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
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20th century
1901 – 2000
Showing 417 albums from the 20th century
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
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
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
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
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