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
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1970s
1970 – 1979
Showing 119 albums from the 1970s
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
There's a Riot Goin' On
1971
Sly overdubbed most of it alone onto a drum machine at home. The title track is listed as running zero seconds and has no music.
★ 8.4
Highway to Hell
1979
Bon Scott was dead six months after it came out. It was the first record they made with a producer who cared about choruses.
★ 8.3
Innervisions
1973
Wonder played almost every instrument on it himself. Days after it came out a car crash put him in a coma for four days.
★ 8.3
A Night at the Opera
1975
The most expensive record ever made at the time, and they layered the Bohemian Rhapsody vocals until the tape went nearly transparent.
★ 8.2
After the Gold Rush
1970
Recorded mostly in the basement of his Topanga house, with an eighteen-year-old Nils Lofgren on piano, an instrument he had not played before.
★ 8.2
Darkness on the Edge of Town
1978
Three years of litigation kept Springsteen out of a studio, and when he got back in he gave away most of the catchy songs.
★ 8.2
Deja Vu
1970
It took roughly eight hundred hours of studio time, and by the end the four of them were barely speaking to each other.
★ 8.1
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
Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs
1970
Clapton wrote it about his best friend's wife. The long piano ending was brought in by the drummer, and he was paid for the co-write.
★ 8.1
Marquee Moon
1977
The two guitars never play the same part, and the singer, Tom Verlaine, refused to double-track anything, so you hear what happened in the room.
★ 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
Sticky Fingers
1971
Andy Warhol's sleeve had a real working zip, which scratched the records stacked behind it in the crates. The tongue logo starts here.
★ 8.0
Tapestry
1971
King had already written dozens of hits for other people before anyone heard her sing. This one sold twenty-five million copies.
★ 7.9
Talking Book
1972
The Superstition riff is a clavinet, an electric keyboard with strings inside, layered several times over. Wonder had just won control of his contract.
★ 7.9
American Beauty
1970
The bassist Phil Lesh wrote Box of Rain while his father was dying, and sang it himself. The Dead had never written this plainly before.
★ 7.7
At Fillmore East
1971
Recorded over two nights in March 1971, and Duane Allman was dead in a motorcycle crash before the year was out.
★ 7.7
Court and Spark
1974
Mitchell hired a working jazz band to back her and made the best-selling record of her life without simplifying a single thing.
★ 7.7
Exodus
1977
Marley made it in London after being shot at home in Jamaica, and side two is nothing but songs people still sing at weddings.
★ 7.6
Horses
1975
It opens by announcing that Jesus died for somebody's sins but not hers. Robert Mapplethorpe took the cover photograph in a friend's apartment.
★ 7.6
Houses of the Holy
1973
The song called Houses of the Holy is not on Houses of the Holy. The cover children were photographed at the Giant's Causeway.
★ 7.6
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
Let's Get It On
1973
The title song began as a political lyric someone else wrote, and Gaye rewrote it into a seduction before the tape rolled.
★ 7.6
Moondance
1970
Morrison arranged the horns himself and has spent decades saying he does not much like the record. Everyone else disagrees.
★ 7.5
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
Red Headed Stranger
1975
Columbia thought the tapes were demos because it cost twenty thousand dollars and had almost nothing on it but guitar and voice.
★ 7.5
Superfly
1972
Mayfield watched the film and wrote songs attacking the drug dealing it made look glamorous, then sang them in a falsetto over congas.
★ 7.4
Zombie
Fela Kuti and Africa '70
1976
Horns and drums lock into one riff and hold it for minutes before Fela sings a word, which is how he built nearly every track.
★ 7.3
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
Catch a Fire
1973
Island Records boss Chris Blackwell added rock guitar and keyboards to make it travel, and packaged it in a sleeve shaped like a Zippo lighter.
★ 7.0
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
Cosmo's Factory
1970
The band called their rehearsal warehouse the factory, because John Fogerty had them in there every day. Five singles came out of it.
★ 7.0
Damn the Torpedoes
1979
Petty declared bankruptcy in the middle of making it, to get out of a contract he had signed without reading properly.
★ 7.0
Imagine
1971
Recorded at his home in Ascot on a white grand piano, and one of the songs is a straight attack on Paul McCartney.
★ 6.9
Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack
Various artists
1977
The Bee Gees wrote most of it in about two weeks in a French château, without having read the script or seen a frame.
★ 6.8
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
Transformer
1972
Herbie Flowers played two basses on Walk on the Wild Side, one upright and one electric, and was paid an ordinary session fee for it.
★ 6.7
Toys in the Attic
1975
The title of Walk This Way came from a line in Young Frankenstein, which the band went to see during a break in the sessions.
★ 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
Natty Dread
1974
The first record after Tosh and Bunny left, with three women, one of them Marley's wife, singing behind him from then on.
★ 6.4
One Nation Under a Groove
1978
The title track runs sixteen minutes and was cut with the band playing together in the room, audience noise dubbed on afterward.
★ 6.4
Raw Power
1973
David Bowie mixed it and everyone including Iggy Pop hated the result. Iggy remixed the whole thing himself twenty-four years later.
★ 6.4
The Last Waltz
1978
Martin Scorsese shot it with seven cameras and a written shot list keyed to the lyrics. Neil Diamond and Muddy Waters both turn up.
★ 6.3
Workingman's Dead
1970
They made it in about nine days, in debt and facing charges after a New Orleans arrest, singing harmonies learned from Crosby, Stills and Nash.
★ 6.3
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
Fresh
1973
The drums land just behind the beat all the way through. Miles Davis is said to have played one track over and over for his band.
★ 6.0
Grievous Angel
1973
Parsons died before it came out, and his road manager stole the body from the airport and burned it in Joshua Tree, as promised.
★ 6.0
Loaded
1970
The label asked for an album loaded with hits, so they called it that. Lou Reed quit the band before it was released.
★ 6.0
Original Soundtrack (The Harder They Come)
1973
Jimmy Cliff starred in the film as well as singing on it, and for years this was the only reggae record most Americans owned.
★ 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
Pearl
1971
Joplin died before recording her vocal for one song, so it appears as an instrumental with the space where she should be.
★ 6.0
Pink Moon
1972
Twenty-eight minutes, recorded in two late-night sessions with nobody else playing. Drake left the tapes at his label's reception desk and walked out.
★ 6.0
Pronounced Leh-nerd Skin-nerd
1973
The band named themselves after a gym teacher who kept sending them home over their hair. Free Bird's guitar outro runs five minutes.
★ 5.9
Rocket to Russia
1977
They were openly chasing a hit single and never got one. The harmonies come straight off the girl-group records they grew up on.
★ 5.9