40 essential albums to hear before you die

When was the last time you listened to an old album from start to finish? With our ears set to shuffle since the death of the CD, only the vinyl fetishists seem to do it any more. Consequently we can end up believing we have solid opinions on records we may never have given our honest and sustained attention. I didn’t want to include Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Then I played it to my nine-year-old son, who doesn’t share any of my cultural baggage. Watching it blow his mind, I changed mine. So. This list is designed for anybody interested in extending their aural attention span and genuinely challenging their preconceptions. We’ve included classics and curveballs, because ‘to list’ can also mean to tilt. Most of our personal favourites aren’t here, because we’ve tried to pick the records that broke new ground rather than those that refined old sounds. Hopefully you can still feel the electricity of invention in The Beatles’ Revolver, Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Nas’s Illmatic. Hopefully you can hear the influence of these albums on some of your own favourites. Hopefully, you’ll use the comment section to tell us what surprised you and what confirmed your suspicions. But first, the olde English meaning of list, or ‘lyst’: shush and harken. Helen BrownThe Velvet Underground & Nico (1967), The Velvet UndergroundIt was Andy Warhol who wanted Lou Reed and John Cale to let his beautiful new friend Nico sing with their avant-garde rock band. Truthfully, though, Victor Frankenstein himself couldn’t have sewn together a creature out of more mismatched body parts than this album.It starts with a child’s glockenspiel and ends in deafening feedback, noise, and distortion. Side one, track one, ‘Sunday Morning’, is a wistful ballad fit for a cool European chanteuse sung by a surly Brooklynite. ‘Venus in Furs’ is a jangling, jagged-edge drone about a sex whipping not given lightly. ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ is a love song. ‘European Son’ is rock’n’roll turned sonic shockwave. That’s before you even get on to the song about buying and shooting heroin that David Bowie heard on a test pressing and called ‘the future of music’. Half a century on, all you have to do is put electricity throughThe Velvet Underground & Nico to realise that he was right. Chris HarveyI Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You (1967), Aretha FranklinWhen Jerry Wexler signed the daughter of a violent, philandering preacher to Atlantic records, he ‘took her to church, sat her down at the piano, and let her be herself’. The Queen of Soul gave herself the same space. You can hear her listening to the band, biding her time before firing up her voice to demand ‘R-E-S-P-E-C-T’, 50 years before the #MeToo movement. HBMaster of Puppets (1986), MetallicaDespite not featuring any singles, Metallica’s third album was the UK rock radio breakthrough they’d been looking for. In 1986, they released one of the best metal records of all time, which dealt with the potency and very nature of control, meshing beauty and raw human ugliness together on tracks like ‘Damage Inc’ and ‘Orion’. This album is about storytelling – the mediaeval-influenced guitar picks on opener ‘Battery’ should be enough to tell you that. Although that was really the only mediaeval imagery they conjured up – they ripped Dungeons & Dragons cliches out of the lyrics and replaced them with the apocalypse, with bassist Cliff Burton, drummer Lars Ulrich, guitarist Kirk Hammett and singer/rhythm guitarist James Hetfield serving as the four horsemen. Roisin O’ConnorRemain in Light (1980), Talking Heads’Facts are simple and facts are straight / Facts are lazy and facts are late…’ sang David Byrne, submerging personal and planetary anxieties about fake news and conspicuous consumption in dense, layers and loops of Afrobeat-indebted funk. Propulsive polyrhythms drive against the lyrical pleas for us to stop and take stock. Same as it ever was. HBCatch a Fire (Jamaican version) (1973), Bob Marley and the WailersThe album that carried reggae music to the four corners of the world and made Bob Marley an international superstar also set the political tone for many artists to follow. Marley sang of life ‘where the living is hardest’ in ‘Concrete Jungle’ and looked back to Jamaica’s ignoble slaving past – ‘No chains around my feet but I’m not free’. He packed the album with beautiful melodic numbers, such as ‘High Tide and Low Tide’, and rhythmic dance tracks like ‘Kinky Reggae’. Released outside of Jamaica by Island Records with guitar overdubs and ornamentation, the original Jamaican version is a stripped-down masterpiece. CHEnjoy unlimited access to 70 million ad-free songs and podcasts with Amazon Music Sign up now for a 30-day free trialSign upRevolver (1966), The Beatles An unprecedented 220 hours of studio experimentation saw George Martin and The Beatles looping, speeding, slowing and spooling tapes backwards to create a terrifically trippy new sound. The mournful enigma of McCartney’s ‘For No One’ and the psychedelia of Lennon’s ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and ‘She Said, She Said’ can still leave you standing hypnotised over the spinning vinyl, wondering if the music is coming out or being sucked back in. HBLike a Prayer (1989), MadonnaIt may be the most ‘serious’ album she’s ever made, yet Like a Prayer is also Madonna at her most accessible – pulling no punches in topics from religion to the dissolution of her marriage. In 1989, her personal life was tabloid fodder: a tumultuous marriage to actor Sean Penn finally ended in divorce, and she was causing controversy with the ‘Like a Prayer’ video and its burning crosses.On the gospel abandon of the title track, she takes the listener’s breath away with her sheer ambition. Where her past records had been reflections of the modern music that influenced her, Like a Prayer saw her pay homage to bands like Sly & the Family Stone and Simon & Garfunkel. The album was also about an artist taking control over her own narrative, after releasing records that asked the audience – and the press – to like her. ROLed Zeppelin IV (1971), Led ZeppelinMillennials coming at this album can end up feeling like the guy who saw Hamlet and complained it was all quotations. Jimmy Page’s juggernaut riffs and Robert Plant’s hedonistic wails set the bench mark for all subsequent heavy, hedonistic rock. But it’s worth playing the whole thing to experience the full mystic, monolithic ritual of the thing. Stairway? Undeniable. HBThe Best of the Shangri-Las (1996), The Shangri-LasOh no. Oh no. Oh no no no no no, no one ever did teen heartbreak quite like the Shangri-Las. Long before the Spice Girls packaged attitude for popular consumption, songwriter Ellie Greenwich was having trouble with a group of teenagers who had grown up in a tough part of Queens – ‘with their gestures, and language, and chewing the gum and the stockings ripped up their legs’. But the Shangri-Las sang with an ardour that was so streetwise, passionate and raw that it still reaches across more than half a century without losing any of its power. ‘Leader of the Pack’ (co-written by Greenwich) may be their best-known song, but they were never a novelty act. This compilation captures them at their early Sixties peak. CHThe Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (1972), David BowiePictorial proof that Ziggy did indeed play guitar (Flamboyance, excess, eccentricity – this is the breakthrough album that asserted Bowie as glam rock’s new icon. He may have come to rue his Ziggy Stardust character, but with it, Bowie transcended artists seeking authenticity via more mundane means. It was his most ambitious album – musically and thematically – that, like Prince, saw him unite his greatest strengths from previous works and pull off one of the great rock and roll albums without losing his sense of humour, or the wish to continue entertaining his fans. ‘I’m out to bloody entertain, not just get up onstage and knock out a few songs,’ he declared. ‘I’m the last person to pretend I’m a radio. I’d rather go out and be a colour television set.’ ROUnknown Pleasures (1979), Joy DivisionIn their brief career, ended by the suicide of 23-year-old singer Ian Curtis, Joy Division created two candidates for the best album by anyone ever. Closer may be a final flowering, but Unknown Pleasures is more tonally consistent, utterly unlike anything before or since. The mood is an all-pervading ink-black darkness, but there is a spiritual force coming out of the grooves that is so far beyond pop or rock, it feels almost Dostoevskyan. There are classic songs – ‘Disorder’, ‘She’s Lost Control’ and ‘New Dawn Fades’ – and for those who’d swap every note Eric Clapton ever played for one of Peter Hook’s basslines, the sequence at 4:20 on ‘I Remember Nothing’ is perhaps the single most thrilling moment in the entire Joy Division catalogue. CHHejira (1976), Joni MitchellThough her 1971 album Blue is usually chosen for these kinds of lists, Mitchell surpassed its silvery, heartbroken folk five years later with a record that found her confidently questioning its culturally conditioned expectations of womanhood. Against an ambiguous, jazzy landscape, her deepening, difficult voice weighs romance and domesticity against the adventure of ‘strange pillows’ and solitude. HBBody Talk (2010), RobynThe answer to whether Robyn could follow up the brilliance of her self-titled 2005 album came in a burst of releases in 2010, the EPs Body Talk Pt 1, Pt 2 and Pt 3, and this 15-track effort, essentially a compilation album. It includes different versions of some tracks, such as the non-acoustic version of ‘Hang With Me’ (and we can argue all night about that one), but leaves well alone when it comes to the single greatest electronic dance track since ‘I Feel Love’, ‘Dancing On My Own’. Body Talk is simply jammed with great songs. CH Off the Wall (1979), Michael Jackson’I will study and look back on the whole world of entertainment and perfect it,’ wrote Jackson as he turned 21 and shook off his cute, controlled child-star imagery to release his jubilant, fourth solo album. Produced by Quincy Jones, the sophisticated disco funk nails the balance between tight, tendon-twanging grooves and liberated euphoria. Glitter ball magic. HBIllmatic (1994), NasHow good can rap get? This good. There are albums where the myth can transcend the music – not on Illmatic, where Nas vaulted himself into the ranks of the greatest MCs in 1994, with an album that countless artists since have tried – and failed – to emulate. Enlisting the hottest producers around – Pete Rock, DJ Premier, Q-Tip, LES and Large Professor – was a move that Complex blamed for ‘ruining hip hop’, while still praising Nas’s record, because it had a lasting impact on the use of multiple producers on rap albums.Nas used the sounds of the densely populated New York streets he grew up on to vividly depict that life in his music. You hear the rattle of the steel train that opens the record, along with the cassette tape hissing the verse from a teenage Nasty Nas on Main Source’s 1991 track ‘Live at the BBQ’: ‘When I was 12, I went to hell for snuffing Jesus.’ ROTrans-Europe Express (1977), KraftwerkThis is the album that changes everything. The synthesised sounds coming out of Kraftwerk’s Kling-Klang studios had already become pure and beautiful on 1975’s Radio-Activity, but on Trans-Europe Express, their sophistication subtly shifts all future possibilities. The familiar quality of human sweetness and melancholy in Ralf Hutter’s voice is subsumed into the machine as rhythms interlock and bloom in side two’s mini-symphony that begins with the title track. Released four months before Giorgio Moroder’s ‘I Feel Love’, Trans-Europe Express influenced everything from hip-hop to techno. All electronic dance music starts here. CHKind of Blue (1959), Miles DavisWith the sketches of melody only written down hours before recording, the world’s best-selling jazz record still feels spontaneous and unpredictable. Davis’s friend George Russell once explained that the secret of its tonal jazz was to use every note in a scale ‘without having to meet the deadline of a particular chord’. Kind of Blue is unrepeatably cool. HBAstral Weeks (1968), Van Morrison ‘If I ventured in the slipstream, between the viaducts of your dream…’ To enter this musical cathedral, where folk, jazz and blue-eyed soul meet is always to feel a sense of awe. Recorded in just two eight-hour sessions, in which Morrison first played the songs to the assembled musicians then told them to do their own thing, Astral Weeks still feels as if it was made yesterday. Morrison’s stream-of-consciousness lyrics within the richness of the acoustic setting – double bass, classical guitar and flute – make this as emotionally affecting an album as any in rock and pop. CHWest Side Story Soundtrack (1961)’Life is all right in America / If you’re all white in America’ yelp the immigrants in this passionate and political musical relocating of Romeo and Juliet to Fifties New York. Leonard Bernstein’s sophisticated score is a melting pot of pop, classical and Latin music; Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics sharp as a flick knife. An unanswered prayer for a united and forgiving USA. HBSign o’ the Times (1987), PrinceThe ninth album from the Minneapolis maestro was almost a six-sided monster before Warner Bros forced him to trim it down to a double album  (Sign o’ the Times is Prince’s magnum opus from a catalogue of masterworks – a double album spanning funk, rock, R&B and most essentially, soul. It is the greatest articulation of his alchemic experiments with musical fusion – the sum of several projects Prince was working on during his most creatively fruitful year. On Sign o’ the Times, the bass is king – Prince had already cemented his guitar god status on Purple Rain. There are tracks that drip with sex, and love songs like ‘Adore’, which remains one of the greatest of all time. Stitched together with the utmost care, as if he were writing a play with a beginning, a middle and an end, the album is a landmark in both