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
Browse by time
The long arc of the canon.
Centuries, unevenly full. Start at the century, open a decade, land on a single year — the works rearrange as you go.
Showing 528 albums from all time
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