The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time

This album lived in myth for decades. Brian Wilson’s unfinished response to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club took nearly 40 years to finally come to fruition. Longtime Wilson collaborator Van Dyke Parks helped him realize his vision, with lush string arrangements, sublime melodies, and vocal harmonies, all impeccably constructed. Close your eyes and you can imagine how it might’ve changed the world in 1968, but with Wilson’s influence still all over scads of indie bands in 2004, it sounds and feels majestically modern.

The Raincoats came up with one of the most experimental and thrilling sounds to emerge from the London punk explosion — four women making their own gloriously unkempt racket. As guitarist Ana Da Silva explained, “We rehearsed for hours, but we always fell apart.” Da Silva and Gina Birch chant over Palmolive’s manic drums and Vicky Aspinall’s buzz-saw violin, for gems like “In Love” and their gender-twisted cover of the Kinks’ “Lola.” Their debut album finally got its long-overdue U.S. release in 1993, at the insistence of Raincoats superfan Kurt Cobain.

Billie Eilish became a teen folk hero with her blockbuster debut — just your average 17-year-old songwriting prodigy with a head full of nightmares. Eilish wrote and recorded these tunes with her brother, Finneas, at the L.A. house where they grew up. But her adolescent imagination ran wild, from the gothic angst of “Bury a Friend” to the whispery trap-pop strut of “Bad Guy.” The voice of a new generation? Duh.

“I’m probably the whitest singer in the world,” Todd Rundgren told Rolling Stone in 1972. “I have no ‘soul’ in the usual sense — but I can do this great feminine falsetto.” On this tour de force double album, Rundgren employs that falsetto on two great singles (“I Saw the Light” and “Hello It’s Me”). For the rest of the album, he demonstrates his complete command of the studio, playing almost all the instruments himself, experimenting with a kaleidoscope of rock genres, and even delivering a monologue on what poorly made records sound like.

Fourteen years after Voodoo, D’Angelo built up impossible levels of anticipation for his next move. But Black Messiah was worth the wait. He brought a new political rage to deep-soul grooves like “The Charade,” responding to the Black Lives Matter movement: “All we wanted was a chance to talk/Instead we only got outlined in chalk.” D’Angelo admits in “Really Love,” “I’m not an easy man to overstand.” Yet he meshes beautifully with kindred spirits, from Roots drummer Questlove to jazz trumpeter Roy Hargrove.

By 1980, Diana Ross’ tenure with the Supremes had ended a decade earlier, and she had spent the Seventies basking in the glow of her successful film career and soundtrack hits. But she still wanted to shake things up. Her 10th album, Diana, was a Nile Rogers-assisted disco jaunt at a time when disco backlash was running rampant; featuring classics like “Upside Down” and “I’m Coming Out,” it became her biggest and most acclaimed album to date.

Swift set out to make “blatant pop music” on 1989 and came up with a love letter to the Pet Shop Boys and Eurythmics, all glossy synths, icy snares, and the manic rush of “Blank Space” and “Bad Blood.” She ends the album with the electro-chill of “Clean,” one of her starkest, grandest romantic exorcisms, comparing love’s memory to “a wine-stained dress I can’t wear anymore” and unspooling images of drowning and surviving that can bring to mind another Eighties hero, Kate Bush.

These hits set introduced the world to Tina Turner, back when she was the raw R&B belter from Nutbush, Tennessee, starring in her husband Ike’s band. The world didn’t know yet the private hell Tina was living through — or that she’d move on to solo stardom. But Tina’s grit and Ike’s guitar combine from the start, in duets like “I Idolize You.” Her triumph is “Proud Mary,” seizing the already-classic Creedence song and turning it into her own soul testimony.

“I hate you so much right now!” Kelis blasted on her debut single “Caught Out There,” giving spurned lovers around the world an instant anthem. It set the tone for a knockout R&B debut. Kaleidoscope was also a showcase moment for the Neptunes (Pharrell and Chad Hugo), who helmed the album’s production, backing Kelis with a barrage of splatting keyboards and thwacking drums and giving the album a taut consistency. Yet the singer was so charismatic she might not have needed them. “I hate you so much right now!” doesn’t lose any force a cappella.

The brainy Boston quartet went up against punk producer Steve Albini for one of the era’s most influential rock sounds: all razor-blade guitars and drum thud. It became the sound of the Nineties, as everyone from Nirvana to PJ Harvey went to Albini, hoping to get the raw power of Surfer Rosa. Black Francis goes from a whisper to a scream in oddities like “Bone Machine,” “River Euphrates,” and “Where Is My Mind?” But bassist (and future Breeder) Kim Deal steals the show with her cheeky Midwest vocals in “Gigantic.”

Mariah Carey’s last couple of albums had only attained platinum status, paltry by her usual high-flying standards. But the vocal acrobat swept away the naysayers with “We Belong Together,” a chattering, heartbroken ballad that interpolates two R&B classics (Bobby Womack’s “If You Think You’re Lonely Now” and the Deele’s “Two Occasions”), then followed that song’s huge success with “Shake It Off,” a dismissive, vengeful cut for all the jilted lovers — and The Emancipation of Mimi turned out to be a sextuple-platinum return to form.

Aretha Franklin was 29 at the time of Young, Gifted and Black, and she was already on her 19th album and her second record label. With her gospel-choir training and jazz chops, there was nothing she didn’t know about singing. Franklin covers (and vivifies) Paul McCartney and Elton John, not to mention Nina Simone’s title song, an anthem of the civil rights movement, and she sings the self-written hits (“Day Dreaming,” “Rock Steady”) with calm certainty, guided only by the spirit.

Radiohead released In Rainbows as a surprise download in the fall of 2007, letting fans pay whatever they liked. But the real surprise was how expansive the music turned out to be, with material the band had road-tested live in the U.S. all summer. Thom Yorke gets soulful in the intense love songs “All I Need,” “House of Cards,” and “Nude.” It’s Radiohead’s warmest album, with the vibe of a communal jam session. One that’s taking place at the end of the world, of course.

Questlove of the Roots called the Detroit producer “the music god that music gods and music experts and music lovers worship.” During the Nineties and early ’00s, Dilla worked with a who’s who of hip-hop greats and helped shape the sound of albums like D’Angelo’s Voodoo [see No. 28]. Released three days before his death, Donuts is a beat head’s delight: 31 concise, wildly inventive sample-swirls (love the Frank Zappa bit on “Mash”), many of which would end up being sampled themselves in the years that followed.

The Ramones wrote their third album on tour, as they took the gospel of three chords and ripped denim beyond New York’s five boroughs. Rocket to Russia was also their first true studio triumph: an exuberant, polished bottling of the CBGB-stage napalm of Ramones and Leave Home. The razor-slashing hooks bring out the Top 40 classicism in “Rockaway Beach” and “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker,” plus the lonely-boy poignancy of Joey Ramone’s vocals in “I Don’t Care” and “I Wanna Be Well.”

While their British Invasion peers— the Beatles, the Stones, the Who — were getting psychedelic, Ray Davies took his band for a pastoral retreat, with witty portraits of quaint English small-town life fading away like “Big Sky.” Nobody bought it, but Village Green went on to become one of the Kinks’ most influential statements. “With ‘You Really Got Me’ and ‘All Day and All of the Night,’ we were saying, ‘We’re here, we’re gonna grab you,’” Davies told Rolling Stone. “The music on Village Green says, ‘Come find us.’”

The Bristol, England, collective that invented trip-hop — Daddy G, Mushroom, and 3D — got even heavier on Mezzanine. They turn the Cocteau Twins’ Elisabeth Fraser into a soul diva in “Teardrop,” and “Angel” is a six-minute ride into the abyss, with the legendary reggae singer Horace Andy wailing over levee-busting drums, cinematic strings, and blasts of guitar. “We like reclaiming the guitar,” Daddy G told Rolling Stone. “People say black music shouldn’t have heavy guitar, but who invented all that heavy-guitar shit? Jimi Hendrix!”

Aussie studio wiz Kevin Parker found surprising mainstream success with his band’s refined neo-psychedelia, thanks in large part to the danceable ease of songs like the hit “Let It Happen.” Tame Impala’s breakthrough is a modern take on trippy bliss, burying vague intimations of displacement and anxiety under pillows of soft, neon synths and Parker’s twee-Bee Gees falsetto. After Currents, he was getting calls to work with Lady Gaga and Kanye West, and Rihanna was covering one of his songs.

Southern-rock icons Lynyrd Skynyrd took their name from their high school gym teacher, Leonard Skinner, who tried to make them cut their hair. (He later became a fan.) Skynyrd lived fast, played hard, and went down in a tragic 1977 plane crash. On their debut, Ronnie Van Zant flexes his wiseass drawl in “Gimme Three Steps,” protests racism in “Things Goin’ On,” and honors his mama in “Simple Man.” But the peak is “Free Bird,” nine minutes of dueling guitars from Allen Collins and Gary Rossington — now and forever, the ultimate air-guitar epic.

Charles Mingus filtered the vibrancy and romance of his hero Duke Ellington’s big-band orchestrations into hard-driving bop, leading his own band through a torrid, gospel inspired rave-up (“Better Git It in Your Soul”), a sly protest song (“Fables of Faubus,” aimed at Arkansas’ segregationist governor), and a mournful elegy (“Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” dedicated to tenor great Lester Young). Ah Um is the place to hear why Mingus deserves a place in any survey of America’s greatest composers, regardless of genre.

On Seventies albums like 2112 and Hemispheres, Rush mastered the high-prog epic. Moving Pictures was the record where they proved they could say as much in four minutes as they previously had in 20. Songs like “Tom Sawyer,” “Limelight,” and the Police-like “Vital Signs” showcased the trio’s superhuman chops in a radio-ready framework, while more adventurous tracks like the Morse code–inspired instrumental “YYZ” and the synth-heavy suite “The Camera Eye” found them tastefully streamlining their wildest ideas. Said Geddy Lee, “We learned it’s not so easy to write something simple.”

The Hollis, Queens, crew kicked off the golden age of hip-hop with their debut — the first great rap album, built to blast out of boomboxes on city streets. “Before us, rap records were corny,” Jam Master Jay said. “Everything was soft. Nobody made no hard-beat records.” Run-DMC changed that with the B-boy bravado of “Sucker MC’s,” the metal guitar of “Rock Box,” and the political realism of “Hard Times.” As they boast, “Just snap your fingers and clap your hands/Our DJ’s better than all these bands.”

These New York art-punk brats blew away the doldrums of the early 2000s with a true rock & roll goddess in Karen O. She knew how to work her sneer like a pair of ripped fishnets, trashing any room in sight. Yet the tender ballad “Maps” became a surprise hit, with Karen pleading “Wait, they don’t love you like I love you” over Nick Zinner’s warped guitar fuzz and Brian Chase’s drum thunder. “There’s a lot of loooove in that song,” she said. “But there’s a lot of fear, too.”

The Louisiana band nearly pulled off an indie-rock Pet Sounds with their second album, leavening low-fi guitar racket and twee folk with circus-y instruments like the singing saw and zanzithophone, as leader Jeff Magnum cut through the irony of the Seinfeld/Pavement era with his heraldic surrealist yammerings about broken homes, Anne Frank, religion, scary sexual awakenings, and other coming-of-age traumas. It’s weird, raw, harrowing stuff; if you think you can’t be moved by a song called “The King of Carrot Flowers Pts. 2 & 3,” hearing is believing.

The album that jump-started the Nineties punk-pop revival. The skittish Dookie was recorded in little more than three weeks, and singer-guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong blazed through all the vocals in two days. “Right from getting the drum sound, everything seemed to click,” their A&R man (and Dookie producer) Rob Cavallo marveled. Indeed, “click” is the operative word here, also describing Armstrong’s airtight, three-minute bowshots like “Welcome to Paradise,” “Basket Case,” and the infectious smash “Longview” — which Armstrong described as “cheap self-therapy from watching too much TV.”

“You want to know how real the blues can get?” Keith Richards asked. “Well, this is it.” The bluesman in question was Robert Johnson, who lived from 1911 to 1938 in the Mississippi Delta, and whose guitar prowess was so great, it inspired stories he had sold his soul to the devil. This 1961 reissue of Johnson’s original 78s was a life-changer for Sixties rockers like Richards and Eric Clapton; the moaning lust of “Terraplane Blues” and the haunted desperation of “Hellhound on My Trail” haven’t aged a minute.

Isaac Hayes demanded Stax Records give him complete artistic control for his second album. What happened next sounded like nothing else in music at the time, an orchestral-soul watershed that forecast R&B’s turn toward symphonic excess and plush introspect. Hayes’ 12-minute Southern-psychedelic version of the Burt Bacharach/Hal David “Walk On By” and his spectacularly tortured 18-minute take on Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” took easy-listening tunes and refashioned them in his own radically laid-back image.

After Big Brother’s performance at the Monterey Pop Festival made Janis Joplin a star, fans were heatedly expecting a live album from them. But their in-the-red loudness and sloppy performances meant they had to cut their second album in a New York studio, with crowd noise added in later. “We’re just a sloppy group of street freaks,” Joplin said. But these San Francisco acid rockers were the most simpatico band she ever had, especially when their raw racket backs Joplin up on “Piece of My Heart,” perhaps her greatest recording.

Indisputably the greatest black vocal group of the modern era, the Temptations embodied Motown, channeling unique individual voices and talents into pristine hits and tight, tuxedoed choreography. This three-album set features masterpiece after masterpiece of chugging, gospel-tinged soul, including “My Girl,” “I Can’t Get Next to You,” and “I Wish It Would Rain,” and later, psychedelic-soul adventures like “Cloud Nine” and the gritty message-song masterpiece “Ball of Confusion.”

On Tha Carter II, Lil Wayne anointed himself the “best rapper alive,” and drove himself insane trying to make good on his declaration. He demolishes the same beat three ways (“Fly In,” “Carter II,” “Fly Out”), like a Michelin-starred chef using every part of the animal, and drops 106 & Park jams (“Fireman,” “Shooter”) with ease. “I deserve the throne,” he raps on “Hustler Musik.” “And if the kid ain’t right, then let me die on this song.” Two years later, Wayne was alive and well, and the throne was firmly secured.

“We were just straight hood,” Havoc said. “It wasn’t no pretty boy shit. He was talking about the Timberlands and bandanas he and Prodigy (R.I.P.) wore, but that was also the brutal appeal of their second album, which the duo produced mostly by themselves. Q Tip functioned as an executive producer, adding depth to sinister tracks built off of 1970s samples, many of them from the LP collection that Prodigy’s jazz-musician grandfather left to him. “Shook Ones Pt. II,” a minor hit, and “Survival of the Fittest” have only one impetus, to document life in a Queens project.

After the end of the Beatles, the Quiet One suddenly looked like the one best prepared for the solo life. After years of writing in the shadow of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, George Harrison had enough songs saved up to make his solo debut a triple album, featuring friends like Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and Ringo Starr. All Things Must Pass is full of spiritual guitar quests like “Isn’t It a Pity” and “My Sweet Lord,” the first Number One hit to include a Hare Krishna chant.

Just when everyone was ready for more pop sensitivity from Drake, he went street. If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late was a mixtape for his rap base — no radio hits or catchy hooks, just his harshest beats and rhymes. It sums up Drake’s willingness to switch lanes at any moment. (Just a few months later, he swerved back into soft-soul territory on “Hotline Bling.”) He spends his money and curses his enemies in paranoid bangers like “10 Bands.”

The bad boys from Boston perfected their Seventies guitar raunch on Rocks — it’s the musical equivalent of getting run over by a muscle car. Steven Tyler and Joe Perry sounded like America’s heirs to the Mick-and-Keith tradition with the filthy riffs of “Lick and a Promise” and “Back in the Saddle.” Tyler brings all his dirtbag swagger and gutter poetry to his favorite topic: sex. Surprise peak: “Sick as a Dog,” an incredible fusion of the Byrds, James Brown funk, and Sixties girl-group harmonies.

This collaboration between rapper MF Doom and producer Madlib is one of underground hip-hop’s greatest moments. Madlib provides a shifting bed of warped funk and wildly unpredictable samples, drawing on everything from Thunder and Lightning’s “Bumpin’ Bus Stop” to “The Theme of the Justice League of America.” Doom’s rhymes are so casually adventurous that sometimes it takes a second to notice how stunning they are: “Still back in the game like Jack LaLanne/Think you know the name, don’t rack your brain/On a fast track to half sane” — hell yeah!

For their second record, Talking Heads found the ideal producer in Brian Eno: Their trilogy of albums with him made the band’s reputation. David Byrne splutters over the twitchy rhythms of “Artists Only” and “Thank You for Sending Me an Angel,” while crooning “The Big Country” as a ballad about feeling lost in America. The Heads cover Al Green’s “Take Me to the River,” a Memphis R&B hit just a year old at the time that they make feel like some kind of ancient prayer.

George Clinton leads his Detroit crew of “extraterrestrial brothers” through a visionary album of science-fiction funk on jams like “Supergroovalisticprosifunkstication” and “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker).” It’s a concept album inspired by Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey, with Clinton as an outer-space radio DJ, broadcasting uncut funk from “the Chocolate Milky Way” and telling the people of Earth, “Put a glide in your stride and a dip in your hip, and come on up to the Mothership.”

In the Seventies, Luther Vandross sang backup for Sister Sledge and Roberta Flack and co-wrote David Bowie’s “Fascination.” As a solo artist, he embodied sophisticated soul in the post-disco era. His debut LP shows off a dazzling range that came almost too easily — from the title track, one of the defining dance-funk hits of the Eighties, to his stunning rendition of the Burt Bacharach and Hal David classic “A House Is Not a Home,” which made the song uncoverable for future generations of singers.

Just as the Who did with Tommy, or Pink Floyd with The Wall, New Jersey act My Chemical Romance served up an era-defining rock opera, tailored for the golden age of emo. Frontman Gerard Way — the goth millennial answer to David Bowie — stars as a cancer patient who marches boldly into the afterlife (“The Black Parade”), where Liza Minelli, of all people, awaits him for a smashing horror-punk duet (“Mama”).

George Clinton led two of the 1970s’ wildest bands: Funkadelic for rock guitars, Parliament for dance beats. But this album sums up his whole P-Funk empire, as Clinton spreads the gospel of mind-altering, loose-booty rhythms for the body and brain. “One Nation Under a Groove” is a call to arms, demanding “the funk, the whole funk, and nothing but the funk.” Another song asks, “Who Says a Funk Band Can’t Play Rock?!” It’s the same message Uncle Jam has always preached: Free your mind and your ass will follow.

Alex Chilton and his band of Memphis misfits were years ahead of their time — when they released Radio City in 1974, hardly anyone heard it. But like the Velvet Underground, they became hugely influential when future generations discovered them and got their minds blown. Big Star came up with their own skewed pop sound, filtering their love of the Beatles through their Memphis-soul roots. “September Gurls” and “Life Is White” should have been hits, soaring with the sweetly eccentric guitar chime and the romantic ache in Chilton’s voice.

With their sixth full album, the New York art-of-noise band made the leap from indie to major label, but few sold out so beautifully. From Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo’s frazzled guitar freakouts to Kim Gordon’s ghostly ode to Karen Carpenter, Goo retained all of Sonic Youth’s quirks and hallmarks. The sessions were technologically fraught, but they used those added production dollars to amp up their sonic assault. On tracks like “Kool Thing” and “Disappearer” they’d never sounded burlier — and yet more true to their alt-nation selves.

“I like weird, ludicrous things,” Tom Waits once said. That understatement plays out most clearly on Rain Dogs, his finest portrait of the tragic kingdom of the streets. Self-producing his music for the first time and recording in his native Los Angeles, he went for a sound he described as “kind of an interaction between Appalachia and Nigeria.” Waits abandoned his signature grungy minimalism on the gorgeous “Downtown Train” (later a hit for Rod Stewart) and gets backing by Keith Richards on “Big Black Mariah.”

Mac Rebennack was a New Orleans piano player on songs for Professor Longhair and Frankie Ford who moved to L.A. in the Sixties, where he played on Phil Spector sessions and encountered California psychedelia. Rechristening himself Dr. John Creaux the Night Tripper, he made this swamp-funk classic. Gris-Gris blends New Orleans R&B, voodoo chants, and chemical inspiration. The groovy Afro-Caribbean percussion and creaky sound effects aren’t just otherworldly — they seem to come from several other worlds all at once.

Recorded in a single 12-hour blurt by a hippie-leaning former blues band, this lumbering debut conjures up a new, sludgy sound: the birth pains of heavy metal. The slide guitar on “Wizard” and the grungy boogie of “Wicked World” would influence not only future metal spawn but even the sound of Nirvana. The album’s most vivid nightmare is the six-minute “Black Sabbath,” which even scared the band itself. “We always wanted to go heavier than any other band,” said bassist Geezer Butler.

Teenage multiracial London girl Poly Styrene had braces on her teeth and wore Day-Glo rags, screeching anthems like “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” over saxophone blasts, and chanting, “I am a poseur and I don’t care! I like to make people stare!” X-Ray Spex’s explosive punk-rock debut went criminally unreleased in the U.S., but it became a word-of-mouth cult classic throughout the indie-rock underground in the Eighties and Nineties, influencing Sleater-Kinney, the Beastie Boys, and many others.

“We used to joke that the first album should be called The Cars’ Greatest Hits,” said guitarist Elliot Easton. Their debut was arty and punchy enough to be part of Boston’s New Wave scene, and yet so catchy that nearly every track (“My Best Friend’s Girl,” “Just What I Needed”) landed on the radio. When Ric Ocasek died in 2019, Eason offered a fitting tribute: “If the goal was to have great success making pop music with a sense of irony, then mission accomplished, right?”

On which Eminem introduced himself as a crazy white geek, the “class-clown freshman/Dressed like Les Nessman.” Hip-hop had never heard anything like Em’s brain-damaged rhymes on this Dr. Dre-produced album, which earned Em respect, fortune, fame, and a lawsuit from his mom. Yet, while he claimed that God sent him here to piss off the world, his most endearing quality was that he saved his most unsparing rhymes for the worst villain in his messed-up life — not mom or his ex-wife, but himself.

Keyboardist Brian Eno’s last album with Roxy Music is the pop equivalent of Ultrasuede: highly stylish, abstract-leaning art rock. The collision of Eno’s and singer Bryan Ferry’s clashing visions gives Pleasure a wild, tense charm — especially on the driving “Editions of You” and “Do the Strand.” The album’s deeply weird centerpiece is “In Every Dream Home a Heartache”: Ferry sings a seductive ballad to an inflatable doll (“I blew up your body, but you blew my mind”), one of the creepiest love songs of all time.