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The 75 Best Albums of 1975

Disco, punk, reggae, and metal were rising, and artists from Patti Smith to P-Funk to Willie Nelson were kicking out classics

By ROLLING STONE
Photo collage of 1975 albums

America was a mighty weird place in 1975 — but music was the weirdest thing about it. The entire culture was changing fast. It was the year Jaws invented the Hollywood blockbuster. Saturday Night Live revolutionized TV comedy. The Feds finally caught up with fugitive Patty Hearst. Muhammad Ali crushed Joe Frazier at the Thrilla in Manila. The Vietnam War ended. Cher married Gregg Allman, then filed for divorce nine days later — a record even by Seventies standards.

You could stay home with your brand new Pet Rock to watch The Jeffersons, Starsky and Hutch, All in the Family, or Welcome Back, Kotter. Or you could go to the movies to see Dog Day Afternoon, Nashville, or The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The Big Red Machine beat the Red Sox in the World Series. Your mood ring turned to purple. Rod Stewart snuggled with Britt Ekland on the cover of the Rolling Stone. New York City was in its “Ford to City: Drop Dead” era. Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft. Mary Tyler Moore had a bad day at the funeral of Chuckles the Clown. Judy Blume published Forever. Everybody on the dance floor was doing the Hustle.

On your radio, the year’s biggest hit was the Captain and Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together.” We got timeless rock classics by legends like Bruce Springsteen, Pink Floyd, Joni Mitchell, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and Neil Young. We got cosmic funk from Parliament-Funkadelic. Freddie Mercury set a new record for the most Galileos in one song. Disco, punk, reggae, and metal were rising. Willie Nelson transformed outlaw country with Red Headed Stranger. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham joined Fleetwood Mac. Kiss became superstars with Alive!

So let’s break it down: the 75 best albums of 1975, complete with a playlist of key tracks from each LP. Some of these albums are famous classics beloved around the world. Others are cult favorites, buried treasures, rarities, or one-shots. We’ve got prog, dub, Afrobeat, German art rock, soul, pop trash, jazz, honky-tonk, Brazilian psychedelia, KC and the Sunshine Band. Some were blockbuster hits; others flopped. But one thing these 1975 albums share: They all sound fantastic in 2025. So as they say in Rocky Horror: Let’s do the time warp again.

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22

Fleetwood Mac, ‘Fleetwood Mac’

Before Rumours, there was Fleetwood Mac. The album marks the first release with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, the couple who’d recently joined the band. They brought several songs to the table, including Buckingham’s opening rocker “Monday Morning” and Nicks’ now-classic “Rhiannon” and “Landslide,” all of which showcased a new California sheen. This, combined with Christine McVie’s hypnotic “Over My Head” and “Warm Ways,” breathed new life into the band, already on its tenth studio LP. Fleetwood Mac released a self-titled album in 1968 (their debut), but doing it a second time around allowed them to formally introduce audiences to this new chapter. What could possibly go wrong? —A.M.

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21

Burning Spear, ‘Marcus Garvey’

There isn’t a more visceral, politically skewed reggae crowd pleaser than Burning Spear’s third album, Marcus Garvey. The music on this rootsy, conceptual opus is raw, rockin’, and emotive, headed by Burning Spear’s quietly crucial whine. Producer Jack Ruby’s solid arrangements enlivened his charge’s large-hearted, pan-African manifestos. Burning Spear’s insistent list of demands on “Give Me” — all bubbly bass and enchanted flutes — come on like a mirthful reparations plea. The pleasurably gut-filling funk of “Live Good” impels a viral message all about peace, love, and prosperity. And, winningly, “Tradition” jumps off with a chorus of sharp horns and an earworm-y chant, which Burning Spear interrupts with a stop-on-the-dime yelp before recanting a history spanning “more than 2,000 years.” Marcus Garvey is for the ages. —W.D.

20

Queen, ‘A Night at the Opera’

Queen’s third album was the most expensive record ever made at that time, and it was worth every penny. A Night at the Opera kicks off with a seething diss track pointed at a seedy former manager, then snakes through a glam-rock declaration of love inspired by a roadie’s devotion to his Triumph TR4 (“I’m in Love With My Car), manages to execute a perfect Sgt. Pepper-esque love song (“You’re My Best Friend”), and somehow works in a sea shanty (“Seaside  Rendezvous”). And — of course — they close out with the operatic masterpiece “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Despite critical ambivalence (Rolling Stone didn’t even mention the song in its review of the album), “Bohemian Rhapsody” became a global smash, the crowning triumph of an LP that pushed every boundary and destroyed genre limitations so comprehensively it even made opera cool again. —Gabrielle Macafee

19

Steely Dan, ‘Katy Lied’

Katy Lied marked the turning point in the Steely Dan story, the first album Donald Fagen and Walter Becker made after deciding to ditch the rigors of the road and fully devote themselves to pursuing perfection in the studio. The songs themselves are vintage Dan — crooks and swindlers, big-city loners and suburban creeps, strung-out addicts and world-weary losers — and the credits feature a plethora of crack musicians, including first-timers (and future regulars) Michael McDonald and guitarist Larry Carlton. For all the greatness on display, the start of this era was all marked by a twist of cruel irony worthy of a Steely Dan song: A faulty noise-reduction machine infamously damaged the tapes, rendering the sonics less than pristine. While that may have meant the album was never able to completely meet Fagen and Becker’s exacting standards, it only adds to the Katy Lied legend. —Jon Blistein

18

Bob Marley and the Wailers, ‘Live!’

In the summer of 1975, Bob Marley and the Wailers trekked to the U.K. to support their seventh studio album, Natty Dread. On July 17 and 18, they filled London’s Lyceum Theatre with the raw power of their now-immortal reggae, captured viscerally by the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio for a live album released that December. It went on to render the Natty Dread version of “No Woman No Cry” an obsolete framework for one of the best live recordings of all time. In London, the band brought the tempo of “No Woman No Cry” down and upped the gravitas with rougher, richer organ, Rita Marley and Marcia Griffiths’ passionate yowls, and the tour-worn gruff in Bob’s voice. The screech of microphone feedback and a swooning, singing crowd make Marley’s magic realer than real. All of the album is like this, unvarnished and communal, from the drama of “I Shot the Sheriff” to the rallying cry “Get Up, Stand Up.” —M.C.

17

Brian Eno, ‘Another Green World’

There’s no music experience like immersing your head in Brian Eno’s Another Green World, a sonic dream zone you can keep revisiting for years, yet still find fresh surprises. By 1975, Eno was still a songwriter, yet starting to explore “ambient music,” as he was about to name it. Another Green World is 41 minutes of hushed electronic pastoral, with five vocal songs sprinkled into the mix. Critic Robert Christgau called it “the aural equivalent of a park on the moon — oneness with nature under conditions of artificial gravity.” The flow never lingers too long in one place, with synth reveries like “Becalmed” giving way to Robert Fripp’s guitar, John Cale’s viola, or Phil Collins’ percussion. “I have to invent something to get excited,” Eno told Rolling Stone. “And when I’m excited, I invent things. So it’s a circular process.” —R.S.

16

Earth, Wind & Fire, ‘That’s the Way of the World’

Earth, Wind & Fire open their landmark album with one of popular music’s great one-two punches — “Shining Star” (the group’s first and only Number One hit) into “That’s the Way of the World,” setting an immaculate tone for an expansive, ambitious album filled with out-of-this-world funk-soul gold (“Happy Feelin’,” “Yearnin’ Learnin’”) and genre-smashing, future-forward epics (“Africano,” “See the Light”). It even boasts one of the most gloriously misunderstood love songs ever, “Reasons,” an R&B ballad infused with such an insatiable, orchestral rush it became a wedding standard despite being about a one-night stand. EWF’s musical might is timeless, but so is the That’s the Way of the World’s introspection, which offers cautious optimism for tumultuous times. “Don’t hesitate/Cause the world seems cold,” the title track reminds us, “Stay young at heart/’Cause you’re never, never old at heart.” —J. Blistein

15

Richard and Linda Thompson, ‘Pour Down Like Silver’

The British folk-rock titans Richard and Linda Thompson made a string of classics in their decade together, from the debut I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight to their divorce envoi Shoot Out the Lights. But Pour Down Like Silver is their absolute zenith, a masterpiece of late-night Celtic dread. It’s got their sharpest songwriting, their most pained vocals, their most undeniable groove. “Night Comes In” is the most spellbinding guitar Richard Thompson ever played in a studio, an eight-minute Stratocaster trance, haunted by Linda Thompson’s harmonies. Great line: “This room is ringing in my ears.” Her voice shines from “For Shame of Doing Wrong” (where the couple trade off the lament “I wish I was a fool for you again”) to “Jet Plane in a Rocking Chair.” They were living in a Sufi commune in London that discouraged their music — this was their last album for three years. But Pour Down Like Silver is as soulfully spooky as Seventies rock gets. —R.S.

14

Smokey Robinson, ‘A Quiet Storm’

Smokey Robinson had already transformed music history a few times in the Sixties, as the genius who did more than anyone to create the Motown sound. But he kept on innovating through the Seventies, after leaving the Miracles. A Quiet Storm was his massively influential orgy of slow-burning soul romance, unconfined by pop conventions or dance beats, just the yearning seduction of ballads like “The Agony and the Ecstasy” or the eight-minute title hit. As Robinson said, his concept was “seven songs carried on the back of a breeze, blowing through the record from start to finish.” It was an immediate sensation, single-handedly inspiring the quiet storm radio format of R&B bedroom balladeers like Luther Vandross and Freddie Jackson. But nobody’s ever done it quite like Smokey. —R.S.

13

Bob Dylan and the Band, ‘The Basement Tapes’

The bootleg industry was essentially created in 1969 so fans of Bob Dylan and the Band could pass around illicit copies of homemade recordings created in an upstate New York basement a couple of years earlier. In 1975, Dylan and the Band decided to release their own version of The Basement Tapes, finally giving people a chance to hear classics like “This Wheel’s on Fire,” “Million Dollar Bash,” and “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” in their original form. Unfortunately, the Band tampered with history by overdubbing new instrumentation onto the tapes, and added four new recordings. But the underlying material was so strong that it hardly mattered. This was Dylan at the peak of his genius, and the first tiny glimpse he gave the public of his giant cache of unreleased recordings. We wouldn’t get to hear the complete, uncut tapes until 2014 when The Bootleg Series Vol. 11: The Basement Tapes Complete was released. —A.G.

12

Willie Nelson, ‘Red Headed Stranger’

By now, the tale of Red Headed Stranger is well known: When Willie Nelson submitted the album to Columbia, his record label at the time, they thought it was a collection of demos, doomed to fail. Instead, it became a massive hit and a cornerstone of Nelson’s ongoing career. Despite its rootsy, sparse production, the LP is cinematic in its scope, telling the story of a husband who turns drifter after killing his unfaithful wife. More bloodshed is to come too, as Nelson presages in “Time of the Preacher”: “Now the lesson is over/And the killin’s begun,” before warning of the stranger, “Don’t cross him/don’t boss him,” and hope that by tomorrow, he’s on his way. Fifty years since RS reviewed the album, our writer’s takeaway remains true: “I can’t remember when a record has taken such a hold on me.” —J.H.

11

Roxy Music, ‘Siren’

Roxy Music’s first four albums established them as imperiously cool, voraciously innovative art-rock sophisticates. Siren isn’t as conceptually high end as previous classics like Roxy Music or For Your Pleasure, but it’s simultaneously their sleekest record and their most soulful, kicking off with “Love Is the Drug,” where Bryan Ferry hits the club over a disco groove, looking for a romantic fix. Roxy is suave and funky on “She Sells” and “Both Ends Burning,” and cataclysmically rocking on “Whirlwind,” an explosive showcase for guitarist Phil Manzanera. The heart of the record lies in ballads like “Sentimental Fool,” “Could It Happen to Me,” and “End of the Line,” where Ferry lets his guard down and exposes the vulnerable man behind his glam-Don Juan persona. —J.D. 

10

Led Zeppelin, ‘Physical Graffiti’

For the first release on their new label Swan Song, Led Zeppelin knew they had to go big. They dialed the rock & roll excess up to 11, releasing a swaggering double album that was extravagant even in its packaging (a die-cut image of a New York City block that proved a bit tricky to manufacture). The album contains their signature combination of hard rock (the awesome “The Rover”) and acoustic magic (“Bron-Yr-Aur”), but they expand their palette even further here, dabbling in psychedelic quests through Morocco (“Kashmir”) and the synth-heavy prog rock odyssey that is “In the Light” (which they tragically never performed live). “It’s just total attitude,” Jimmy Page once told us. “Which is probably in my DNA.”–A.M.

9

Neil Young and Crazy Horse, ‘Zuma’

Neil Young had just dropped the scorched-earth hippie-doom classic Tonight’s the Night, one of the darkest rock masterpieces ever, and he was newly single after the devastating breakup he’d autopsied on 1974’s On the Beach. Now, it was time to clear the air and rock, so he regrouped with Crazy Horse for his best garage-rock splurge since Everybody Know This Is Nowhere six years earlier. Fans confused by his recent bummed-out swerves were elated, but this was no party; they go from alienated bangers like “Barstool Blues” and “Don’t Cry No Tears” to the slo-mo apocalypse of “Danger Bird” and the forlorn grunge country of “Lookin’ for a Love.” Zuma peaks with “Cortez the Killer,” taking Young’s obsession with the cowboy West back to its bloody roots over some of the finest guitar violence he ever unleashed. —J.D.

8

Joni Mitchell, ‘The Hissing of Summer Lawns’

Instead of taking the safe route and making another L.A. radio-friendly LP to follow 1974’s Court and Spark, Joni Mitchell surged forward with a different kind of masterpiece. With the exception of “Don’t’ Interrupt the Sorrow” (in which she sings “Since I was 17 I’ve had no one over me,” one of her greatest lines), the album marks a shift from internal to external. “I began to write social descriptions as opposed to personal confession,” she told Rolling Stone in 1979. “The basic theme of the album, which everybody thought was so abstract, was just any summer day in any neighborhood when people turn their sprinklers on all up and down the block.” To do this, she used a variety of instruments including the Moog, and even sampled Burundi drumming. The album perplexed critics (“The worst album of the year,” Mitchell later joked), but here real fans — Prince and Morrissey among them — never lost sight of its brilliance. —A.M.

7

Pink Floyd, ‘Wish You Were Here’

The massive success of Pink Floyd’s 1973 album, The Dark Side of the Moon, would’ve had any other band doing cartwheels up and down the halls of their mansions. Not these guys. Instead they responded with the ultimate rock-star bitchfest of the 1970s, channeling their anger at the corporate system and their sadness about the mental collapse of their visionary co-founder Syd Barrett into the devastating grandeur of “Wish You Were Here,” and the smoldering angst of “Have a Cigar” and “Welcome to the Machine.” Twenty-five minutes of the album are taken up by the epic inward journey “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” where they beautifully translated what Roger Waters called their “indefinable, inevitable melancholy about the disappearance of Syd” into a prog-rock prayer. —J.D.

6

Toots and the Maytals, ‘Funky Kingston’

Toots and the Maytals released two different albums called Funky Kingston, with the same cover artwork. The 1975 Funky Kingston is a landmark U.S. collection, crashing three different Maytals LPs into one of reggae’s most ferocious albums ever — the ultimate showcase for the mighty roar of Toots Hibbert. (It has only three songs in common with the lesser 1973 Funky Kingston.) A country boy in the concrete jungle, Hibbert was reggae’s soul shouter, belting over the James Brown groove of “Funky Kingston.” The Maytals liven up the John Denver country classic “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” turning “West Virginia” into “West Jamaica.” And for “Louie Louie,” they grab the Caribbean-inspired beat of the West Coast garage-rock classic and bring it all back home. —R.S.

5

Bruce Springsteen, ‘Born to Run’

The first time Bruce Springsteen heard the album that would save and define his career, he threw it into a pool. He was afraid, he told Rolling Stone years later, “of releasing the record and just saying, ‘Well, this is who I am,’ for all the obvious reasons that people are afraid of exposure and putting themselves out there.” Born to Run is the sound of a great artist’s confidence and vulnerability, hopes and fears, caught neck and neck in a high-speed drag race, with everything and nothing to lose. It’s a total declaration of self, one that still resonates no matter how many times you’ve heard “Thunder Road” or “Born to Run” or “Jungleland” or “Backstreets.” But what makes it a great album — a great work of art — is the way Springsteen’s “This is who I am” helps us know a little better who we are. —J. Blistein

4

Neil Young, ‘Tonight’s the Night’

Tonight’s the Night is the final installment of Neil Young’s famous “ditch trilogy,” yet it’s far darker than Time Fades Away and On the Beach, the “OD letter” he wrote while reeling from the deaths of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry. Holed up in a makeshift studio with the Horse’s Billy Talbot and Ralph Molina — the band’s first time together since Whitten’s death — as well as Ben Keith and Nils Lofgren, Young processed his grief, laying down raw, unfiltered melodies and whiskey-soaked rockers that would confound listeners for decades. The title track is a bone-chilling chant fit for a seance, one you can actually hear commence on “Come on Baby Let’s Go Downtown,” when Whitten appears on vocals. “Albuquerque” and “Mellow My Mind” are some of the most tender and honest moments in Young’s catalog, while “Tired Eyes” is the sequel to “The Needle and the Damage Done.” The album was recorded two years earlier and shelved, until Young decided his haunted masterpiece was ready. We haven’t stopped listening since. —A.M.

3

Parliament, ‘Mothership Connection’

Afrofuturism owes everything to Parliament, and the album Mothership Connection is a pillar of the concept. The imaginative album envisions an encounter between Black astronauts and extraterrestrials in outer space, pulling inspiration from Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey as well as pop concept albums like The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Who’s Tommy. The result is as funky as you can get, with George Clinton slipping easily into the role as the Mothership’s DJ, coming at you from “the Chocolate Milky Way.” The album is as foundational to funk as it is to pop music, becoming widely sampled in hip-hop for decades to come. And the Mothership would be integral to Parliament’s own lore, becoming a centerpiece of the collective’s live shows for the rest of the Seventies. This album would also produce one of their biggest hits: “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker)” became their first million-selling single. —B.S.

2

Patti Smith, ‘Horses’

“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.” Has an album ever kicked off so startlingly great? Patti Smith was largely unknown when she dropped her debut, Horses, but it soon became the blueprint of punk rock — which she fused beautifully with her lifelong love of poetry. Smith flips a Van Morrison classic on its head (“Gloria”), reflects on poverty (the defiant “Free Money”), and drops a stunning, 10-minute odyssey packed with figures both real and literary (“Land”), all with the help of her incredible band: guitarist Lenny Kaye, pianist Richard Sohl, bassist Ivan Kral, and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty, plus the Velvet Underground’s John Cale in the producer chair. The iconic black-and-white cover, in which Smith poses androgynously with a black coat over her shoulder, was shot by her Just Kids muse Robert Mapplethorpe. “I’m a girl doing what guys usually did,” she told Rolling Stone in 1976. “The way that I look, the goals and kinds of things I want to help achieve through rock.” Mission accomplished. —A.M.

1

Bob Dylan, ‘Blood on the Tracks’

Bob Dylan shocked the world with Blood on the Tracks, the album where he sang in a fiery new adult voice — a man in pain, brooding over lost love, as he rambles on down the road. Nobody knew he still had this much passion in him. But Dylan made Blood on the Tracks while his marriage fell apart, singing “Tangled Up in Blue” with raw intensity. It was the ultimate rock comeback, reviving him after years of half-assed albums and depressingly polite tunes. But it’s also the ultimate breakup record. When you’re suffering a dose of heartache, nothing hits quite like hearing Dylan moan the desperate blues of “You’re a Big Girl Now” or snarl the bitter rage of “Idiot Wind” or accept his fate with the stoic generosity of “If You See Her, Say Hello.” He’s a Jack of Hearts getting kicked around by the simple twists of fate, as his boot heels go wandering from Delacroix to Montague Street, from San Francisco to Ashtabula, from the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol. The way he sings the line “You’re gonna make me give myself a good talking-toooo” — he deserved the Nobel Prize for that alone.Blood on the Tracks was an immediate commercial and critical smash. “A lot of people told me they enjoyed that album,” Dylan said. “It’s hard for me to relate to that — I mean, people enjoying that type of pain.” But for the past 50 years, Blood on the Tracks has been an album people always turn to in hard times. Especially those moments when romance leaves you tangled up in blue, with a corkscrew in your heart.–R.S. 

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