Home Music Music Lists

The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time

The classics are still the classics, but the canon keeps getting bigger and better

Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time was originally published in 2003, with a slight update in 2012. Over the years, it’s been the most widely read  — and argued over — feature in the history of the magazine (last year, the RS 500 got over 63 million views on the site). But no list is definitive — tastes change, new genres emerge, the history of music keeps being rewritten. So we decided to remake our greatest albums list from scratch. To do so, we received and tabulated Top 50 Albums lists from more than 300 artists, producers, critics, and music-industry figures (from radio programmers to label heads, like Atlantic Records CEO Craig Kallman). The electorate includes Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Billie Eilish; rising artists like H.E.R., Tierra Whack, and Lindsey Jordan of Snail Mail; as well as veteran musicians, such as Adam Clayton and the Edge of U2, Raekwon of the Wu-Tang Clan, Gene Simmons, and Stevie Nicks.

How We Made the List and Who Voted

When we first did the RS 500 in 2003, people were talking about the “death of the album.” The album —and especially the album release — is more relevant than ever. (As in 2003, we allowed votes for compilations and greatest-hits albums, mainly because a well-made compilation can be just as coherent and significant as an LP, because compilations helped shaped music history, and because many hugely important artists recorded their best work before the album had arrived as a prominent format.)

Of course, it could still be argued that embarking on a project like this is increasingly difficult in an era of streaming and fragmented taste. But that was part of what made rebooting the RS 500 fascinating and fun; 86 of the albums on the list are from this century, and 154 are new additions that weren’t on the 2003 or 2012 versions. The classics are still the classics, but the canon keeps getting bigger and better.

Written By

Jonathan Bernstein, Pat Blashill, Jon Blistein, Nathan Brackett, David Browne, Anthony DeCurtis, Matt Diehl, Jon Dolan, Chuck Eddy, Ben Edmonds, Gavin Edwards, Jenny Eliscu, Brenna Ehrlrich, Suzy Exposito, David Fricke, Elisa Gardner, Holly George-Warren, Andy Greene, Kory Grow, Will Hermes, Brian Hiatt, Christian Hoard, Charles Holmes, Mark Kemp, Greg Kot, Elias Leight, Joe Levy, Angie Martoccio, David McGee, Chris Molanphy, Tom Moon, Jason Newman, Rob O’Connor, Park Puterbaugh, Jody Rosen, Austin Scaggs, Karen Schoemer, Bud Scoppa, Claire Shaffer, Rob Sheffield, Hank Shteamer, Brittany Spanos, Rob Tannenbaum, David Thigpen, Simon Vozick-Levinson, Barry Walters, Jonah Weiner

From Rolling Stone US

358

Sonic Youth, ‘Goo’

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.

357

Tom Waits, ‘Rain Dogs’

“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.”

356

Dr. John, ‘Gris-Gris’

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.

355

Black Sabbath, ‘Black Sabbath’

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.

354

X-Ray Spex, ‘Germfree Adolescents’

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.

353

The Cars, ‘The Cars’

“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?”

352

Eminem, ‘The Slim Shady LP’

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.

351

Roxy Music, ‘For Your Pleasure’

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.