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
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
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