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
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
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
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
Brothers in Arms
1985
The first album to sell a million copies on compact disc, and one of the first recorded digitally start to finish.
★ 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
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
Electric Warrior
1971
Marc Bolan sings everything with the same wobbling vibrato over two-chord boogie, and producer Tony Visconti buried strings underneath it.
★ 6.1
Every Picture Tells a Story
1971
The mandolin on Maggie May was played by a session man paid fifteen pounds, whose name Stewart admitted he had forgotten in the sleeve notes.
★ 6.1
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
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
Peter Gabriel
1980
Gabriel banned cymbals from the entire record, which forced the drummers into the gated sound that the whole of the eighties then copied.
★ 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
Selling England by the Pound
1973
Gabriel performed these songs in costume, sometimes as a flower. John Lennon mentioned on the radio that he rather liked the band.
★ 5.9
A Rush of Blood to the Head
2002
The piano figure in Clocks turned up so late in the sessions that it nearly missed the record. Everything here is built to fill arenas.
★ 5.8
Amnesiac
2001
Recorded at the same sessions as Kid A and held back eight months. The band spent years insisting it was not a collection of leftovers.
★ 5.7
Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
2006
The band's early demos spread on burned CDs and file-sharing sites, passed around by fans rather than the band, long before any label appeared.
★ 5.6
Aftermath
1966
Their first album written entirely in-house, with Brian Jones reaching for the marimba, the dulcimer and the sitar between the blues numbers.
★ 5.5
Homework
1997
Made in a bedroom on borrowed equipment and never meant to be an album, just a run of tracks that kept getting finished.
★ 5.4
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
Out of Our Heads
1965
Keith Richards wanted horns on the Satisfaction riff and used a fuzz pedal as a placeholder. The placeholder is what got released.
★ 5.4
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
Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!
1970
Recorded on the 1969 American tour, weeks before Altamont. Charlie Watts posed for the cover with a donkey carrying the band's instruments.
★ 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
Made in Japan
1972
The band thought a live album was a waste of time and only agreed because it was for the Japanese market alone.
★ 5.0
Outlandos d'Amour
1978
Made in scraps of studio time for about fifteen hundred pounds, and Roxanne is named after a poster the band walked past in Paris.
★ 5.0
Parachutes
2000
It cost a few thousand pounds to make. Chris Martin has said Yellow came from looking up at the stars outside a Welsh studio.
★ 5.0
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
1974
Peter Gabriel wrote all the words alone against the rest of the band's wishes, and left the group as soon as the tour ended.
★ 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
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
Discreet Music
1975
Eno was bedridden after a car accident with a harp record playing too quietly to hear properly, and got the idea for ambient music.
★ 4.4
Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me
1987
Eighteen songs across a double album, deliberately in as many different styles as the band could manage, recorded in a French farmhouse.
★ 4.4
Tumbleweed Connection
1970
Neither John nor Bernie Taupin had set foot in America when they wrote these songs about it. Taupin had been listening to The Band.
★ 4.3
Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
2009
The band come from Versailles and had spent ten years making records almost nobody outside France bought before this one arrived.
★ 4.2
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
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
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