plays a psalm he had written out.
★ 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
Bitches Brew
1970
Davis gave the players almost no written music, and his producer Teo Macero cut the tapes together afterward with a razor blade.
★ 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
Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)
1993
RZA negotiated a deal letting every member sign solo elsewhere, then recorded the group in a basement on deliberately cheap, muddy equipment.
★ 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
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
The Chronic
1992
Dre had session players replay the funk records rather than sample them, which sidestepped clearance and made everything sound warmer and slower.
★ 8.8
The Low End Theory
1991
Ron Carter, who played bass with Miles Davis, appears on one track and made them promise there would be no swearing on it.
★ 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
Tristan und Isolde
1865
Seventy-seven rehearsals in Vienna ended with the opera abandoned as unperformable. It waited six years for a stage willing to try it.
★ 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
Aquemini
1998
Rosa Parks sued them over the song named after her, and the case ran for a decade. The record itself goes everywhere at once.
★ 8.7
At Folsom Prison
1968
Cash's career was finished when he talked Columbia into letting him record for prisoners. The laughter after the Reno line was added afterward.
★ 8.6
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
Giant Steps
1960
The title track modulates through three keys so fast that the pianist, Tommy Flanagan, audibly struggles through his solo on the finished take.
★ 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
good kid, m.A.A.d city
2012
Subtitled a short film, and the story runs in order across one day. The interludes are voicemails from his parents asking where the van is.
★ 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
Life After Death
1997
It came out sixteen days after Biggie was shot dead in Los Angeles, a double album he had finished and titled beforehand.
★ 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
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
Paul's Boutique
1989
It uses well over a hundred samples, which would be unaffordable to clear today, and it sold so badly the label gave up on them.
★ 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
Stankonia
2000
B.O.B. runs at a hundred and fifty-five beats a minute, which is drum and bass speed, with a gospel choir on top.
★ 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
Straight Outta Compton
1988
The FBI wrote to their record label objecting to one of the songs, which did more for sales than any advertising could.
★ 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