Good morning. |
 | Neil McCormick Chief Music Critic |
What are the greatest albums ever made? That’s a question guaranteed to stir music fans into heated debate, at the very least.
As the finale of a series about my 30 years as The Telegraph’s popular music critic, I was asked to come up with a definitive top 50 albums of all time. No pressure, right? I immediately jotted down a shortlist off the top of my head… and it ran to more than 200 albums. But I persevered, thinking hard about the artists who have shaped the popular music story of our age and the albums that show their talents at their most potent.
It was a labour of love that took me from Elvis Presley’s explosive 1956 rock ‘n’ roll debut to Kendrick Lamar’s soul-searching 2015 hip-hop masterpiece To Pimp A Butterfly, ordered according to my own sense of their lasting beauty, power and impact.
This article comes in a brand new format, too. You can save a list of albums you’ve listened to, or those you want to listen to, and share them among family, friends and colleagues. And if you have thoughts on my selection (I know you will), you can use the comment function on each individual album — or share general thoughts at the bottom of the article. Let the music play…
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Elton John: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Written and recorded in just two weeks during Elton John’s first flush of superstardom, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road captures the piano man in full flow, bringing melodic magic to lyricist Bernie Taupin’s bittersweet, nostalgic investigations into American pop culture. This extraordinarily rich double album remains John’s masterpiece, a pop smorgasbord that stretches from the intimate to the epic with a thrilling sense of adventure.
Every song has a distinct flavour. From the opening synth-driven prog suite Funeral for a Friend / Love Lies Bleeding, Elton and his incredible band career through the glam stomp of Bennie and The Jets, ripped-up rock ’n’ roll of Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting, cod reggae (Jamaica Jerk-Off), psychedelic wonder (Grey Seal), as well as singalongs, lullabies, whimsy and dirty rockers. His elegy for Marilyn Monroe, Candle in the Wind, was an all-time classic long before he repurposed it for the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997, after which it became the bestselling single in pop history.
At the heart of this fantastically colourful album lurks a darkness. These are songs about sadness, disillusion, alcoholics and star-crossed lovers, lifted by Elton’s yearning voice, rousing gospel harmonies and scene-stealing piano playing.
The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds
Brian Wilson occupies a special place in the pop pantheon: the golden youth who made mind-blowing music, then lost his mind. Pet Sounds set a new benchmark in pop culture, blending rock ’n’ roll with classical harmonic theory, baroque orchestrations and an audacious sound palette, all conjured in Wilson’s sandbox studio.
The Beach Boys emerged as a pure expression of youthful, heady escapism. But by the mid-Sixties, with their leader’s mental health already in decline, their sound began to warp while the songs turned toward a poignant mourning for lost innocence. As Carl, the younger Wilson sibling, led the live band, Brian remained in Los Angeles, writing and producing groundbreaking new music with Phil Spector’s session musicians the Wrecking Crew.
Plucked from Brian Wilson’s visionary head space, Pet Sounds overflows with near-cosmic beauty. God Only Knows floats as a gorgeous devotional on a heart-bursting melody, while Good Vibrations ripples between dimensions, surely the purest, time-switching blast of sheer bliss ever recorded. The Beach Boys’s British rivals the Beatles took note, and were pushed to even greater heights. In the mid-1960s, Pet Sounds represented something thrillingly new. Six decades later, its richness, depth, and mystery still resonates.
REM: Automatic for the People
Post-punk and pre-grunge, REM were no one’s idea of what an American rock group should sound like. Too arty for the mainstream, too restrained for US hardcore, they cut their own path out of Athens, Georgia, with offbeat folk leanings, pop sensibilities, and a strange, asexual frontman with cryptic lyrics and a goatee beard.
Somehow, the world came round to them. Automatic for the People is their quietest, most broodingly affecting album, filled with lush, vibrant alternative pop. It balances anthemic gems (Man on the Moon, The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite), folky melancholia (Star Me Kitten, Nightswimming), angry protest rock (Ignoreland) and perhaps the most empathetic ballad of all time in Everybody Hurts, a secular hymn of compassion built on a simple, picked rock ’n’ roll motif. This was the album that made REM unlikely global stars.
The Smiths: The Queen Is Dead
Short-lived but hugely influential, the 1980s Manchester quartet the Smiths forged a delicate, maverick indie-rock sound that challenged the macho dynamics of the mainstream. Their third (of four) superb studio albums is their masterpiece, in which singer Steven Morrissey’s poetic language, languorous voice and emotionally bereft world-view perfectly synced with guitarist Johnny Marr’s melodic songcraft and dazzlingly inventive guitar playing. A limber rhythm section – bassist Andy Rourke and drummer Mike Joyce – completed this graceful unit.
From the clattering satire of the title track to the throwaway joy of the finale, Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others, via the swooning nihilism of There Is a Light That Never Goes Out, the album never lets up. Feeling both disgust and empathy at the human condition, Morrissey revels in a kind of morbid glee at life’s injustices with arch, understated humour.
Taylor Swift: 1989
Taylor Swift has proven herself astonishingly good at every aspect of the music business, as comfortable in the boardroom as in the studio, displaying an incredible instinct for the ways in which art and business bind together. She’s been a particularly canny operator on social media, deftly weaving a soap-opera narrative from her complicated love life. But her success is all founded on songwriting constructed along classic lines.
Named after the year of her birth, 1989 is the album with which Swift completed her transformation from America’s country sweetheart to global pop colossus. Executive-produced by Swedish chart hitmaker Max Martin, it is jam-packed with sleek, synthetic textures evoking the neon rush of 1980s pop. Yet scratch the surface and Swift’s roots are plainly visible: well-formed verses, rising bridges and indelible choruses, grounded in the confessional realism of singer-songwriter tradition.
Smash hits such as Blank Space, Style and Shake It Off explode with bright drum machines and sparkling hooks while delivering sharply observed emotional reckonings. Swift’s greatest gift has been to turn the narratives of her own life into communal anthems, offering her young female audience a rare voice for their own everyday struggles, aspirations, and heartbreaks. 1989 is her purest expression of pop class, with a strain of something raw running through its centre that bursts out on the haunting Clean. It confronts memory and survival with a lucidity and conversational ease that cuts through even the slickest production.
Van Morrison: Astral Weeks
Astral Weeks established Van Morrison’s reputation, after pop hits with Northern Irish band Them. It is an album of mysteries – as much, one suspects, to its maker as to listeners. Utterly raw and in-the-moment, it blends jazz, blues, soul and folk into some kind of amorphous singer-songwriter extemporisation. The sharply tenor-voiced Morrison delivers a deeply melancholic yet uplifting song sequence, caught between forlorn reminiscence and spiritual transcendence. It is beautiful and strange.
In dispute with his American label, Morrison was in dire financial straits when Astral Weeks was recorded in just three live sessions with a handful of New York jazz musicians. The result was an improvised collision of cultures, channelled through a young genius trying to convey the music he could hear in his head. From the title track’s whispered transcendence to Slim Slow Slider’s hushed farewell, Morrison sounds like a man possessed by sound. Despite poor sales, it was hugely influential among critics and aficionados, helping shape the subsequent singer-songwriting boom of the 1970s.
Madonna: Like a Prayer
There was no one like Madonna before Madonna. A 360-degree artist, media-manipulator, marketing whizz and cultural pundit, she was the first female global pop superstar of her kind, fighting for every inch of space she occupied. Her unstoppable rise heralded a new era of empowered women in pop.
Madonna was already filling stadiums when she released Like a Prayer, but this was the moment that everything clicked: it is a bold, brilliant, and utterly uncontainable monster of 1980s pop. The title track mashes spiritual and sexual surrender into a giddy gospel-charged anthem, while Express Yourself roars with a storming faith in selfhood. These glorious dance-floor fillers can still ignite any room.
But it wasn’t all sweat and choreography. Madonna marshalled top writers and producers to deliver synth-funk erotica with Prince (Love Song), wrenching ballads (Promise to Try), breakup confessions (Till Death Do Us Part) and Beatlesque whimsy (Dear Jessie). If Madonna is the queen of pop, Like a Prayer is her crowning achievement.
Amy Winehouse: Back to Black
Amy Winehouse’s witty, musically rich masterpiece updates classic 1960s girl-group pop and soul with self-lacerating honesty. Heavily tattooed and looking close to breaking point, Winehouse sang with a big, smoky, sensual voice steeped in a century of jazz and soul yet charged with a 21st-century snap and swagger. She was, by turns, dirty, flirty, funny, sarcastic, heartbreaking, and wise. Breakout hit Rehab was misread as a rebel anthem, when in fact its desperate defiance signalled much more profound personal troubles.
The title track is immense; a heartbreak epic with a towering coda that sucks you into the black hole of Winehouse’s most self-negating mood. Yet, paradoxically, every time she sang, the atmosphere lifted, her voice curling magically in the air, incorporeal yet resonant. Back to Black shimmers with slivers of Sixties guitar, snapping hip-hop beats, plush strings, and lush doo-wop harmonies, capturing the singer’s raw, bittersweet vitality and pure love of music.
Kendrick Lamar: To Pimp a Butterfly
LA rapper Kendrick Lamar’s third album announced him as the star hip hop had been waiting for: the most urgent, dextrous and purposeful rap lyricist of his, and perhaps any, generation. To Pimp a Butterfly is a dense, intricate mesh of free-flowing jazz, deep funky psychedelia and cut-up hip hop, connecting modern rap back to the great socially and politically aware soul of the 1970s. The hyper-articulate, sensitive wordsmith switches up styles and tempos to address racial and class sensitivities in a poetic narrative built around a long dark night of the soul.
On the dazzling For Free? Lamar sets the hipster flow of a beatnik poet against cascading trumpets, evoking rap’s historic origins with The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron. George Clinton’s space-age P-Funk is another touchstone, yet, despite a host of retro samples, there is nothing old-fashioned about Lamar’s masterpiece. It’s a fierce, funny, emotionally committed state-of-the-(divided)-nation address.
Paul Simon: Graceland
With Graceland, Paul Simon, long celebrated as a lyricist and melodicist, put rhythm at the core of his music. In the apartheid era, his sanctions-busting collaborations with South African musicians such as Ladysmith Black Mambazo sparked controversy but birthed a sprawling masterpiece. Graceland draws together all strands of Simon’s musical life: the bubbling African grooves are shaded with his love of American blues, doo-wop, and rock ’n’ roll. There are acoustic guitars, flowing melodies, lush orchestrations and blissful harmonies reminiscent of his Simon & Garfunkel hits.
Laced with internal rhymes, Simon’s philosophical lyrics flow with the swaggering audacity of a master writer. There’s no shortage of humour to lighten the heavy subject matter: You Can Call Me Al delivers its punchline with the timing of a New York stand-up. Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes is pure joy. The Boy in the Bubble offers a marvel of modern bewilderment. On release, the political ramifications of the album were the subject of much debate, but the songs are absolutely dazzling, a verbally audacious, melodically gorgeous, polyrhythmic celebration of human connection.
Bob Marley & The Wailers: Exodus
Bob Marley was the first and greatest reggae superstar, with charisma and moral authority in spades. But, since his premature death in 1981, it is the sheer universal pleasure of the music he left behind that has kept him bubbling through pop culture. Exodus, his magnificent 10th album, was recorded in exile in London following a failed attempt on his life in Jamaica. The English capital proved a fertile environment as Marley plugged into the city’s flourishing punk and disco scenes.
There’s a luxuriousness to Exodus, its rock colours and hypnotic grooves blended with sinuous, unhurried reggae rhythms, a warp and weave of loping bass, lightly shifting percussion, chinking slices of guitar, splashes of warm organ and bright parps of horn, all swimming in dubby echo. Lush, feminine harmonies push in and out in call and response with Marley’s own sweet, expressive voice.
Jamming, Waiting in Vain, One Love/People Get Ready and Three Little Birds became Marley’s signature hits, while the title track is a mesmerising epic of the black diaspora. Investigating faith, revelling in sensuality, and advocating peaceful revolution, these are songs of meaning and power, but most of all of melody and mood, deeply funky to their roots.
Aretha Franklin: Lady Soul
Aretha Franklin was the honied voice that set pop free: the greatest soul singer of her, or any other, age. Young, gifted and black, she really hit her stride in the late 1960s, storming into the public consciousness like civil rights in action, feminism incarnate, the very embodiment of emancipation and equality. Lady Soul finds her at the absolute height of her powers.
Song for song, note for note, it may be the greatest soul album ever made. Stand back in amazement as Aretha does her thing with an incredible band (Bobby Womack and Eric Clapton both feature on guitar) performing lovingly curated material, produced by legendary Atlantic Records head Jerry Wexler, some of it written by Franklin herself.
She’s sorrowful in Chain of Fools, burns slow and righteous on People Get Ready, bleeds into the smoky blues of Good to Me as I Am to You (with the 22-year-old Clapton on lead), and bares her heart on the devastating Ain’t No Way. Wexler called Aretha “the lady of mysterious sorrows”; every note here carries emotional riches.
Kraftwerk: Trans-Europe Express
Kraftwerk are the Beatles of the computer age, whose visionary music presaged a shift from the age of analogue instruments, blues rhythms and melodic harmony to mechanised grooves. The first time the German quartet appeared on British TV in 1975, it was not on Top of the Pops, but on Tomorrow’s World. In contrast to the gaudiness of Seventies rock and funk, here were four men dressed in business suits, standing immobile at technology stations, making synthetic music that was sparse, linear and rhythmic. Their songs were hymns for the ordinary objects of an industrial world.
Trans-Europe Express represents their most complete vision, a journey through inner spaces reflected in exterior locations, infused with a tender melancholy that chimes perfectly with the lean beats and pure electronic sound. It sounded shockingly weird in its moment but if you tune into the pop charts in the 21st century, you might conclude the robots have taken over. Trans-Europe Express was a bridge from the past to the future: now, we all live in Kraftwerk’s world.
Black Sabbath: Paranoid
Emerging from the industrial heartland of Birmingham in the late 1960s, Black Sabbath channelled the noise and grit of their local environment into something primal and revolutionary. Guitarist Tony Iommi lost fingertips in a sheet metal factory accident and developed a heavy, dynamic fretting style that fused perfectly with Geezer Butler’s brooding basslines and Bill Ward’s aggressive, time-shifting drumming.
Vocalist Ozzy Osbourne fronted it all with unhinged charisma and a big-chested, raw-throated voice that made every song feel ferociously alive. Though countless subgenres (thrash, doom, goth, death and hardcore among them) have proliferated in their wake, Sabbath’s sound remains heavy metal’s core: distorted, intricate, riff-driven rock with nerve-shredding solos, howling vocals, and pulp-horror lyrics.
Their second album Paranoid has never been bettered. From the riff-fuelled fury of the title track to the grotesque protest of War Pigs, the jazzy cosmic drift of Planet Caravan and apocalyptic grind of Iron Man, there’s a grandeur and irregularity to Sabbath here. Or to put it another way, it still rocks like a monster.
Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man
Drum machines, synths, funky bass: at 53, veteran Canadian folk troubadour Leonard Cohen went electropop. The results were a revelation, emphasising the mischievous wit that always lay at the dark centre of his work, tempering his intellectual and philosophical seriousness. A choir of backing singers led by long-time collaborator Jennifer Warnes deliver choruses with almost saccharine melodiousness; a counterbalance to Cohen’s ever-dryer and deeper vocals. “I was born like this, I had no choice / I was born with the gift of a golden voice,” he intones on Tower Of Song, a masterpiece about the art of songwriting.
A lyricist with a poetic precision and spiritual wisdom unsurpassed in popular music, Cohen forges imagery that is elegant, thoughtful and occasionally startling. On such extraordinary tracks as Ain’t No Cure for Love and Everybody Knows, he acts as a musical spirit guide, addressing the impossible question of how to live a moral life in a seemingly indifferent universe. To hear Cohen sing is to know that he is right there in the struggle with you.
Lauryn Hill: The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
The solo debut from the Fugees frontwoman proved the crossover power of hip hop. Featuring velvet vocals and razor-sharp rhymes, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill mixes the rough with the smooth, pairing streetwise lyrics with warm harmonies and musical flow. On Doo Wop (That Thing), Hill dishes out smart, no-nonsense advice over a sassy, infectious beat; it’s music with a message that lands like a soft punch.
Where so many 1990s rap albums leaned heavily on gangster tropes, Hill places herself in a classroom, turning her focus to self-improvement and social uplift without slipping into preachiness. Drawing from gospel, jazz, soul and rock, Hill crafted a delightful and philosophical masterpiece bursting with infectious hooks and outrageous harmonies.
Massive Attack: Protection
We exist in a musical era that has moved far beyond the confines of genre. Portmanteau albums thrived in jazz and funk but really came into their own with hip hop and techno. Building on their brilliant 1991 debut Blue Lines, the second album of eclectic Bristol DJ and producer trio Massive Attack set a standard that remains hard to beat, a multicultural fusion of apparently incompatible elements – including punk, funk, ambient, reggae, pop, hip hop and soul – that coalesces into a thrilling reflection of the diverse cultural landscape of modern Britain.
The title track, featuring singer-songwriter Tracey Thorn, is a haunting, minimalist ballad blending fragility and strength in a hypnotic slow groove. The psychedelia of Karmacoma features Bristol maverick Tricky’s murmured flow, folding dub basslines into surreal, dreamlike textures, while Spying Glass channels Horace Andy’s roots reggae through a digital prism. Live instrumentation, lush orchestrations and inspired sampling weave throughout the album, balancing human warmth with synthetic eeriness. The ultimate trip hop masterpiece, Protection remains a vital, genre-defying and genre-defining record of the 1990s.
The Sex Pistols: Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols
Punk’s greatest band changed the course of music history with one perfect album before disintegrating. From the machine gun attack of Holidays in the Sun to the sneering disavowal of the corporate music business on EMI, that album is the absolute dog’s proverbials. At the Pistols’ core was one of the great rock power trios: slick bassist Glen Matlock and battering-ram drummer Paul Cook making a ferocious engine for guitarist Steve Jones to fuel with distorted glam-rock chords and sudden sweet injections of lead (Matlock’s numbnut replacement Sid Vicious only appears on two tracks, thankfully).
John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten), an audacious lyricist and iconoclast who invests their rebellious posturing with seething, eccentric, sarcastic fury shifts things up a gear. There is an imperious theatricality to his weird keening melodies and disdainful rat-a-tat-tat delivery that somehow weaves in perfectly with the chainsaw buzz of Jones’s guitar.
The venomous rant of Bodies is still the most thrilling shocker in rock history. Pretty Vacant, God Save The Queen and Anarchy in the UK show the lean, mean pop machine underpinning the Pistols’ relentless attack. Back in 1977, it sounded like the end of the world. Decades later, it seems more like the perfect new beginning.
Kanye West: My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Kanye West has become the most problematic superstar of our times, his long nascent mental health issues erupting unpleasantly via social media forums, expressing views so beyond the pale even his most loyal allies have abandoned him. Before it all unravelled, he was arguably the boldest, most influential shapeshifter in 21st-century music, a Bowie for the hip hop age. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is his maximalist masterwork, fusing the genre’s sample-driven roots with the scope of stadium rock, the pulse of club music and the emotion of soul.
Melodious, harmonic songs are concocted with megalomaniac grandeur from startling sources including Smokey Robinson, Aphex Twin, Bon Iver, Gil Scott-Heron and King Crimson, folded into shifting, symphonic structures encompassing glittering electronica and swooning classical orchestrations.
The album is peppered with pop hooks and grandstanding contributions from Jay-Z, Nicki Minaj, John Legend and Rihanna (none of whom would now give West the time of day). Oscillating between braggadocio and bruised vulnerability, West paints a grippingly revealing psychological self-portrait. On the extraordinary nine-minute Runaway (underpinned by single icy piano notes), he delivers a dark anthem for losers, toasting “the douchebags” and knowing full well he’s one of them.
The Eagles: Hotel California
By the mid-1970s, the Eagles had already perfected their sleekly harmonic country rock formula and released a Greatest Hits that would go on to become one of the biggest-selling albums of the decade. They followed it with their masterpiece, Hotel California, a bulletproof collection of songs about the seductive illusions of the American dream. The title track is a spooky wonder, a haunting metaphor for luxurious ennui.
Drummer, vocalist and lyricist Don Henley’s aching voice guides the listener through a vision of glossy excess and spiritual emptiness, culminating in a twin-guitar climax from Joe Walsh and Don Felder that is probably the most famous solo in rock history. The Last Resort ends proceedings with a sadly prophetic environmental lament. Crafted with surgical precision and poetic intent, Hotel California remains a definitive American album: the sound of a nation with something on its mind.
Elvis Presley: Elvis Presley
They call him the King because he was a supreme, world-ruling talent. Elvis Presley’s debut album features one of the great sleeves (copied by the Clash for London Calling, more on which below), displaying the singer lost in ecstatic performance. Released in the singles era, his first LP is a hurried, slap-dash affair that nonetheless perfectly captures the energy of the moment. His vocals demonstrate a joyous, playful confidence, as he hyperactively hiccups and hollers over the honky-tonk and boogie piano beats.
Shamelessly adapting the rock ’n’ roll hits of his rapidly multiplying contemporaries, Presley grabs each song by the neck and makes it his own. His definitive version of Blue Suede Shoes makes Carl Perkins sound positively polite, an invitation to rumble rather than a mere request not to scuff his footwear. What you might mistake for a bongo on the eerie Blue Moon is in fact Presley restlessly tapping the body of his guitar. While the sleazy, atmospheric Money Honey closes a collection of songs ripe with undiluted sensuality. Overloaded with energy and ideas hastily tossed together, the album is like a musical snapshot of the 1950s teen explosion.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Electric Ladyland
Jimi Hendrix was one of the most explosive, visionary talents in popular music history, an untutored genius who changed rock forever. A virtuoso on a mission to explore every possibility of the electric guitar, he came close to achieving that aim on his exuberant final double album. Acting as his own producer, Hendrix used the Electric Ladyland studio in New York not just as a recording space, but as a creative instrument. What emerges is a sprawling set that balances improvisation with detailed sound design.
This is Hendrix at his boldest and most expansive, from the tight, urgent funk of Crosstown Traffic to his electrified reinvention of Bob Dylan’s All Along the Watchtower. He takes the blues of Voodoo Chile fast and slow and it proves stunning both ways. He had just four years as a recording artist, from his debut in 1966 to his death in 1970, aged 27. In that short time, he burned as brightly as any musician before or since. It’s all here: the showman, the studio wizard and the soul-searing improviser.
Patti Smith: Horses
Horses is an album that had an impact far beyond its sales figures, the kind of record its disciples treat with near-religious veneration. Patti Smith’s 1975 debut offers a wild collision of poetry and primal rock, a volatile, hallucinatory, three-chord sermon that feels conjured on the spot, from the nerve of inspiration itself.
Her version of Gloria doesn’t cover Van Morrison’s 1964 hit so much as burn it down and rebuild it in her own image, making “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine” ring out like a battle cry. The incantatory beat poetry of Birdland channels loss with a surreal force that still stuns. Throughout, her garage band teeters on chaos but never collapses.
With a sleeve featuring Robert Mapplethorpe’s portrait of Smith at her most androgynous, Horses registered like a thunderclap of defiance and transformation. Smith’s journey from minor poet (she had published three volumes of verse in the early 1970s) to major rock star was driven by a feeling for rock as a potentially world-changing medium. In her prime, she was a pioneer, a singular voice for women and outsiders. There is hardly a rocker of either gender who could match the improvisational freedom of expression Smith delivers in full flight on Horses.
Lou Reed: Transformer
Lou Reed’s legacy is forever bound to the poisonous attitude, atonal vocals, shuddering rhythms and thrashy distorting guitars of The Velvet Underground, shadowy godfathers of punk, goth and indie. But it is Transformer that crystallises his brilliance into its most accessible form. Produced with theatrical flair by David Bowie and Mick Ronson, Transformer gleams with style, wit and subversive charm on every song.
From the urbane sleaze of Walk on the Wild Side (which has surely the most famous bassline in pop history) to the tender ache of ambiguous ballad Perfect Day, Reed finds a perfect balance between sharply observed lyricism and pure pop classicism. Satellite of Love marries cosmic detachment with earthly jealousy, lifted by Bowie’s ethereal backing vocals into pop-art transcendence.
The Clash: London Calling
Punk was supposed to bring self-indulgence to an end. Yet this sprawling double-album from The Clash is a juicy musical feast. The passionate, idealistic London four-piece dive headlong into the melting pot of their influences, turning their hands to rockabilly, reggae, ska, jazz, blues, ragtime and pop. The album cover’s homage to Elvis Presley’s 1956 RCA debut is a history lesson in itself.
Every song is delivered as if their lives depended on it. The opening title track is a monster, a taut stomp creating ominous apocalyptic drama from a thick mix of guitars, rumbling bass, and Joe Strummer’s whisper and howl. Guitarist-vocalist Mick Jones’s dreamy Lost in the Supermarket offers a perfect prototype for the emerging 1980s indie scene. Bassist Paul Simonon’s finest moment arrives on revolutionary reggae anthem Guns of Brixton. Drummer Topper Headon holds it all together with considerable flair.
The band took things too far with the follow-up, Sandinista, a triple album from which it would be hard to extract one good track. But London Calling overflows with the love and the enthusiasm of a perfect unit absolutely on point.
Carole King: Tapestry
Selling more than 25 million copies worldwide, Tapestry was the first true mega-hit album, a record found in every home with a hi-fi. Before stepping into the spotlight, King was already a hugely successful songwriter, but divorce from her childhood sweetheart and co-writer Gerry Goffin spurred her on as a solo artist, and her perfectly formed vignettes of maturing womanhood touched a nerve.
King is no polished vocalist: her earthy voice blends warmly with her robust piano-playing and the looseness of a band that included James Taylor and Joni Mitchell. Tapestry opens with the rousing gospel of I Feel the Earth Move, but is not an album of flashy hits. There’s an undercurrent of anxiety running alongside hope, an emotional fragility that filters through the joy of self-liberation. So Far Away aches with loneliness; You’ve Got a Friend offers tender solidarity; Will You Love Me Tomorrow? is steeped in melancholy. Odd to think that it was Goffin who wrote the lyrics to (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman, about love’s transformative power.
Tapestry set a new template for sensitive singer-songwriters; its influence can be heard everywhere, from Adele to Taylor Swift.
The Who: Who’s Next
The album sleeve shows the band urinating on a concrete monolith in a wasteland, a display of casual contempt by a group already operating in a realm of their own. Who’s Next marked a seismic shift in rock music, propelling the whole genre from 1960s brashness into a new era of precision. Renowned for their explosive live shows, the Who transplanted that chaotic energy into the studio with remarkable discipline. Guitarist Pete Townshend pioneered the use of synthesisers in rock, seamlessly blending them with the four-piece’s muscular sound.
You immediately know you are somewhere strange and new as the album opens with Baba O’Riley, a sci-fi anthem of teenage disillusionment that climaxes in a frenzied violin jig and singer Roger Daltrey’s snarling cry: “They’re all wasted!” Daltrey is on roaring form throughout, a ferocious vocalist capable of unexpected tenderness. Keith Moon’s wild, unpredictable drumming and John Entwistle’s agile basslines are electrifying. Highlights include the romantic bruiser Bargain, the graceful The Song Is Over, and a haunting ballad, Behind Blue Eyes. The album closes with Won’t Get Fooled Again, a cynical political epic featuring the most despairing scream in rock history.
U2: Achtung Baby
The Irish quartet are the most idealistic stadium band in rock history, as loved (and loathed) for their faith-based humanitarian politics as for their anthemic choruses. Beneath the heartfelt bombast, though, lurks the world’s biggest art rock combo. When Achtung Baby landed in 1991, it didn’t just mark a new chapter for U2, it obliterated the old one. Abandoning the earnest grandeur of 1987’s The Joshua Tree, the band plunged into darker, messier and more experimental territory. Lead single The Fly announced the transformation with a twisted metal riff and clanking hip-hop groove as saintly frontman Bono sang through a distorting bullet mic in the guise of Lucifer calling from the edge of hell.
Though cloaked in pop-culture irony and disguised by static and spectacle, the songs on Achtung Baby remain profoundly sincere. From the fractured secular hymn of One to the tormented beauty of Love Is Blindness, the emotional stakes are high. U2 embraced contradiction: spiritual seekers wrapped in rock-star sheen, true believers who could laugh at themselves. The album fused glam rock, industrial noise, dance beats, electronic textures and emotional depth, to land with the velocity and impact of a bullet from rock’s future.
Miles Davis: Bitches Brew
Inspired by the psychedelic adventures of Jimi Hendrix and a burgeoning revolutionary Afro-futurist spirit in soul music, in August 1969 the trumpet prodigy Miles Davis gathered 12 virtuoso players at Columbia Studios, in New York. After three intense days of improvisations – guided, shaped and orchestrated by Davis – jazz fusion emerged.
Davis’s 1959 masterpiece Kind of Blue may be the album that guided jazz into a new melodic and harmonic freedom, but its revolutionary impact has receded over time. With Bitches Brew, he took on the rhythmic challenges of popular music, using the studio itself as a tool, to create a mind-bending exploration of sound and groove that still feels utterly fresh. Mati Klarwein’s psychedelic cover artwork is a wondrous mirror to the music. You could listen to this double album for decades and never get to the bottom of it.
Radiohead: OK Computer
OK Computer marks the moment Radiohead rewired the circuitry of modern rock. It is an album of stark warnings and surreal visions, a fractured, apocalyptic art-rock opus that captures the alienation of a new digital age. Thom Yorke’s lyrics read like fevered dispatches from a society unravelling: disjointed, bitterly poetic, and laced with black humour. Jonny Greenwood’s orchestral abstractions and electronic experiments summon everything from Penderecki’s terrifying strings to DJ Shadow’s mystical beats. The results veer between beauty and chaos, yielding such unforgettable moments as the eerie majesty of Paranoid Android and the gentle paranoia of No Surprises.
Yorke can be a deliciously mean-spirited writer (“Karma police, arrest this girl. / Her Hitler hairdo is making me feel ill”), but his beautiful falsetto and underlying compassion counterbalance his darkest instincts. OK Computer’s 12 seamlessly interlinked songs add up to a potent portrait of the end of the millennium, a vision of a world where the individual is compelled to acquiesce to greater powers: government, state, economics, technology. Bleak truths, delivered with grace.
The Beatles: Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Once the epitome of Swinging Sixties psychedelic pop culture, Sgt Pepper has come to be regarded as Sir Pepper OBE, a venerable old duffer gathering dust on the trophy cabinet of some mythical music library. For decades it topped every poll of the greatest albums ever. Latterly, the consensus has become that, song for song, it doesn’t even qualify as the greatest Beatles album. Yet for its sheer imaginative scope, technical accomplishment, musical daring and extraordinary impact, Sgt Pepper is one of pop’s most dazzling achievements.
Powered by Lennon and McCartney’s inventive songwriting, George Martin’s production genius, and the creative synergy of four young musicians at the height of their powers, it recalibrated the artistic potential of pop. Recorded at Abbey Road studios in four months, it saw the band layer sounds and stories like never before. From the kaleidoscopic bedazzlement of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds to the shattering finale of A Day in the Life, Sgt Pepper is pop music as theatre and art. It remains deeply strange and genuinely affecting, inviting listeners into its own warm, magical, mind-expanding world.
Stevie Wonder: Songs in the Key of Life
Alongside Paul McCartney and Prince, Stevie Wonder stands as one of popular music’s most-gifted multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriters. A former Motown child prodigy, Wonder was on a celebrated hot streak throughout the 1970s, and Songs in the Key of Life is his most boundary-breaking triumph. This 86-minute double album overflows with invention, blending lyrically powerful, melodically rich songwriting with deep grooves and pioneering electronica.
A gadget freak, Wonder pushed the use of synthesisers with help from Tonto’s Expanding Head Band, building funky textures around clavinets and keys. At just 26, he played most instruments himself, but when in the mood to share, he brought in giants such as Herbie Hancock and Minnie Riperton to sprinkle some magic.
From jazzy anthem Love’s in Need of Love Today to heartbreaking ballad Joy Inside My Tears, the addictively catchy Pastime Paradise and ebullient Isn’t She Lovely, the album is crammed with riches. Wonder’s warm voice is matched by a life-affirming philosophy, captured in Sir Duke, a joyous salute to music’s power to move us body and soul.
Led Zeppelin: IV
In terms of what can be achieved with the primal rock elements of drums, bass, guitar and voice, it is hard to surpass the swaggeringly virtuoso quartet of Bonham, Jones, Page and Plant. Led Zeppelin’s magnificent fourth album is the purest distillation of heavy-rock power ever recorded. In just eight tracks, it spans thunderous blues (Black Dog), amped-up rockabilly (Rock and Roll), folky mysticism (The Battle of Evermore), harmonic bliss (Going to California) and epic transcendence (Stairway to Heaven).
Each song is a masterclass in musical invention. John Bonham’s seismic drums and groovy percussion, Jimmy Page’s serpentine riffs and high-velocity solos, John Paul Jones’s lubricious bass and dexterous keyboard textures, and Robert Plant’s primal wail are fused in a way that still feels elemental. Stairway may have been worn down by over-familiarity, but free your ears and it’s a towering, symphonic wonder. The closing half-tempo blues When the Levee Breaks sounds like the end of the world. Led Zeppelin’s IV set the rock benchmark for all that followed.
Bruce Springsteen: Darkness on the Edge of Town
Springsteen’s canon is second to none in popular music. An unusual American icon, the man known as the Boss simultaneously embodies stirring patriotism and brooding liberal doubt. Grittier and gloomier than his more aspirational early recordings, Darkness connected to the harder economic mood of the times, reflecting his growing politicisation, and compressing the rock and soul blend of the E Street Band into something sleeker and tougher.
It’s a kind of concept album of American failure – of tarnished dreams. “Mister, I ain’t a boy, no, I’m a man,” the 28-year-old roars in his first great and lasting work of maturity that still burns fiercely today.
Michael Jackson: Thriller
Michael Jackson was a 24-year-old showbiz veteran when he crafted the bestselling album of all time with producer Quincy Jones, whose own background was in jazz and orchestral soundtracks. Between them, they cooked up a fantastically inventive, futuristic fusion of black and white musical styles that established a new pop dynamic, which still underpins hit music today. Its rhythms pulse with life and Jackson’s almost unreal voice soars, urgent and ecstatic, modulating into the ether with freaky ease.
From the electrifying jolt of Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ to the slinky paranoid pop of Billie Jean, the rocking snap of Beat It, the tender ache of Human Nature and the cinematic swagger of the title track, each song feels like a self-contained universe. Allegations and controversies have challenged how we see Jackson, but the joyous inspiration of Thriller beams through the shadows cast by its creator.
Bob Dylan: Blonde On Blonde
This is rock culture’s first great double album. In 1966, the 25-year-old Dylan decamped to a studio in Nashville, where session men tuned up while the best lyrical singer-songwriter of his generation hammered out future classics on the spot. He was searching for “that wild mercury sound” – and found it in a fluid, chaotic electric blues, and poetry of myth, abstraction and emotion. Blonde on Blonde is Dylan at his most visionary – deliriously poetic, restlessly inventive, and utterly uncontainable.
The epic Visions of Johanna drifts between surreal romanticism and hard-boiled noir, while Just Like a Woman offers a delicate, conflicted waltz that veers between tenderness and bite. Even the stoned brass-band absurdity of the jarring opener, Rainy Day Women #12 & 35, plays into Dylan’s mischievous inclination to confound expectations. Written between poker games and bursts of inspiration, the album is a kaleidoscopic masterpiece and an act of artistic rebellion.
Joni Mitchell: Hejira
While her 1971 break-up masterpiece Blue may represent Joni Mitchell at her tenderest, Hejira is the most sophisticated and enigmatic work of a singer-songwriter who ranks among the all-time greats. Lyrically, she operates on a plane where Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen are her only serious rivals. Musically, her feel for jazz makes her more melodically and rhythmically complex than either. Hejira was written largely during a cross-country odyssey in which Mitchell wrestled with love and the limits of domesticity. The title, derived from an Arabic word meaning “departure”, sets the tone for songs steeped in displacement and longing.
The sound is spare and open, Mitchell’s electric guitar in unorthodox tunings laying a meditative foundation, while Jaco Pastorius’s fretless bass dances delicately beneath, and percussion maintains the restless momentum of her emotional travelogues. Songs such as Coyote and Amelia investigate relationships unravelling and dreams dissolving, with poetic precision. Mitchell’s turn of phrase throughout is electrifying: “A woman I knew just drowned herself / The well was deep and muddy / She was just shaking off futility / Or punishing somebody”, she sings on Song for Sharon. Hejira is a restless and open-ended album of sacrifice and escape.
Prince: Purple Rain
Prince Rogers Nelson may have been the greatest popular musician of our times. He was certainly the most multi-talented. He could play every instrument he touched to ridiculously high levels, recording many of his albums completely solo. His command of musical styles was astonishing, spanning rock, soul, jazz, funk, disco, gospel, sensitive singer-songwriting, wonky electronica and deeply groovy club-banging techno dance music, blending them all into something unique.
His singing voice was unreal, shifting gears from rasping soul to sweet, seductive falsetto to screaming heavy-metal roar. It all came together in a perfect package on his sixth album, Purple Rain, establishing the Minneapolis wonder as one of the superstars of his time. It features Prince at his most disciplined, running down nine poptastic songs in under 45 minutes, from bravura intro Let’s Go Crazy to the minimalistic icy synth romance of When Doves Cry, and the closing ecstatic guitar solo of the anthemic title track.
David Bowie: Aladdin Sane
The iconic lightning-bolt cover immortalises Bowie as a fallen alien deity – haunted, sublime, untouchable and a contender for the greatest album cover of all time. Aladdin Sane is peak glam Bowie, created by one of the most fertile minds in pop music. It emerged as part of the hottest streak in rock ’n’ roll: 11 extraordinary albums that stretch from Hunky Dory in 1971 to Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) in 1980.
It is a run so rich and audacious it is hard to pick a favourite, but Aladdin Sane offers a jagged crystallisation of Bowie at his most dazzlingly weird and wonderful. Written largely while touring the US in the guise of Ziggy Stardust, his radically transgressive master blast captures Bowie teetering between stardom and collapse, channelling fame’s chaos into a dazzling, genre-smashing masterpiece.
Many of its songs dealt with mental disintegration, influenced by private fears regarding Bowie’s schizophrenic half-brother Terry. Its scope is vast: from the sleazy strut of Cracked Actor to the Brechtian grandeur of Time, Bowie traverses rock, cabaret, jazz and sci-fi balladry with mercurial ease. Mick Ronson’s sensational guitar heroics and Mike Garson’s avant-jazz piano duel, while The Jean Genie and Panic in Detroit inject bluesy swagger and Detroit soul.
The epic Lady Grinning Soul and soaring doo-wop blast of Drive-In Saturday showcase Bowie’s melodic flair and theatrical daring. Produced by Ken Scott, the sound is wider and harder than anything Bowie had made before, a sonic evolution and spiritual reckoning. Bowie, as ever, moved on quickly, leaving the character behind with the haunting refrain “Who will love Aladdin Sane?” The answer to that, half a century later, is surely everyone.
The Beatles: Revolver
Their first psychedelic masterpiece, Revolver, represents the Beatles at their most cohesive: a hipster-suited, shades-sporting, rocking unit of close friends firing on all cylinders, embracing whole new vistas of self-expression. Every song is a tautly crafted gem, the playing is tight and varied, the singing and harmonising are stunning.
There is so much going on: Indian tablas and sitars creating mystical magic for George Harrison’s droning Love You To; a string quartet underpinning the heartbreaking Paul McCartney vignette Eleanor Rigby; ripe horns surging through the soulful Got to Get You Into My Life; the world’s first backwards guitar solo discombobulating John Lennon’s dreamy I’m Only Sleeping; dynamic twin lead on blistering rocker And Your Bird Can Sing; the cool snap of Taxman; the gorgeous harmonies of Here, There and Everywhere; tape loops, mountainous drumming and a spirit of anything-goes madness blowing out the mind-bending epic finale Tomorrow Never Knows.
Even Ringo Starr (reliably the singer of the Beatles’ worst songs) gets to shine on the surrealist children’s classic Yellow Submarine. Pound for pound and song for song, Revolver is as good as it gets, establishing a template for the way guitar bands looked and sounded for decades to come.
The Rolling Stones: Exile on Main St.
Exile is an album shrouded in myth. A mess of sound, sweat and swagger, it reeks of the humid basement of a crumbling French villa where the Rolling Stones jammed through the night, high, haunted and on the run. You can almost smell the mildew and cheap liquor in the gluey mixes, where rhythm ’n’ blues, country, gospel and soul bleed together in a glorious, grimy din.
Perhaps only Tumbling Dice and Happy deserve a place in the canon of the Stones’ greatest songs, but when you tuck into Exile, what you get is a whole feast. Keith Richards’s electric mantras push and pull, with everybody playing out of their skins, and Mick Jagger yelping and shouting to be heard. At times, it sounds like a brawl in a Harlem dancehall, with clenched fists and twirling skirts, peppered with Bobby Keys’s wild tenor sax and Nicky Hopkins’s barrelhouse piano. When the mood is right, nothing else will do.
Daft Punk: Random Access Memories
Pop music always goes back to the future, digging around in the past for buried treasure. The French duo Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo were the prime architects of a 1990s techno-electro-club-pop sound that belatedly colonised American pop under the po-faced acronym EDM (Electronic Dance Music). The duo responded by rewiring the genre with real musicianship on the smartest, most colourful, funky, funny and purely pleasurable dance album of the 21st century.
In an effort to invoke the records they used to sample, Daft Punk built tracks with a live band, notably collaborating with Chic guitarist Nile Rodgers, whose slick, syncopated chords shimmer and shine amidst plush synthesisers. For all its retro references, RAM is far from slavish homage, reaching towards the past through the digitally manipulative context of modern club culture. Over 74 minutes of wild exploration, they embrace chugging new-wave rock, sleek Steely Dan soul, cocktail-lounge crooning and Dixieland jazz – but there’s nothing here to scare movers and shakers off the dancefloor.
Beyoncé: Lemonade
Beyoncé Knowles-Carter has had an extraordinary, chameleonic career, evolving from youthful R&B with Destiny’s Child into a mature, boundary-pushing artist with an ability to continually redefine the modern music landscape. Lemonade is her finest hour, a big, bold, shapeshifting masterpiece channelling personal turmoil into visionary genre-hopping pop.
Drawing on the turbulence within her marriage to the superstar rapper Jay-Z, Beyoncé delivered a gripping narrative of infidelity, jealousy, fury, and hard-won reconciliation, via an adventurous hybrid of musical styles. Lemonade reaches beyond autobiography, exploring the experience of black womanhood, failed fatherhood and advocating self-empowerment as a political imperative.
The singing is, of course, astonishing: Beyoncé is one of the most technically gifted vocalists in modern pop, with gospel power, hip-hop flow and a huge range. She employs it all with shades of blues, country and New Orleans jazz filtered through digital electronic grooves shifting from gossamer-light ambience to swanky funk. From blistering guitar rocker Don’t Hurt Yourself (featuring a rip-roaring Jack White) to steamy soul blast Freedom (with rapper Kendrick Lamar), Lemonade turns from heartbreak to catharsis.
Nirvana: Nevermind
Nevermind by Nirvana may be the greatest, purest and most utterly thrilling rock album ever made. It boils rock down to its core sounds and emotions, with a quiet/loud dynamic that constricts to sorrowful self-pity and erupts in fury.
There is a Beatles-esque elegance to the melodies, a classic crunch and swagger to the playing, and a punk economy to its attack, focused on the hurting tone of Kurt Cobain’s voice and the elusive, intangible truthfulness of his songwriting. There’s mischievousness, too – a playful spirit glimpsed in the album cover of a baby swimming after a dollar bill. But Nevermind, released three years before Cobain’s death, aged 27, pulses with sadness that bursts into electrifying rage, nowhere more so than in Smells Like Teen Spirit.
Each song feels like an intensely personal expression of generational despair, played by a perfectly balanced power trio, built on Krist Novoselic’s liquid bass, Dave Grohl’s frenzied drums and Cobain’s grungy guitar. Nevermind completely recalibrated a genre that had become fatuous and overblown; it still sounds urgently alive today.
Kate Bush: Hounds of Love
Adventuress Kate Bush makes music of such passion and imagination that most pop pales beside it. Her voice is gorgeously distinctive: pure, flexible, a hushed whisper capable of soaring to astonishing heights, always beautifully woven into her lush soundscapes. Each album opens a window into her psyche – but Hounds of Love is the mother lode.
Recorded in a converted barn on her English country estate, it pulses with synths delivering a mighty percussive wallop, while Bush creates vast empires of sound with her own vocals.
Side one is an absolute monster, packed with anthems of obsession including Running Up That Hill and Cloudbusting. Side two is a theatrical prog-pop suite about a woman adrift in nightmares. Beautiful, strange, and wholly itself, Hounds of Love is a freshly minted sound world under Bush’s total command. Unleash the hounds!
Pink Floyd: The Dark Side of the Moon
The greatest concept album of the progressive rock era, Dark Side still sounds overwhelmingly majestic more than 50 years on. By 1973, the Floyd had gone through many fantastically strange phases on their psychedelic journey. The maturing of bassist Roger Waters as a songwriter gave them something to hang their experimentalism around, and everything came together on a gorgeous, trippy rock journey into inner space. With its opening and closing heartbeats, an implicit arc carries listeners on a journey from birth to death, grappling with big existential questions along the way.
The lyrics are profound, particularly when sung in ethereal harmony by guitarist David Gilmour and keyboard player Richard Wright, but they don’t dominate this most spacious of spacey albums. Underpinned by drummer Nick Mason’s loose, groovy playing, long, atmospheric instrumental passages paint cinematic scenes, with burbling synthesisers, soaring guitar solos, breathy saxophones, delicate piano, splashes of Hammond organ and lush female backing vocals. The twin towers of Brain Damage and Eclipse offer perhaps the most epic conclusion to any album in rock history.
Fleetwood Mac: Rumours
One of the great break-up albums, Rumours creates bittersweet tension between the strong emotional content of songs such as Don’t Stop, Go Your Own Way, Dreams, Songbird and Oh Daddy and the gently rocking, beautifully harmonised arrangements. There’s a duality here: musical luxuriousness smoothing out raw emotions; and a paradoxically uplifting account of the cost of divorce. Recorded in a period of personal turmoil – with two couples in the band separating while being compelled to work together every day – Rumours is a multi-faceted reflection of love, loss, heartache and survival.
Stylistically, it emerged from a perfect coming together of Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter intimacy with sleek, harmonic Californian soft rock and an undercurrent of the grittier British blues-rock roots of the long-serving rhythm section. Its enduring popularity is credit to its perfect blend of catchy hooks and emotional vulnerability. Rumours is a break-up album without tears.
Marvin Gaye: What’s Going On
Motown’s most mellifluous singer defied label boss Berry Gordy to make a protest album addressing the Vietnam War, black ghettoisation and environmental damage. The result broke the mould of black pop music and created a new template for socially conscious urban soul.
Amid a haze of inspiration and marijuana smoke, Gaye took charge as producer for the first time. He guided session band The Funk Brothers through sweet grooves while pouring out his anxieties about the world. He almost sounds like he’s singing to himself in a double-tracked conversational call and response.
Luscious strings, brass, woodwind and ethereal choral harmonies were added to blend nine songs into one long, moody groove-out, a tempo-shifting song cycle that functions as a form of ambient soul.
Despite lyrics steeped in philosophical gloom, the mood is light. The layered looseness of Gaye’s masterpiece laid the roots for modern urban music’s emphasis on groove and feel over structure. What’s Going On is a landmark of jazz funk and psychedelic soul – and still a pure joy to hear.
Bob Dylan: Blood on the Tracks
There have been many extraordinary lyrical musicians, but Bob Dylan towers over them all. His most personal masterpiece was created in the mid-1970s, when the 33-year-old singer-songwriter was grappling with affairs and a marriage breaking up, and struggling with a songcraft that had once come almost too easily to him. Seeking new ways to express his interior conflict, he wanted to use language “the way Picasso used paint”, an abstraction of time and space coalescing into something more felt than understood.
The result is a stark, strange album of cinematic vignettes, drenched in regret, populated with outlaws, lovers, and ghosts. The writing is intricate, often elusive. These songs don’t describe heartbreak – they inhabit it, moving through memories and regrets, with lightning strikes of dark humour. Dylan once said people enjoying this album’s pain was hard for him to understand. But it’s precisely that pain that keeps it so vivid, bleeding like an open wound.
The Beatles: Abbey Road
Who else could occupy the top spot but the Beatles? The Greatest of All Time. The band who shattered the smooth surface of early-1960s pop, who fused classic harmonic songcraft with the rebellious swagger of rock ’n’ roll, and mixed it all up in a spirit of experimentalism, setting the musical template for those that followed. Which is to say: all of popular music as we know it.
Abbey Road was their glorious swansong, their most mature, cohesive and emotionally resonant album – less baroque than Sgt Pepper, deeper than Revolver, more polished than the White Album. Recorded in 1969 with long-serving producer George Martin, it fused cutting-edge studio techniques and lush arrangements with a potent sense of fulfilment, as if they all understood that this was the end of their long and winding road together. What they created was a sublime summation of a decade of pop revolution – and a love letter to the future of sound.
Each Beatle shines. McCartney tears his throat out on piano rocker Oh! Darling, Lennon unleashes primal lust on coruscating rock masterpiece I Want You (She’s So Heavy), Harrison delivers the shimmeringly beautiful Something, and even Ringo charms with his country children’s song Octopus’s Garden. But there is a togetherness that makes everything greater than the sum of its many great parts.
The Beatles casually toss off melodies on which others would build whole careers. The album is rich with details that reveal themselves on repeated listening: subtle Moog synths, waves of choral harmonies, an anvil striking during the unfairly maligned music-hall romp Maxwell’s Silver Hammer. It opens with the slinkiest and most seductive rocker, Come Together, while the whole of side two is occupied by a 16-minute cascade of melody, wit and yearning, stitched together so seamlessly it feels like one sweeping emotional movement.
Abbey Road is not just technically brilliant; it’s emotionally complete. It’s mature, playful, bold and strangely comforting. As a listener, you feel the love, the friction, the craft, the effortless brilliance. The Beatles never sounded more alive, even as they were walking away.
