There are great albums, favourite albums, important albums, and albums everyone agrees you’re supposed to own. These aren’t necessarily any of those.
These are the records I consider essentially flawless from beginning to end. No filler. No obligatory deep cut I politely pretend to enjoy. No reaching for the skip button. Just albums where the songs, performances, production, sequencing and whatever other mysterious ingredients were involved somehow came together exactly right.
Entirely subjective. Completely defensible.
Probably worth arguing about.
Expansive, atmospheric and impeccably produced, The Division Bell is Pink Floyd operating at a remarkably assured late-career peak. Gilmour’s guitar is everywhere it needs to be, Wright’s presence gives the record its soul, and the songs unfold with the kind of space and patience almost nobody gets away with anymore. From Cluster One through High Hopes, it feels less like a collection of tracks than one continuous, beautifully constructed piece of music. No skips. No apologies. A perfect 10.
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Choosing Dear Rouge’s Phases over Black to Gold is harder than it has any right to be, but there’s something about this record that cuts considerably deeper. It’s huge, polished and ridiculously consistent, yet underneath all of that is an emotional current that runs through virtually every track. There’s so much between the lines here: vulnerability, tension, longing, uncertainty, resilience. The more you listen, the more you hear. And somehow, every track still manages to feel better than the one before it. An extraordinary record.
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The Downward Spiral may be the masterpiece. The Fragile may be the epic. I’ll take Hesitation Marks. This is Reznor at his most refined and, somehow, still completely raw. Cold, precise, electronic and occasionally almost funky, every sound feels obsessively placed while everything underneath it feels dangerously exposed. This isn’t the chaos of earlier Nine Inch Nails cleaned up for middle age. It’s what happens when the person who made those records survives long enough to dissect the wreckage with considerably sharper tools. Dense, uncomfortable, darkly funny and absolutely fucking brilliant. Turn it up.
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Heated is an exercise in just how enormous a stripped-down rock record can sound. There’s space everywhere, Gordie Johnson’s guitar tone is absolutely monstrous, and the rhythm section lives somewhere several floors below ground. The playing is exceptional without ever becoming the point, and the whole thing feels loose, heavy and completely under control. It also sealed the deal on my own move to a Gibson SG through a Traynor and, as it happens, became one of the first albums I ever had a review of published. So yes, there’s some history here. Twenty-plus years later, it still sounds absolutely massive.
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Forget the hits. Forget the synthesizers, sequencers, spinning guitars and furry everything. Rhythmeen is ZZ Top stripped back to three people making an absolutely colossal amount of noise. By far the heaviest record they ever made, it’s filthy, raw, hypnotic and almost impossibly thick, with Billy Gibbons producing guitar tones that sound less recorded than excavated. Everything has weight. Everything has groove. Nothing is there that doesn’t need to be. This is ZZ Top reduced to its essential ingredients, then turned up until the walls start moving.
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Travelling Without Moving is what happens when ridiculous musicianship, impeccable production and an almost pathological commitment to groove all land in exactly the same place. Funk, soul, jazz, disco and electronics move effortlessly through a record that is impossibly slick without ever feeling sterile. The rhythm section is frightening, the arrangements are immaculate, and there’s an organic looseness underneath all that precision that keeps the whole thing alive. Cool without trying to sound cool, sophisticated without showing off, and funky beyond reasonable measure. Nearly thirty years later, it still sounds like the future.
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