The list covered many decades of popular music, and was the result of a vote among more than artists, writers, producers and industry figures; this update covers just three years. So we kept the changes light. 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 artists, producers, critics, and music-industry figures from radio programmers to label heads.
As in , 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. The classics are still the classics, but the canon keeps getting bigger and better.
The most popular girl group of New Wave surfed to the top of the charts with this hooky debut. This album lived in myth for decades. Longtime Wilson collaborator Van Dyke Parks helped him realize his vision, with lush string arrangements, sublime melodies, and vocal harmonies, all impeccably constructed. The Raincoats came up with one of the most experimental and thrilling sounds to emerge from the London punk explosion — four women making their own gloriously unkempt racket.
Billie Eilish became a teen folk hero with her blockbuster debut — just your average year-old songwriting prodigy with a head full of nightmares. Eilish wrote and recorded these tunes with her brother, Finneas, at the L. For the rest of the album, he demonstrates his complete command of the studio, playing almost all the instruments himself, experimenting with a kaleidoscope of rock genres, and even delivering a monologue on what poorly made records sound like.
