125 Best Albums of the Past 25 Years

115 OutKast, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below

2003 "Stankonia meets Sandinista!" SPIN declared in 2004, naming this album "simply the most adventurous 'rap' record ever made." It's a dense mad scientist of hip-hop experimentation, dosed with OutKast's inimitable sense of style and humor. "At two hours plus, the double CD is nearly half-rapless and foregoes obvious singles in favor of aberrant crooning, second-line horn charts, drum'n'jazz fusion, and Siamese-twin song mutations." In a July 2005 issue, Andre 3000 copped to a serious influence from Prince's 1987 classic, Sign 'o' the Times: "That album lasted so long for me. I keep finding songs on it."
LISTEN OutKast, Speakerboxxx/The Love Below

SPIN Archive on Google

• Best Albums of 2003 (January 2004)
• 110 Best Album of 1985-2005 (July 2005)

114 Animal Collective, Merriweather Post Pavilion

2009 Psychedelic electronic music with a soul found a champion in Animal Collective. "Merriweather plays like the summation of a long, strange trip, combining the group's career touchstones: harmonic Beach Boys pop, African tribal chants, minimalism, techno, psychedelia, and dub," SPIN wrote in a 2009 review. That's a crowded house, but one that Animal Collective has learned to live in comfortably. And they get by with a little help from their friends -- as Deerhunter's Bradford Cox told the magazine in a February 2009 feature: "I consider Animal Collective to be the most important band of our time."
LISTEN Animal Collective, Merriweather Post Pavilion

SPIN Archive on Google

• Merriweather Post Pavilion review (January 2009)
• Animal Collective feature (February 2009)

113 Danger Mouse, The Grey Album

2004 Iconoclastic, brilliant, and completely against the law, is one way to describe this mash-up of Jay-Z's The Black Album and the Beatles' "White Album". As SPIN wrote in an April 2004 review, "It's the kind of record only Paul McCartney's legal team could hate." You won't find it in a store -- it was never for sale -- but a savvy self-release turned the DIY album into an internet phenomenon and a flashpoint for those who thought about copyright law. "I knew The Grey Album was illegal when I was doing it," Danger Mouse told the magazine in 2004. "But I didn't want that to stop me from trying it as an art project."

SPIN Archive on Google

• Grey Album review (April 2004)
• Danger Mouse feature (May 2004)

112 Interpol, Turn on the Bright Lights

2002 Resurrecting post-punk for the downtown set, Interpol came dressed for success: coolly blase, anthemic, and hip as hell, outfitted with the Factory Records catalog and skinny ties. Introducing the group in 2002, SPIN compared them to "Joy Division with a good weed dealer." Frontman Paul Banks was ambitious even before the band's superstardom: "I would like to cause a complete and utter upheaval in the psychology of all mankind and completely subvert all society." That goal may still be unrealized, but Interpol's debut album left a serious mark with propulsively brooding tracks like "Obstacle 1" and "NYC."
LISTEN Interpol, Turn on the Bright Lights

SPIN Archive on Google

• Interpol article (October 2002)
• Best Albums of 2002 (January 2003)

111 Teenage Fanclub, Bandwagonesque

1991 SPIN famously picked Bandwagonesque over Nirvana's Nevermind as "Album of the Year" for 1991, which is kind of like having picked the New York Mets to win the Super Bowl. But beyond the mess of such crossed signals (Teenage Fanclub never seemed to even aspire to such a grand scale) lies a gorgeous, gaseous rock album made in the mold of countless old power-pop bands and especially the great Big Star. The original review by Jim Greer laps up the album's fuzzy shine and languorous melodies, while deriving a strange sort of pleasure from the fact that "the recombining process is, these days, about the closest thing we've got to originality in rock music."
LISTEN Teenage Fanclub, Bandwagonesque

SPIN Archive on Google

• Bandwagonesque review (December 1991)
• Teenage Fanclub profile (January 1992)

110 Spiritualized, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space

1997 In 2003, SPIN dubbed this psych-inflected classic as an "Album You're Most Likely to Hear at a Laser Show," alongside Pink Floyd, Rush, and Radiohead. That wasn't meant to be an insult. Spiritualized's mind-expanding pharmaceutical rock is a layered, swirling mass of guitar worship -- in other words, perfect for the planetarium. Band frontman Jason Pierce would later be savaged by the magazine as guilty of "navel-gazing to make music to navel-gaze at," but Ladies and Gentleman still stands as a lushly produced, over-the-top record of its times.
LISTEN Spiritualized, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space

SPIN Archive on Google

• Albums at a Laser Show (April 2003)
• Space Rock 2001 (October 2001)

109 The Chills, Submarine Bells

1990 A swelling wave of swell indiepop from New Zealand reached a peak of sorts in Submarine Bells, an album that layered precise and wordy "folk-punk" songs with allusions to varied things that SPIN described as "television, Swamp Thing comics, and the Byrds." ("I never knew deliquesce was a word," reviewer Evelyn McDonnell wrote in response to the Chills' thesaurus-like lyrical vocabulary.) In another piece that called the NZ indie label Flying Nun "the Sun Records of New Zealand," the magazine adored the way the Chills "soak gloomy, even bleak songs in a cold rain of piano and pale keyboards" -- all in service of a sound that proved both elemental and exploratory.
LISTEN The Chills, Submarine Bells

SPIN Archive on Google

• Submarine Bells review (April 1990)
• Flying Nun essay (February 1990)

108 Fugees, The Score

1996 From their cover of "Killing Me Softly With His Song" to "Ready or Not," the Fugees' breakout album flipped the script of modern hip-hop. As SPIN reported in 1997 -- after following the trio to Trinidad, where they performed for 15,000, scoffed at surly cops, and hosted a spelling bee -- the group did everything a bit differently. The Score was positivity and hope, the idea that "hip-hop was pop music with the power to open up and change the world...Marshalling R&B's intimate, vocal yearning and reggae's boundless spiritual pulse, the Fugees liberated hip-hop from its scowling project exile."
LISTEN Fugees, The Score

SPIN Archive on Google

• Fugees feature (January 1997)
• The Score review (March 1996)

107 Coldplay, A Rush of Blood to the Head

2002 These British romantics resurrected sincerity, giving other musicians the right to wear their hearts on their sleeves -- and accompany it with strings. "Unless you consider sighing a form of aerobic exercise, Coldplay aren't really about body-moving," SPIN wrote in 2002. "They're about ballads. And the best ones here have a stately, spacy grace, like what Bono might come up with after a couple weeks on an iceberg with Nordic warblers Sigur Ros." John Mayer explained the thrill of songs like "Clocks" to the magazine in 2004: "Coldplay makes everyone feel like as if they are the stars of their own movie."
LISTEN Coldplay, A Rush of Blood to the Head

SPIN Archive on Google

• Rush of Blood review (September 2002)
• Coldplay feature (January 2004)

106 Fiona Apple, When the Pawn Hits...

1999 Many remember her half-naked in the video for debut single "Criminal," but Fiona Apple went on to make serious music, much of it on her sophomore album with the 90-word moniker. These tracks earned her unexpected admirers -- Missy Elliott, for instance, and Kanye West, who snagged her producer for his second album. Always honest, Apple worked her issues out in the studio. "I still have problems with people," she confided to SPIN in a February 2000 cover story. "I still need to write the songs. If I didn't need to, they just wouldn't be that good. It wouldn't be worth doing."
LISTEN Fiona Apple, When the Pawn Hits...

SPIN Archive on Google

• Fiona Apple cover story (February 2000)
• Fiona Apple feature (December 1999)

105 Massive Attack, Mezzanine

1998 "Massive Attack's mix of influences -- rock, hip-hop, house, dub, techno, etc. --constituted what was later dubbed trip-hop and laid the foundations for drum'n'bass," SPIN wrote in 2002. "The definitive Massive vocalists -- Shara Nelson, Horace Andy-- are world-weary griots who've suffered for our sins," noted Charles Aaron in 1998 when reviewing the album's single, "but on 'Teardrop,' ex-Cocteau Twin Liz Fraser floats her guileless soprano through an ominous, womblike dubscape." Groundbreaking and gloomy, this album's effect on music's recent history is hard to overstate.
LISTEN Massive Attack, Mezzanine

SPIN Archive on Google

• 50 Greatest Bands of All Time (February 2002)
• 'Teardrops' single review (August 1998)

104 The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs Vol. 1, 2 & 3

1999 Three discs, three hours, 69 songs. Lovelorn Stephen Merritt proved here that you don't always have to choose between quantity and quality. A glowing SPIN review explored Merritt's mission: to crawl inside every "love-song genre he can think of: the civic-pride anthem, the giddy cabaret number, the gospel paean that's practically a come-on, the Motown/ABBA pocket symphony," and a few dozen others. The sprawling result is both "grand gesture and a brilliant joke; art about the most personal emotion stamped out in bulk; and a love offering in its own right."
LISTEN The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs Vol. 1, 2 & 3

SPIN Archive on Google

• 69 Love Songs review (October 1999)

103 M.I.A., Arular

2005 Who knew that a diminutive firebrand with a revolutionary Sri Lankan family, impeccable taste in samples, and "jump-rope raps" could combine into such a perfect storm? "M.I.A.'s beats scream grimy dancehall party," SPIN wrote in a March 2005 review. "Origami polyrhythms, electro-current sounds, and slinky squelches populate songs about child prostitution ('Ten Dollar') and political prisoners ('Amazon')." In naming Arular the second-best album of 2005, the magazine fondly categorized the new sound as a "homemade version of Missy Elliott's life-affirming, dance-floor-scattering sex-funk gibberish."
LISTEN M.I.A., Arular

SPIN Archive on Google

• Arular review (March 2005)
• 40 Best Albums of 2005 (January 2006)

102 Queen Latifah, All Hail the Queen

1989 You could name yourself Queen Latifah and choose not to call your debut All Hail the Queen, but it's not clear why you would want to. And especially if that debut happens to actually be hailable, as Latifah's was. The sassy rapper was greeted "as a trailblazer for integrating singing with rapping, and for sneaking tastes of R&B, jazz, house, reggae, and soul into her hip-hop soufflé," wrote SPIN's Dimitri Ehrlich in 1991. And after Hail had time to settle, there weren't many other prospective candidates to overtake her as the era's "top female MC."
LISTEN Queen Latifah, All Hail the Queen

SPIN Archive on Google

• Queen Latifah profile (December 1991)
• Sound Bites (December 1993)

101 Blur, Parklife

1994 Tales of the storied '90s Britpop rivalry between Oasis and Blur tend to obscure just how singular a band Blur was in its prime. And when it comes to finding that prime, it's hard to do better than Parklife. "Blur speaks earnestly in interviews about living in a post-rockist age of information and media simulacra," SPIN's initial review said, "but their art-school pedigrees, impeccably tailored keyboards, and sense of teenage pathos are all in a grand rock 'n' roll tradition." Then, one month later, SPIN was ready to concede that Blur might actually be "the best British band since the Smiths."
LISTEN Blur, Parklife

SPIN Archive on Google

• Parklife review (August 1994)
• Blur profile (September 1994)

100 Kanye West, Late Registration

2005 "Great rap should make you think," SPIN wrote in 2006, "and kick your ass." The magazine's September 2005 review of cultural polymath Kanye's second album dropped references to De La Soul, Pharcyde, and Fiona Apple, celebrating an album that was essentially a chest-thumping song of self. It's "a follow-up as ornate and bloated as West's ego. There's hardly an ounce of humility here -- every track aims for the anthemic." Why be modest when you're on top? "No artist in any genre has ever argued so assiduously for his place in the canon, and perhaps no artist has been more oddly equipped for the position."
LISTEN Kanye West, Late Registration

SPIN Archive on Google

• Late Registration review (September 2005)
• 40 Best Albums of 2005 (January 2006)

99 PJ Harvey, Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea

2000 The battered banshee who once urged you to lick her legs because she was on fire scored a solid review from SPIN in 2000: "It's her return to the down'n'dirty. Polly Harvey has made a career of balancing the fucked-up human and the mythic monster -- a balance her soul brother Kurt [Cobain] couldn't maintain." Harvey (who owes more than a subtle debt to Patti Smith) also echoed other alt-femme firebrands, like Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, on the explosive and confrontational "Big Exit." Yet such songs as "Place Like Home" were melodic -- pretty, even -- proving that Harvey contained multitudes.
LISTEN PJ Harvey, Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea

SPIN Archive on Google

• Stories from the City review (December 2000)

98 Johnny Cash, American Recordings

1994 Johnny Cash, the Man in Black, was Johnny Cash, the Legendary but Largely Forgotten Man in Black when he teamed up with producer Rick Rubin for a serious resurrection in 1994. The duo kept things raw and simple in a pared-down set that paired covers (of Leonard Cohen and others) with originals, and focused on what SPIN called Cash's "dark mineshaft of a voice." It also shined new light on what the magazine later called, after the singer's death in 2003, an old familiar face marked by "rough pocks and weathered lines Cash seemed to be born with."
LISTEN Johnny Cash, American Recordings

SPIN Archive on Google

• American Recordings review (June 1994)
• Walk the Line feature (December 2005)

97 Arcade Fire, Neon Bible

2007 This buzz band's second album was named after an obscure novel and recorded in a church while high on the fumes of Springsteen. "Neither a timid repeat nor a knee-jerk departure," SPIN wrote in 2007, "the bigger, bolder Neon Bible better captures what Arcade Fire achieve live." The magazine paired The Boss and Arcade Fire's Win Butler together in a dual 2007 interview. "There's a furious aspect to the performance," Springsteen said of the young Canadian band. "That's why people come out -- you're recognizing the realities of people's emotional lives and their difficulties, you're presenting these problems, and you're bringing a survival kit."
LISTEN Arcade Fire, Neon Bible

SPIN Archive on Google

• Neon Bible review (March 2007)
• Q&A With Bruce Springsteen (December 2007)

96 The Roots, Things Fall Apart

1999 Philadelphia's purveyors of serious hip-hop changed the scene with cerebral lyricism and a focus on live instrumentation. Drummer ?uestlove told SPIN in 1998 that this album strove for a combination of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, the Beatles' Abbey Road, and Sly and the Family Stone; he wanted it to "really throw people." Whether those comparisons hold true or not, it worked. "Warping R&B into locked-groove robo-funk ('Next Movement'), throwing jazz into the depths of dub-space ('The Spark'), attenuating hardcore beats into pure silence ('The Realm')," SPIN wrote in 1999, "the Roots have created perhaps rap's first melancholy masterpiece."
LISTEN The Roots, Things Fall Apart

SPIN Archive on Google

• Things Fall Apart review (March 1999)

95 Soundgarden, Superunknown

1994 "Soundgarden Kills Grunge Dead" screamed the cover of SPIN in April 1994, when the Seattle band put out their fourth album and fanned out past the point where punk resists complication. The album's mix of stoner wandering and tight Led Zeppelin designs was considerably more developed than what Soundgarden had started with: "music that was," as the magazine put it, "simultaneously hard rock and an ironic commentary on hard rock." And it all followed behind what SPIN's 1995 Readers' Poll called "a bona fide single, 'Black Hole Sun,' something that had eluded [Soundgarden's] riff-rock grasp up till now."
LISTEN Soundgarden, Superunknown

SPIN Archive on Google

• Soundgarden cover story (April 1994)
• Year-end Readers' Poll (January 1995)

94 Jane's Addiction, Ritual De Lo Habitual

1990 The boundlessly weird rockers from L.A., led by the outrageous Perry Farrell, came together after a few years in the scene to break out with Ritual De Lo Habitual, a wildly unhinged album that SPIN said "hits like the nighttime shrieking of a boy who suddenly knows the savage power of his own desire and his own poetry." A cover story from a few months later stays on message, reveling in the way the revved-up post-Ritual band "invites us to swim in the evocative juice of Perry's poems and in its organic, untraditional metallic presence."
LISTEN Jane's Addiction, Ritual De Lo Habitual

SPIN Archive on Google

• Jane's Addiction profile (September 1990)
• Jane's Addiction cover (June 1991)

93 Chemical Brothers, Dig Your Own Hole

1997 This album from the "Amyl-sniffing Brit beat junkies," as SPIN wrote in 1997, aimed to "create a better place for just one night by jamming together all their favorite records" and pushed "drums, drums, drums, until you believe in the revolution of, well, drums." That meant samples, sure, but also cameos from Oasis' Noel Gallagher and Beth Orton. The album helped birth a hype machine known as "electronica," a rock-and-dance hybrid. As the magazine noted in 1999, while the Gallagher-led single "Setting Sun" was popular in the States, "In Britain it all but defined an era."
LISTEN Chemical Brothers, Dig Your Own Hole

SPIN Archive on Google

• Dig Your Own Hole review (May 1997)
• Chemical Brothers feature (June 1997)

92 Jay-Z, The Black Album

2003 "I've had it with the rap game," Jay-Z claimed after The Black Album dropped. He may have been posturing, but if he had retreated to a laid-back life of bling and bottle service, this wouldn't have been a bad place to stop. Partially overshadowed by its aftershocks on remix culture -- i.e., Danger Mouse's seamless meshing of Jay-Z with the Beatles on his download-friendly Grey Album -- the source material, from "Moment of Clarity" to "Justify My Thug," is classic Hova.
LISTEN Jay-Z, The Black Album

SPIN Archive on Google

• Rappers retiring (June 2004)
• Danger Mouse's track-by-track rundown (May 2004)

91 The Smiths, Strangeways, Here We Come

1987 "The Smiths were like a painting. Every month you'd add a little bit here and a little bit there. But it wasn't quite complete, and it was whipped away." That's Morrissey talking to SPIN in 1988, not long after the Smiths broke up and a legacy ended. But for all the mournfulness it invokes for being the Smiths' last album, Strangeways, Here We Come also happens to be very good, to say the least. Johnny Marr's arrangements sound almost impossibly perfect in their precise, delicate manner, and Morrissey's songs are fully developed in the way that would lead SPIN to anoint him, in a 1991 solo profile, "Lyrical King."
LISTEN The Smiths, Strangeways, Here We Come

SPIN Archive on Google

• Morrissey cover (June 1988)
• Morrissey profile (April 1991)

90 Elliott Smith, XO

1998 It's hard not to listen to the late Elliott Smith without nostalgia: the mopey singer-songwriter did commit suicide by sword, after all. A January 1999 profile in SPIN captured the indie icon in all his shabby, shambolic glory, dressed in thrift store duds and admitting that, "The last thing I need right now is somebody telling me how fame can make you crazy." XO followed Elliott's unexpected post-Good Will Hunting celebrity. The success certainly didn't make him upbeat, though the piano bounce of "Baby Britain" gets close, even as its lyrics describe "floating over a sea of vodka."
LISTEN Elliott Smith, XO

SPIN Archive on Google

• Elliott Smith (January 1999)
• Elliott Smith feature (February 2004)

89 Basement Jaxx, Remedy

1999 "Among the most inventive dance albums of the decade," SPIN surmised in 1999. "What we admire in deep house and American garage is the music's untouchable sexiness, which U.K. house has always lacked. At the same time, we like to rough up that polished sound with some English punk attitude," Jaxx member Simon Ratcliffe told the magazine. "What's great about [Basement Jaxx] is the way they go from cartoon disco to sick drug-noise," the magazine added in 2001, "from imagining Prince as Chicago house auteur to perfecting Brazil-as-utopia samba-house."
LISTEN Basement Jaxx, Remedy

SPIN Archive on Google

• Greatest Albums of the '90s (September 1999)
• Rooty review (references Remedy) (August 2001)

88 Jeff Buckley, Grace

1994 Jeff Buckley came close to transcending his status as the son of British folk legend Tim Buckley during his short musical life. And most of that owes to his lone studio full-length, Grace. "If Buckley continues to evolve in the direction that Grace indicates, only good things can result," read the SPIN review, which was taken with Buckley's distinctive vocal quaver and sense of song. Sadly, that evolution was cut short when Buckley died, at 30. Still, as the magazine put it in 2004: "Thom Yorke owes him, Chris Martin owes him, Devendra Banhart owes him big time."
LISTEN Jeff Buckley, Grace

SPIN Archive on Google

• Grace review (October 1994)
• Reissues review (November 2004)

87 The White Stripes, White Blood Cells

2002 The dirty spirit of rock'n'roll got dug up by this Detroit duo, who pretended to be brother and sister. "The thing was it wasn't hype," legendary British DJ John Peel told SPIN in 2003. "I think people were just relieved at the simplicity and directness of the White Stripes." That meant garage riffs and thumping, primal drums. "We wanted things to be as childish as possible, but with no sense of humor," Jack White told the magazine in 2002. "Because that's how children think."
LISTEN The White Stripes, White Blood Cells

SPIN Archive on Google

• White Stripes oral history (September 2003)
• White Stripes cover story (October 2002)

86 TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain

2006 This Williamsburg, Brooklyn, band blew up the hard way: with a lot of hustle, heart, and sick two-part harmonies. In an eye-opening 2007 SPIN article, the band lays out their creative chronology. Lead singer Tunde Adebimpe listened to the Beatles and Beach Boys in Nigeria; guitarist and producer Dave Sitek recorded and tour-managed Yeah Yeah Yeahs; drummer Gerard Butler was a subway busker. It's no wonder that these disparate histories smashed together in such a unique way on the band's album, which "proves 'soulfulness' and 'art rock' aren't antithetical."
LISTEN TV on the Radio, Return to Cookie Mountain

SPIN Archive on Google

• TVOTR feature (January 2007)
• TVOTR feature (August 2006)

85 Missy 'Misdemeanor' Elliott, Supa Dupa Fly

1997 25-year-old Missy Elliott had already lent her hitmaking skills to Aaliyah by the time Supa Dupa Fly dropped, produced and recorded by the massively influential Timbaland. The album was a big bang for the music that followed in its meteoric path. "Missy and Timbaland expanded the boundaries of hip-hop -- the sound, the look, even the perspective," SPIN wrote in 1998. Her celebrated eccentricity kept her close to another offbeat hip-hop hero: Busta Rhymes. "It's like we're both these loud characters," she told SPIN in 1998, "but we're also sort of unexplainable, you know what I mean?"
LISTEN Missy 'Misdemeanor' Elliott, Supa Dupa Fly

SPIN Archive on Google

• Top 40 Artists (May 1998)
• Missy Elliot feature (October 1997)

84 LL Cool J, Radio

1985 LL Cool J introduced himself rather impressively in 1985 with Radio, a debut album that would go on to be known as "a serious jam." Rap tracks with uniquely strong song structures would help establish Radio as a formative hip-hop classic, and the way it caught on seeded the idea of rap crossing over into the humongous scale of rock. SPIN writer Annette Stark, on assignment to find Cool J backstage in 1987, puzzled over her unfamiliar surroundings: "I sniff around for the old familiar rock'n'roll smells -- beer, sweat, and weed -- but all I get are competing whiffs of orange juice and aftershave." And then, just a couple years later, Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon wrote, "Radio was one of the things that turned me on to rap," in the intro to a Q&A in which she goes on to talk with LL about Andrew Dice Clay, sexiness, and the Stooges.
LISTEN L.L. Cool J, Radio

SPIN Archive on Google

• L.L. Cool J profile feature (September 1987)
• Kim Gordon interviews L.L. (September 1989)

83 Steve Earle, Guitar Town

1986 "America. Mom. Baseball. Apple pie. Crass commercialism. Imperialist foreign intervention. Steve Earle's first album Guitar Town is a lot like Reagan's America." So goes our original review, which frets over a suspected "compromise between country and rock" and wonders just how seriously to take Earle's rootsy charm. That skepticism would change in time, as Earle proved himself a serious and searching songwriter with chops. In 1995, SPIN found itself traipsing through Tennessee to learn more about Earle, who writer Mark Schone described as a "self-invented demographic of one: an ACLU gun nut, a biker-junkie-bookworm, a politically active high school dropout, a hopeless romantic with four ex-wives."
LISTEN Steve Earle, Guitar Town

SPIN Archive on Google

• Guitar Town review (September, 1986)
• Steve Earle profile feature (May, 1995)

82 Dr. Dre, The Chronic

1992 Dr. Dre's reputation preceded him ever since he started out as the producer of N.W.A -- a group that SPIN took to a rowdy dinner at the Russian Tea Room in 1991. But it was with The Chronic that he truly shot off into the stratosphere. Dre's solo debut was full of "sinister odes, slow and sizzling, to life in the ghetto," as the magazine put it. Dre proved a more laid-back and appealing rapper than he'd been in N.W.A, and he had some considerable help from a certain new guest star named Snoop Doggy Dogg. And then there was the sound: a new form of gleaming, steaming G-funk that grew even more funky as it grew more minimalistic.
LISTEN Dr. Dre, The Chronic

SPIN Archive on Google

• N.W.A. at Russian Tea Room (September 1991)
• Dr. Dre profile (January 1994)

81 Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

2002 The alt-country revival never would've happened without Jeff Tweedy and Wilco, but evidently their major label thought they'd gone too far with this album, which SPIN called "the kind of Kid A-style breakthrough rock cults dream about." The band ended up releasing this "pastiche of experimental sonics and midlife rumination" via their website, and later through indie imprint Nonesuch. A 2009 cover story on Wilco reflected on how this pivotal album "nearly blew up the band"; the real-life drama resulted in the acclaimed music documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.
LISTEN Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

SPIN Archive on Google

• Yankee Hotel Foxtrot story (January 2003)
• Wilco cover story (August 2009)

80 The Fall, This Nation's Saving Grace

1985 Gloriously incessant, inscrutable post-punk band the Fall fanned out far and wide on This Nation's Saving Grace, an album that paired their early itchy funk with wide-eyed wanderings into new-wave pop and cosmic rock. Fabled ranter Mark E. Smith was in fine form as an antagonistic frontman: "Playing anti-star to the hilt, [Smith] tends to show the audience more of his back than of his face," we said in 1986. But he was also hitting his peak as the kind of abstract literary songwriter who could make fans stand back and ogle in awe: "There's all these guys with spectacles on... creepin' around," Smith said in the '90s. "I've seen 'em. They're like the CIA. Nobody can tell me I'm wrong about this. I fuckin' know it."
LISTEN The Fall, This Nation's Saving Grace

SPIN Archive on Google

• Fall profile (June 1986)
• Fall profile (October, 1993)

79 The Breeders, Last Splash

1993 The Breeders were first greeted as a side project for Pixies bassist Kim Deal, but it wasn't long before they counted as an alt-era hallmark on their own. The group's second album grew big behind the effervescent hit "Cannonball," and also churned through what SPIN called a "tangle of gender politics under Last Splash's sun-fun surface noise." It was an agile, accessible alt-rock album hatched in the mind of a surprise maker who would tell SPIN, two years later, "I know I come off lookin' like a fuckin' haggy housewife compared to all these other women in rock, and that's fine with me, man."
LISTEN The Breeders, Last Splash

SPIN Archive on Google

• Last Splash review (September 1993)
• Kim Deal cover (July 1995)

78 Lauryn Hill, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

1998 The Fugees member who breathed new life into "Killing Me Softly With His Song" showed that she could fly solo. "From spirituals to Stevie Wonder to dancehall, Hill harvested the history of black music for an idiosyncratic brew -- sing-song melodies, edgy production, enviable rhyme skills, back-to-church vocals -- that definitely played to the people, but also challenged them to meet her ambitions halfway," SPIN wrote in 1999 when naming Lauryn Hill Artist of the Year. Miseducation also ended up on the magazine's list of the Greatest Albums of the '90s: "Hill has made hip-hop at home in undreamed-of places."
LISTEN Lauryn Hill, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

SPIN Archive on Google

• Artist of the Year (January 1999)
• Greatest Albums of the '90s (September 1999)

77 Boogie Down Productions, Criminal Minded

1987 Boogie Down Productions upped the stakes for hip-hop as a pointed, polemical art form, and few LPs from the '80s earn their place at the table next to BDP's debut, Criminal Minded. John Leland celebrated the album's "hard-edged economy" in a 1988 piece, which also happened to be a column in which he wrote about the shooting death, not long before, of BDP producer Scott LaRock. LaRock's tough, evocative work on Criminal Minded would be missed, but rapper KRS One would stay very much alive in service of the burgeoning tradition he helped start -- a tradition that SPIN writer Bonz Malone would call "the radical sound of rap."
LISTEN Boogie Down Productions, Criminal Minded

SPIN Archive on Google

• Singles column (May 1988)
• Boogie Down Productions Boogie Down Productions

76 OutKast, Aquemini

1998 The Atlanta hip-hop duo's groundbreaking third album got them recognized, respected, and sued by Rosa Parks. "The sound is spacious like a luxury-liner ballroom," SPIN wrote in 1999, "with the MCs tag-teaming on everything from world peace to instant grits." SPIN later situated the album next to Tribe Called Quest's classic Low End Theory. "The record was also distinctly Southern, not just because of its copious 'bounce,' but because its creators seemed so untroubled by the lyrics-versus-music, rap-versus-R&B, or thug-versus-'positive' debates sweated by rap intelligentsia on both coasts. Watching from below, they simply dug it all."
LISTEN OutKast, Aquemini

SPIN Archive on Google

• 100 Greatest Albums (September 1999)
• Outkast feature (December 2000)
• Rosa Parks lawsuit (July 1999)

75 Björk, Post

1995 The synth riff on "Army of Me" sounded the alarm: an Icelandic alien was here to change the face of pop music. "She's got a voice like a trumpet, pronunciation skills that rival ABBA's, and a jazz singer's taste for certain kinds of melodic interval," SPIN wrote in a playfully positive 1996 review. "Whether her accompaniment is punk guitar, disco beats, jazz horns, or symphonic strings, Björk always comes across as her own wacky and seductively weird creation." A decade later, the magazine called her mix of popular convention and quasi-insane experimentation: "Like Madonna with a MoMA membership."
LISTEN Björk, Post

SPIN Archive on Google

• Post review (July 1995)
• 100 Greatest Albums (July 2005)

74 Sleater-Kinney, Dig Me Out

1997 A 1997 SPIN review connected the dots between radical feminism, lesbianism, and punk spirit, saying it all lead to this Olympia trio's raw "suffragette rock." Yet it wasn't only for the riot grrrls: "Dig Me Out captures the noise of a soul-filled body shaking itself awake, and that's an experience that bridges any gender divide." And if that body doesn't respond, Sleater-Kinney isn't happy. "Our music should physically take you over," drummer Janet Weiss told SPIN in May of 1997. "When I hear people refer to new albums as 'good background music,' I think of that as an insult."
LISTEN Sleater-Kinney, Dig Me Out

SPIN Archive on Google

• Dig Me Out review (July 1997)
• Sleater-Kinney feature (May 1997)

73 The Pogues, Rum Sodomy & the Lash

1985 The story of drunken, angry, Irish-bar-song bands could be said to begin and end with the Pogues, and the story of the Pogues could be said to begin in earnest with their second album, Rum Sodomy & the Lash. Elvis Costello produced it, with a mind to keep things raw and unpolished, and the approach worked for what SPIN would later describe as a collection of songs that "lilted and rocked like an Irish wedding party gone bad: the band's been drinking, they start to brood...while Shane MacGowan screams about the devil and rape and British soldiers." MacGowan's songs also happened to be highly poetic and charged, and they were delivered with the kind of energy that transformed a folk-music sound into something that Glenn O'Brien wrote "could blow away any heavy-metal band in the world with that intensity."
LISTEN The Pogues, Rum Sodomy & the Lash

SPIN Archive on Google

• Pogues profile feature (June 1986)
• Review of the Pogues' Peace and Love (September 1989)

72 Lucinda Williams, Lucinda Williams

1988 Rootsy Americana maiden Lucinda Williams came on strong with her 1988 album, which was her third record but her first -- significantly, it would seem -- to be plainly self-titled. The country-rock songwriter was already storied at the time. "Like one of those late-blooming winter flowers, Lucinda Williams pops through the musical topsoil with resilience and beauty that demand attention," wrote Jim Fouratt in 1989. Lucinda Williams would help gain and maintain that attention over the years, as evidenced by a big 1998 profile of what SPIN then took to calling a "neurotic diva with one foot in Faulkner's South."

SPIN Archive on Google

• Lucinda Williams album review (March 1989)
• Lucinda Williams profile (July 1998)

71 Oasis, Definitely Maybe

1994 "For Oasis," SPIN wrote in 1996, "rock is a sport." And the game got started with Definitely Maybe, an assuming debut that "came on loud and brash...with songs about what life might be like as rock'n'roll stars." Soon after their first record, Oasis became rock'n'roll stars, of course -- thanks to a little-more-than-slightly absurd Britpop rivalry with Blur, as well as a notorious tendency to go big. As the magazine put it by the time Oasis made the cover, in 1997: "Amid this rather prudent, health-conscious decade of non-ostentation, Oasis have revived the grand rock tradition of hedonism and bad behavior."
LISTEN Oasis, Definitely Maybe

SPIN Archive on Google

• Oasis profile (February 1996)
• Oasis cover (October 1997)

70 Pearl Jam, Ten

1991 Pearl Jam's Ten roared and muttered to the higher rungs of grungedom after catching on in the wake of Nirvana. Some of the guys had played together in the Seattle band Mother Love Bone, but it was a certain frontman by the name of Eddie Vedder who made them cohere. Vedder had small-band values: "How can you have a religious experience watching a band in a place this size?" he asked while showing SPIN a 10,000-seat venue in 1993. But he made Pearl Jam a big-band draw with a tightly controlled handle on his role as what the magazine later called "the voice of grunge autism."
LISTEN Pearl Jam, Ten

SPIN Archive on Google

• Pearl Jam cover (December 1993)
• Pearl Jam profile (May 1998)

69 The Stone Roses, The Stone Roses

1991 Without this Manchester, England, quartet's debut, Britpop -- Oasis, Blur, Radiohead, et al. -- wouldn't exist. The album, "a real cotton candy rush'n'run with loose, drippy rain guitars," SPIN wrote in 1989, marked a colossal shift in British music with its groovy, funky, neo-psychedelic sound and the dance and rave scene it ignited in Northern England. "Black kids always had something going," singer Ian Brown later remembered. "1989 was the year white kids woke up."
LISTEN The Stone Roses, The Stone Roses

SPIN Archive on Google

• Stone Roses Q&A (March 1989)
• Stone Roses feature (June 1993)

68 Raekwon, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx...

1995 When SPIN reviewed this Wu-Tang Clan member's solo album back in 1995, cinematic analogies seemed more appropriate than musical ones. Cheo Coker compared Raekwon's 18-track epic to the work of action filmmaker John Woo, full of "tales filled with gunshots ('Glaciers of Ice'), assassins with their own special codes of morals ('Incarcerated Scarfaces') and a beautiful woman mourning the loss of a lover caught up in the drama ('Rainy Dayz')." And as SPIN noted in a rundown of the Wu's collective output, this wasn't empty hip-hop posing. "The hardest hitting Wu member, Raekwon, isn't gangster, he's gangster."
LISTEN Raekwon, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx...

SPIN Archive on Google

• Wu Tang Clan feature (July 1997)
• Wu Tang Clan feature (December 2007)

67 Tom Waits, Rain Dogs

1985 Tom Waits was a decade deep into his career -- and already sounded 1,000 years old -- when he made Rain Dogs, a shambling roadshow of a record remembered later by SPIN as Waits' "clattering and martial" masterpiece. The album is full of croaky beat poetry and drunken tambourines, and upon its release, Waits was no less a total enigma than he would become decades hence. In an interview from 1985, he told Glenn O'Brien how he liked to watch Mr. Rogers on TV with his two-year-old daughter: "I make her watch it with me. I do subtitles. I do a Fourteenth Street version of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood where everybody's out of work and selling drugs on the corner."
LISTEN Tom Waits, Rain Dogs

SPIN Archive on Google

• Waits Q&A (November 1985)
• Waits live review (December 1999)

66 Arcade Fire, Funeral

2004 This sprawling, emotive Canadian band helped jump-start the great Montreal resurgence of the oughts, paving the way for other hyperbolic rockers like Wolf Parade. In 2005, SPIN branded them "a Brechtian circus of twinkling piano, mournful violins, and gasping, dramatic vocals." A live review from 2006 proved the band could translate that energy to the stage, creative percussion and all. The highlight? "The clanging, showstopping 'Neighborhood #2 (Laiki),' during which guitarist Richard Reed Perry maniacally drums away on a motorcycle helmet -- often while it's on his head."
LISTEN Arcade Fire, Funeral

SPIN Archive on Google

• Arcade Fire article (January 2005)
• Arcade Fire live review (September 2006)

65 Eminem, The Marshall Mathers LP

2000 The Beastie Boys may have laid the groundwork, but it was this quick-witted, Detroit-born white boy who made hip-hop a real rainbow coalition. With lurid story-songs like "Stan" -- about a deranged rap fan -- Eminem's third album created its own universe. In an August 2000 cover story, Slim Shady flaunted his (legal) gun, cruised Amsterdam, and scoffed at anyone who thinks music can make you into a monster. "I was listening to 2 Live Crew when I was 11 years old, and there's nothing wrong with me," he told SPIN. "Right?"
LISTEN Eminem, The Marshall Mathers LP

SPIN Archive on Google

• Eminem cover story (August 2000)
• Eminem interview (May 1999)

64 The Flaming Lips, The Soft Bulletin

1999 "On The Soft Bulletin, the band replaced its familiar gonzo guitar rock with a brilliant new brand of lo-fi orchestral pop," SPIN wrote in a 2002 feature. "[Wayne] Coyne veered away from his old Dadaist lyrics to express heartfelt sentiments about love and devotion." The new Lips vision is obvious from the album's opener, "Race For The Prize," with its rush of romantic strings. Reviewing the record, SPIN saw a new musical solar system: "Stare into the sonic firmament that is The Soft Bulletin, and it will engulf you."
LISTEN The Flaming Lips, The Soft Bulletin

SPIN Archive on Google

• Soft Bulletin review (July 1999)
• Flaming Lips feature (August 2002)

63 R.E.M., Fables of the Reconstruction

1985 "The sound just crumbles," SPIN's Barry Walters wrote about this diaphanous third album by a young band that already knew the romance of ruins. He was thinking out loud in a cover story on R.E.M. in 1986, and there was a lot to think about. Here was a rock band fronted by an art-bent poet from Georgia who described his feelings for pine trees as "lachrymose and weepy," and who went on to praise the way the act of typing "kind of explodes me and scatters me around." All of that played an evocative role in a haunting, impressionistic, and impressively eclectic record by a band then ripe to grow big -- "a pop band," in the estimation of SPIN reviewer Sue Cummings, "big enough to pull together the divergent strains of folk, rock, and country, and with the presence to inject the mix with mysticism."
LISTEN R.E.M., Fables of the Reconstruction

SPIN Archive on Google

• R.E.M. cover (October 1986)
• Fables review (July, 1985)

62 U2, The Joshua Tree

1987 Bono was a young and eager gentleman named "Bono Vox" when U2 first appeared in SPIN in 1985, but he was already the bigger and bolder Bono we all know by the time The Joshua Tree made U2 unassailably huge. The band's fifth album spit out hits like crazy, and they were unusually searching hits, each with a pointed political edge. "The time I spent in El Salvador and Nicaragua earlier this year showed me another side of America," Bono told SPIN. "The Joshua Tree is about that other side."
LISTEN U2, The Joshua Tree

SPIN Archive on Google

• U2 Q&A (May 1985)
• U2 profile (June 1987)

61 Smashing Pumpkins, Siamese Dream

1993 Billy Corgan has never been one for understatement, but it was really with the second Smashing Pumpkins album that he announced himself as a true maker of epics. Smashing Pumpkins appeared on the cover of SPIN's 100th issue, and writer Jim Greer deemed Siamese Dream "a fit vehicle to deliver the band to rock godhead." It pretty much did, thanks to Corgan's thematic sweep and a Butch Vig-produced sound that drew on what the magazine's review called Smashing Pumpkins' "enormous bag of tricks, a lot of them discovered...on cannabis-heavy mid-American afternoons where their teenage selves reimagined the music of Deep Purple and Blue Öyster Cult without the preen-rock frills."
LISTEN Smashing Pumpkins, Siamese Dream

SPIN Archive on Google

• Siamese Dream review (August 1993)
• Smashing Pumpkins cover (November 1993)

60 Fugazi, 13 Songs

1989 "This Is Not a Fugazi Article" reads one of many sub-headlines in what is most definitely a Fugazi article from SPIN in 1991. Call it a suitable kind of skewed justice for a polemical punk band, led by Ian MacKaye from Minor Threat and Dischord Records, that made a career of calling everything into question. Fugazi's 13 Songs compiled two EPs and introduced a heavy, heady process that involved, as SPIN's Charles Aaron wrote years later, "codifying avant-punk moves...into broadside ambushes."
LISTEN Fugazi, 13 Songs

SPIN Archive on Google

• Fugazi profile (September 1991)
• In on the Killtaker review (September 1993)

59 Belle and Sebastian, If You're Feeling Sinister

1998 This album is so twee that Zooey Deschanel may never have been invented without it. Ana Marie Cox approvingly called the band "the Carpenters with a mean streak," in the October 1997 issue of SPIN, summarizing the album as "death-by-comfort-chair" and full of a "morbid complexity." Singer Stuart Murdoch vamps as a tough wimp on tracks like "Seeing Other People" and "Mayfly." The magazine named the album one of the Top 20 of 1997, dubbing it "teensy, but not a toy, not half as frail as their willowy music seems."
LISTEN Belle and Sebastian, If You're Feeling Sinister

SPIN Archive on Google

• Album review (October 1997)
• Best Albums of the Year (January 1998)

58 DJ Shadow, Endtroducing

1996 Less an innovator than a wild-eyed exploder of convention, DJ Shadow's debut full-length invented new labels. As a review in SPIN's January 1997 issue noted, this Californian sampled, tweaked, and chopped beats all the way to his own singular category: "urban classical music." Electronic music's renaissance wouldn't come from where you expected. As SPIN said in 1999, when naming Endtroducing one of the best of that decade, "The most unlikely DJ savior of the '90s was a 23-year-old white kid from Davis, California, with a B.A. in communications and a record crate deeper than the San Andreas Fault."
LISTEN DJ Shadow, Endtroducing

SPIN Archive on Google

• Entroducing review (January 1997)
• Greatest Albums of the '90s (September 1999)

57 White Stripes, Elephant

2003 "The White Stripes' Elephant is not a good record," SPIN coyly wrote in 2003. "It seems like one for the first eight songs, but then you get to a song called 'The Hardest Button to Button.' This is when you realize that Elephant is, in fact, a remarkably good record, quite possibly a great record, and certainly the sexiest divorce-rock album since Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville." And the magazine paid the ultimate back-handed compliment when naming Elephant the year's best: "White is simply the best derivative songwriter of his generation."
LISTEN White Stripes, Elephant

SPIN Archive on Google

• Elephant review (May 2003)
• Album of the Year (January 2004)

56 Aphex Twin, Selected Ambient Works 85-92

1999 "There's no such thing as a shit sound. You can take anything and build around it." That's Aphex Twin talking to SPIN in 1993, a little after he put out the gently pulsing Selected Ambient Works and became "the techno guy it's okay for indie kids to love." The decidedly not-shit sounds he built around were drawn from a well of vintage Detroit techno and offshoots of the burgeoning movement of rave -- and all without what the magazine called, in a different context, his occasional habit to show "as much contempt for his audience as Don King."
LISTEN Aphex Twin, Selected Ambient Works 85-92

SPIN Archive on Google

• Aphex Twin profile (July 1993)
• Come to Daddy EP review (January 1998)

55 Hole, Live Through This

1994 Consider how hard it would be for Kurt Cobain's wife to transcend the simple fact of being Kurt Cobain's wife, and then consider how effectively Courtney Love did exactly that. She was always shadowed by suspicions of being, as SPIN put it, "a star-fucking careerist." But she was also an agile artist who, as the review of Live Through This noted at the time, "Plays patty-cake with the idea that she deserves everything she gets, good or bad, snagging slurs...and slinging them back with gleeful rage."
LISTEN Hole, Live Through This

SPIN Archive on Google

• Live Through This review (May 1994)
• Hole cover story (February 1995)

54 Dinosaur Jr., You're Living All Over Me

1987 "I'm kinda glad they had to stick 'Jr.' on the end of their name, because it makes them sound like kids who discovered that big noisy guitars were just as fun as tadpoles." That's SPIN's Erik Davis in a review of Bug, the follow-up to Dinosaur Jr.'s awesome 1987 fuzz-fest You're Living All Over Me. He was onto something with the tadpole thing. J Mascis' guitar was already cutting through the underground muck decisively in 1987, and thanks to You're Living songs like "Little Fury Things," it wasn't long until a 1989 issue of SPIN declared Dinosaur Jr. the "best independent band in America."
LISTEN Dinosaur Jr., You're Living All Over Me

SPIN Archive on Google

• You're Living All Over Me review (September, 1987)
• Dinosaur Jr. profile (August, 1989)

53 The Cure, The Head on The Door

1985 In a discography dotted with flashpoints and swerves, the Cure's The Head on the Door stands as a major change-agent. The group all but swoons through pop-minded melodies in the album's opening notes (for "In Between Days," a total Cure classic), but it's not long before they dive deep into murky underworld matter -- only to come up again, many, many times. SPIN called the Cure "the most unlikely pop band of the eighties," and Jon Dolan, later assessing The Head on the Door's reissue, imagined mopey Robert Smith "ripping the black duct tape off his bedroom windows to let the sun shine in."
LISTEN The Cure, The Head on The Door

SPIN Archive on Google

• Cure profile feature (July 1987)
• Reissue review (September 2006)

52 Kanye West, The College Dropout

2004 It's hard to remember -- before the Daft Punk sampling, the culture-nerd blogging, and the infamous interruption of Taylor Swift -- that at one point in time Kanye West was an unproven element. SPIN caught up with him in February 2004, ready to release his debut album and move beyond production credits for Jay-Z and company. "I want people to scream these songs back at me," he told the magazine. "I want to bring back the feeling for people. Like the feeling I had when I had Saturday detention and I would pop in [A Tribe Called Quest's] Low End Theory."
LISTEN Kanye West, The College Dropout

SPIN Archive on Google

• Kanye West profile (February 2004)
• Best of The Year (January 2005)

51 Rage Against the Machine, The Battle of Los Angeles

1999 Melding the instrumental fury of rock and metal with the lyrical activism of early hip-hop, Rage Against the Machine hit their angry stride in 1999. "The funk is deep and the rock is brutal," guitarist Tom Morello told SPIN in 2005. The Battle of Los Angeles was their finest moment, as the magazine described in a March 2000 article detailing Zack de la Rocha's personal connections to Mexican politics and the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas. The album "is Rage's great stage dive forward. It depicts cities and suburbs, ghettos and malls, factories and fields, caught up in a constant power grab."
LISTEN Rage Against the Machine, The Battle of Los Angeles

SPIN Archive on Google

• 100 Greatest Albums (July 2005)
• Rage Aginst the Machine feature (March 2000)

50 Jay-Z, Reasonable Doubt

1996 "A full-throated response to 'too much West Coast dick licking,' Jay-Z's debut posited young Shawn as the East Coast alpha male," wrote SPIN in a May 2004 guide to the best of gangsta rap. "Jigga gave his days as a mover and shaker on the Brooklyn streets the Joel Silver multiplex treatment -- midnight drug deals with Peruvian drug kings and Cristal-popping parties that go till six in the morning." It was only the beginning for Hova, a larger-than-life hip-hop star who had the audacity to nickname himself after God.
LISTEN Jay-Z, Reasonable Doubt

SPIN Archive on Google

• Gangsta Rap feature (May 2004)
• Jay-Z review (Feb 1998)

49 D'Angelo, Voodoo

2000 "Between every staccato, breathy, slack-jaw-smooth lyric on this genius' masterpiece was an implied syllable of psychedelic soul sex," SPIN remembered in 2005. "D'Angelo out-suaved that other sexy motherfucker, the newly Prince-again Prince, lighting a fire under the burgeoning neo-soul movement." A 2000 profile examined his long struggle to record Voodoo -- not to mention its creator's aphrodisiac influence on female fans. Said D'Angelo collaborator George Clinton: "He's definitely got that legend quality as a musician. The route he's taking could definitely be a strange one -- a lot of people might not understand."
LISTEN D'Angelo, Voodoo

SPIN Archive on Google

• 100 Greatest Albums (July 2005)
• D'Angelo feature (February 2000)

48 Elliott Smith, Either/Or

1997 This tortured singer-songwriter's legend-making album was released on indie label Kill Rock Stars, but he wouldn't be an underground secret for long. When a handful of tracks -- notably "Say Yes" and "Between the Bars" -- ended up on the soundtrack for Good Will Hunting, Smith ended up performing at the Oscars, famously out of place on the same stage as Celine Dion. Smith was characteristically humble when describing his songwriting to SPIN in 1998. "I don't usually know what I'm trying to do," he said. "Eventually you look at your songs and go, 'Oh, this is how it goes.' But first you just sort of dream it."
LISTEN Elliott Smith, Either/Or

SPIN Archive on Google

• Elliott Smith feature (January 1999)
• Top 40 Artists (May 1998)

47 Portishead, Dummy

1994 All trip-hop traffics in drama, but few acts in the genre's heyday did drama better than Portishead. With their striking debut, the ghostly, spectral group from Bristol, England, introduced what SPIN called an "innovative mix of low-rider beats, creepy ambience, and lovelorn lamentation." It was sensuous but haunting, to say the least -- so much so that SPIN described Dummy simply as "the sound of something horrible about to happen."
LISTEN Portishead, Dummy

SPIN Archive on Google

• Portishead profile (February 1995)
• Dummy review (November 1994)

46 N.W.A, Straight Outta Compton

1988 ...and into the bedrooms of countless impressionable kids who would subsequently grow up in a musical world scarred, in ways good and bad, by N.W.A's debut. It's hard to overstate the shock that greeted Straight Outta Compton in 1988. The album "is just about killing ourselves off," said Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid in a SPIN roundtable on hip-hop and violence. But then, just as many rallied to the group's fearless storytelling and verite street-reporting. "N.W.A are relevant because they are speaking a truth": the speaker this time? You guessed it -- Sinead O'Connor.
LISTEN N.W.A, Straight Outta Compton

SPIN Archive on Google

• Hip-hop & violence roundtable (August 1989)
• Sinead O'Connor talks about N.W.A. (November 1991)

45 Pixies, Surfer Rosa

1988 "When I first heard people talking about this group of white kids from Boston who can't sing, dance, or play their instruments, I naturally assumed it was the Pixies." That's Jim Greer writing in SPIN about...um, New Kids on the Block, whom he went on to compare to the Pixies at length. Needless to say, this many years later, his take on the Pixies and their nervy, natty, and altogether unique art-rock sound would rank as a minority opinion. As for Surfer Rosa, it's a blast of a debut with songs about, as SPIN noted at the time, "bones breaking, bodies falling apart, and minds free-floating through surreality."
LISTEN Pixies, Surfer Rosa

SPIN Archive on Google

• Black Francis Q&A (August 1988)
• New Kids/Pixies essay (December 1990)

44 Beastie Boys, Licensed to Ill

1986 It's one thing for a group to flash a license to ill and another thing for a group to go ahead and issue that license itself, which is what the Beastie Boys did when they barreled into the burgeoning realm of hip-hop as a trio of ballsy, brassy, and altogether brash upstarts. SPIN first met up with the group of former hardcore-punk dudes when their headquarters was the NYU dorm room of Rick Rubin: "Rick's had more noise complaints than anyone in the history of the dorm." All the clatter was worth it, as the foursome created this bright debut that both goosed hip-hop and took it on its own terms.
LISTEN Beastie Boys, Licensed to Ill

SPIN Archive on Google

• Beastie Boys profile (July 1985)
• Beastie Boys profile (October 1989)

43 The Notorious B.I.G., Ready to Die

1994 Notorious B.I.G. didn't need a lot of help seeming larger than life, but Ready to Die certainly didn't hurt. The Brooklyn rapper's rich debut established him as a huge figure in hip-hop -- as well as the kind of contemplative artist whom SPIN, in 1995, found "on the cellular mixing business with pleasure: cussing then laughing, breathing blunt smoke, then suddenly hush-voiced, asking for a pen so he can make sure and remember to visit an old girlfriend on lockdown." Later, when he made the cover after his murder, the magazine summed it up this way: "Before his death became an occasion for iron-on T-shirts and Police covers, Biggie Smalls was the life of the hip-hop party."
LISTEN The Notorious B.I.G., Ready to Die

SPIN Archive on Google

• Notorious B.I.G. profile (February 1995)
• Notorious B.I.G. cover (January 1998)

42 Green Day, Dookie

1994 Green Day was still just a snide, snotty punk band when they made Dookie. But that doesn't mean Green Day wasn't good -- or grand. "A free lunchtime concert in Boston was cut short when roughly 40,000 more fans than expected showed up," wrote SPIN's Craig Marks, in a 1995 cover story about the band's surprising rise. And much of that rise came on the strength of Dookie, which ranted and bounced with the kind of spirit that Billie Joe Armstrong displayed in his SPIN interview: "Billie Joe doesn't say anything. He just grabs my glass mug, takes one more deep gulp, and then spits the whole thing out high up the window."
LISTEN Green Day, "Dookie"

SPIN Archive on Google

• Green Day profile (September 1994)
• Green Day cover (December 1995)

41 Pulp, Different Class

1995 Jarvis Cocker proved himself the bard of Britain's alternative nation with his band's fifth album. In 1996, SPIN's Barry Walters put the Pulp frontman in the lyrical company of Morrissey, and celebrated these "songs about naughty infidelities, sexless marriages, grown-up teenage crushes, twisted revenge fantasies, obsessive voyeurism, and useless raves." Cocker was as surprised as anyone that Different Class was a hit among the "common people." "Suddenly we were allowed to do something for mass audience," he told SPIN in 1999. "I was thrilled to force people to listen to all these mundane details of life."
LISTEN Pulp, Different Class

SPIN Archive on Google

• Different Class review (March 1996)
• Greatest albums of the '90s (September 1999)

40 Tricky, Maxinquaye

1995 This former member of Massive Attack jumbled his influences and, along with barely legal singer Martina Topley Bird, made one of the few trip-hop albums that still sounds vital. "Imagine the cracked-out vibe of vintage Schoolly D generated by a black British outcast who loves Billie Holliday and PJ Harvey as much as he digs sluggish beats and singsong melodies," SPIN wrote in 1995. And the eccentric maestro would continue to push the envelope after this masterpiece. "Musically, I definitely mislead people," he told SPIN in 1996. "They hear one album, they think they know what's coming next."
LISTEN Tricky, Maxinquaye

SPIN Archive on Google

• Maxinquaye (June 1995)
• Tricky feature (December 1996)

39 Public Enemy, Fear of a Black Planet

1990 A lot happened to Public Enemy in the two years between their epic triumph It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Fear of a Black Planet. Controversy involving anti-Semitic talk by Professor Griff had swirled out of control, and the rest of PE was exhausted by the hubbub. "Let's talk about something else, let's talk about basketball," Chuck D told SPIN's John Leland. None of that changed just how dense and resolutely modern Fear would wind up sounding after everything settled, though. Another piece in the magazine noted how PE had done nothing less than claim "the death of European cultural predominance."
LISTEN Public Enemy, Fear of a Black Planet

SPIN Archive on Google

• Public Enemy profile (September 1990)
• Public Enemy Q&A (September 1989)

38 Run-DMC, Raising Hell

1986 Run-DMC's third album raised many things in addition to hell. One was the stock of Rick Rubin, whose work as a producer managed to prick curious ears while also moving serious units. Another was the prospect of "rap-rock," which shot to popularity on the strength of the Run-DMC/Aerosmith collaboration "Walk this Way." And yet another thing was, well, hip-hop, which had been solidly established by 1986 but not on the scale that Raising Hell would tip. "They know that they've got a motherfucker in the can," said SPIN's John Leland before the album dropped in 1986. They were right, of course -- enough so that, two years later, they wound up on SPIN's cover with a tag as "the world's greatest rock'n'roll band."
LISTEN Run-DMC, Raising Hell

SPIN Archive on Google

• Run D.M.C. profile (August 1986)
• Run D.M.C. cover (May 1988)

37 Liz Phair, Exile in Guyville

1993 In the early '90s, Liz Phair's simultaneously bold and plainspoken songs dug deep in the context of a dude-intensive indie-rock scene. Full of searing and searching lyrics about sadness and sex, her triumphant debut "deconstructed relationships with an insight that didn't seem mortal," said SPIN's Chuck Klosterman. There was a calmness in the chaos, too, as the magazine noted in a live review at the time: "The sublime bile that's made her a goddess in guyville rises only when she finally closes her eyes, forgets about busking for the creepy guys and sensitive poetry chicks at her feet, and bares her fangs in fierce spurts like 'Divorce Song.'"
LISTEN Liz Phair, Exile in Guyville

SPIN Archive on Google

• Liz Phair live review (July 1994)
• Exile in Guyville review (April 1993)

36 The Jesus and Mary Chain, Psychocandy

1985 There's fuzz and then there's fuzz. The Jesus and Mary Chain favored the latter on Psychocandy, an album that sounds like the melding of a million different memories of the '60s as the decade went down in garages and dive bars and stoned-out suburban rec rooms. SPIN's John Leland did not dig the idea in 1985, when he described the grating guitar noise underlying the band's would-be surf songs as "sort of like when the dentist's drill obscures the Muzak." But many others dug, indeed, including a slew of English bands who latched onto JAMC and later drifted into the hazy, dazy sound to be known as shoegaze. Bandmember Jim Reid explained in 1985: "We have no intention of being the new Sex Pistols. We're better than them."
LISTEN The Jesus and Mary Chain, Psychocandy

SPIN Archive on Google

• Song Review (July 1985)
• JAMC feature (November 1985)

35 R.E.M., Automatic for the People

1992 By 1992, R.E.M. had already come a long way from what SPIN called an "alcohol and Quaalude-nourished party" at which they first played together in Athens, Georgia, more than a decade before. After the mosaic hit Out of Time in 1991, the band returned with a mellow, moody, languid, and very beautiful album named in mind of a down-South soul food restaurant and full of what Michael Stipe called "chamber music." Courtney Love also happened to call Automatic her favorite R.E.M. album, which is no small thing.
LISTEN R.E.M., Automatic for the People

SPIN Archive on Google

• R.E.M. profile (November 1992)
• 90 Greatest Albums of the '90s (September 1999)

34 Beck, Odelay

1996 Before he was a celebrated genre-smashing, Charlotte Gainsbourg-collaborating Scientologist, Beck Hansen was a lo-fi misfit with a dream. He got a leg up from SPIN in 1996 when the magazine dubbed his second album a perfect 10, hailing its mix of rap, country, and general oddness: "In the Beck universe, hip-hop is hoedown is funky-fresh slumber party." In a '96 interview, Beck said that the place where he cut Odelay was between two other recording studios -- one hosting Black Sabbath, the other the Muppets. Whether that's true or not, it sounds about right.
LISTEN Beck, Odelay

SPIN Archive on Google

• Odelay review (July 1996)
• Beck interview (August 1996)

33 Björk, Debut

1993 It's hard to imagine a world without Björk, but such was once the case. During her name-making stint with the Sugarcubes, SPIN said she had "the wisdom and eloquence of an elder and the uninhibited mannerisms of a child." And then came a solo career that only upped the stakes, beginning with a debut whose success shocked pretty much everyone. "I had absolutely no clue this would happen," Björk told SPIN in 1995, after Debut had sold 2.5 million copies. "But at the same time, I was on an almost religious mission to fight for my songs."
LISTEN Björk, Debut

SPIN Archive on Google

• Björk profile (August 1993)
• Bjšrk profile (September 1995)

32 Wu-Tang Clan, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)

1993 Has there ever been an album, of any kind, as heady and dense as the Wu-Tang Clan's debut? Everything about it proved improbably welcoming, especially for something so hermetic and arcane -- not to mention something made by a disorderly group who, as SPIN put it, "decentered hip-hop in most every way possible." It was a stone-cold classic that was also fluid and warm. Or, as Chris Ryan put it in a 2007 survey of the Wu's discography: "The kung fu samples, the goofy nicknames...the gnomic rhyme styles, the chaotic nine-man posse cuts, the RZA's thorax-snapping beats -- it all seems commonplace now, but then?"
LISTEN Wu-Tang Clan, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)

SPIN Archive on Google

• Wu-Tang Clan profile (July 1997)
• Across the Wuniverse feature (December 2007)

31 Massive Attack, Blue Lines

1991 "Massive Attack likes to keep everything semifocused," a member of the so-called "sound system" group told SPIN in 1991. The focus there should go on "semi," especially as it applies to the miasmic classic debut Blue Lines. The magazine's review the following month praised the way the English electronic-music act combined "dark dance rhythms with an undertow of melodic strings and...creamy, multitracked vocal pinings." Without all that there probably wouldn't have been trip-hop -- not to mention a certain wispy dystopian poet named Tricky, who left his mark on Blue Lines in a big and haunting way.
LISTEN Massive Attack, Blue Lines

SPIN Archive on Google

• Massive Attack profile (July 1991)
• Blues Lines review (August 1991)

30 A Tribe Called Quest, The Low End Theory

1991 "They've got cultural bass in abundance...great taste in old-school breaks, a sly sense of humor that doesn't undermine the seriousness of their mission, and they don't hold their dicks." That's SPIN's assessment from 1990 of a Tribe Called Quest, a boho-weird hip-hop group that soon issued their masterpiece in the form of The Low End Theory. The album trafficked in some brilliant, warped rapping from Q-Tip and bumped through, as the magazine described them, "some of the sweetest, simplest, funkiest jazz riffs evah to be put on hip-hop vinyl."
LISTEN A Tribe Called Quest, The Low End Theory

SPIN Archive on Google

• Singles column (April 1990)
• Tribe Called Quest feature (October 1991)

29 Pavement, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain

1994 Pavement showed a lot of temerity to lyrically slag off Smashing Pumpkins on their second album, but they displayed even more audacity in making album No. 2 as good as the majestic debut, Slanted and Enchanted. "Triumphantly trivial," SPIN's review said. "Pavement cares deeply about caring less, and revealing even less than that." But they ended up revealing a good bit, indeed, including a sharp ear for hooks and an easiness with pop forms that was new. All that, plus it was -- as the magazine remembered later -- "a concept album about ambivalence, a dizzy skateboard ride through indie culture."
LISTEN Pavement, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain

SPIN Archive on Google

• Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain review (March 1994)
• 90 Greatest Albums from the '90s (September 1990)

28 Radiohead, The Bends

1995 Before Thom Yorke's crew jetted off into full-blown art-rock territory, they made this classic pop album. A 1996 story in SPIN explored how the English quintet moved beyond the earlier success of "Creep" -- and a hilarious-in-retrospect MTV Beach Party appearance -- to hit "just the right combination of guitar crunch, keyboard hush, and rhythm-section push." Radiohead's sophomore release was a slow burner that eventually found the fans tunes like "Fake Plastic Trees" and "High and Dry" deserved. "It's taken people a year to figure [the album] out," Yorke said in '96, "and now they're going 'F***kin' ell!'"
LISTEN Radiohead, The Bends

SPIN Archive on Google

• Radiohead feature (May 1996)
• Radiohead profile (Jan 1998)

27 Nirvana, In Utero

1993 The making of In Utero was notoriously knotty, with an aborted attempt at sessions with mechanic-punk maestro Steve Albini and all kinds of drama that attended Nirvana being the most explosive band in the world. The result was gloriously diverting and diverse -- a realization of what made Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore call Nirvana, in a SPIN interview the year before, "The element everyone was waiting for, the best of R.E.M. and the best of the Butthole Surfers." Or maybe it was just, as SPIN's Eric Weisbard remembered years later, "The measure of beauty available to someone rolling around on a hotel bed, wavering between pain, spew, and fog."
LISTEN Nirvana, In Utero

SPIN Archive on Google

• Thurston Moore talks Nirvana (July 1992)
• 90 Best Albums of the '90s (September 1999)

26 Guided by Voices, Bee Thousand

1994 Beck was on the cover when Guided by Voices' Bee Thousand got reviewed in SPIN, which makes for as good a time-capsule capture as any for the slacker '90s. But: "The band is just too damn old to be lumped in with the slack pack," according to the review in question. "Singer Robert Pollard is 38, a full-time fourth-grade teacher and father of two..." So went the story of a songwriter whose lo-fi songs were positively packed with hooks and melodic allusions to the '60s and '70s, or, as Jon Dolan called them: "...a cavalcade of attention-deficient fuzz-rock anthems about bitter robots and oppressed elves."
LISTEN Guided by Voices, Bee Thousand

SPIN Archive on Google

• Bee Thousand review (July 1994)
• Guide to Essential Indie Rock (March 2003)

25 Nas, Illmatic

1994 Illmatic is one the best three or four best hip-hop albums of all time, period. It was, as SPIN wrote in 1999, "A word-drunk masterpiece of ghetto reportage [that] describes baseheads, task force raids, and other facts of life in the projects in such quickly unfolding narratives that it defined a new genre: the book on DAT." It also introduced a new rapper, some kid named Nas, who -- in the words of SPIN's Chris Ryan -- got over big by "undercutting bloated gangsta mythologizing with 'life's a bitch' existentialism."
LISTEN Nas, Illmatic

SPIN Archive on Google

• Nas profile (June 1999)
• 100 Greatest Albums (July 2005)

24 Metallica, Master of Puppets

1986 How do you feel about "corporate-deathburger-influenced creative direction"? That's what steered Metallica's third album in the mind of SPIN writer Judge I-Rankin', and he didn't much like it. ("A nice sort of ballad for Chrissakes...execrable guitar noodling...confusing," etc.) Others, of course, liked it a lot, especially since Master of Puppets marked an important shift where Metallica moved away from speed and stretched out. "Very few heavy-metal bands that play as intensely as Metallica are as open-minded," Sue Cummings wrote in that year's SPIN profile. A young Lars Ulrich agreed: "As long as you have some sort of intensity, it's fuckin' Metallica."
LISTEN Metallica, Master of Puppets

SPIN Archive on Google

• Master of Puppets review (July 1986)
• Metallica profile feature (August 1986)

23 Daft Punk, Discovery

2001 This is the sonic document that so many later acts would borrow from (and gleefully rip off) -- Justice or Soulwax would be lost without it. Simultaneously cartoonish and dead serious, Daft Punk bred repetition, technology, and melodic stickiness into a sci-fi dance party. But as SPIN determined after meeting the reclusive band in 2001, all the costuming has a point: "It's a B-movie-style shout-out to man-machine boogie pioneers Kraftwerk, and, like the rest of Discovery, a kitschy but superbly funky history lesson." Who says that two robots spinning records in a pyramid can't be rock stars?
LISTEN Daft Punk, Discovery

SPIN Archive on Google

• Daft Punk Q&A (May 2001)
• Discovery review (June 2001)

22 Eric B. & Rakim, Paid in Full

1987 On his 1987 debut with DJ Eric Barrier, Long Island-native MC Rakim Allah set a new artistic benchmark in hip-hop, pushing the budding genre forward with his ferocious vocal presence and lyrical scope, eclipsing rap's simple word-by-word rhyming patterns with involuted verses, eight-and-a-half to the bar. "I'm not a rapper; I'm a lyricist," Rakim told SPIN in 1987. "I take this more serious than just a poem...[I'm] tryin' to make this art."
LISTEN Eric B. & Rakim, Paid in Full

SPIN Archive on Google

• Paid in Full review (September 1987)
• 100 Greatest Albums (July 2005)

21 Oasis, (What's the Story) Morning Glory?

1995 If Oasis wanted to claim they were bigger than the Beatles, then this was what stomped all over the "White Album". In 2003 SPIN pegged the record as essential britpop, singling out the track "Morning Glory" and its "sneering delirium worthy of Johnny Rotten, borne aloft on a towering inferno of guitar." The wild success of the album would later have Noel Gallagher wishing they'd taken some R&R before recording again. "We were fueled by youth and cocaine," he told the magazine in 2008. "We were surrounded by people telling us it was the greatest thing they'd ever heard."
LISTEN Oasis, (What's the Story) Morning Glory?

SPIN Archive on Google

• Noel Gallagher interview (October 2008)
• Essential Britpop (February 2003)

20 My Bloody Valentine, Loveless

1991 Only a handful of other albums from the entire history of rock can stake a claim to singularity as strong as that of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless. With the roar of what sounds like 1,000 guitars and haunting vocals that split the difference between heaven and hell, the album proffered a fully realized form of what the SPIN review at the time wryly called "sophisticated music" that would effectively fulfill the entire idea of shoegaze. No wonder, as it came from the mind of Kevin Shields, who in 1989 told the magazine: "I find that often if I have a dream about something, it seems that, just because I've woken up, I don't feel like it's finished."
LISTEN My Bloody Valentine, Loveless

SPIN Archive on Google

• My Bloody Valentine profile (May 1989)
• Loveless review (December 1991)

19 Jay-Z, The Blueprint

2001 "Jay-Ho forsakes big pimping and gets personal," SPIN wrote in 2002. "Plus: one-take vocals and a whole mess of steaming vitriol. Punk record of the year? Fo' sheazy!" And in 2005, the magazine named The Blueprint, with its Kanye cameos and beef-ready vibe, as one of the best of the past two decades. "Jay-Z settled all scores. To his nemesis Nas, he went nuclear, dropping his Lizard King-aided dis track, "Takeover." And to his critics who pegged him as the poster boy for hip-hop's shallow materialism, he presented a moving portrayal of an artist as a hood/businessman/New Yorker/young man."
LISTEN Jay-Z, The Blueprint

SPIN Archive on Google

• Best Albums of the Year (January 2002)
• 100 Greatest Albums (July 2005)

18 The Strokes, Is This It

2001 Hipster dance parties in the new millennium would have been vastly different without this instant classic of New York City style and sass. Julian Casablancas, Albert Hammond, Jr., and company spawned a legion of imitators with deceptively simple guitar riffs and melodies as catchy as any social disease in the Lower East Side. SPIN praised the record's "glamour and grit and sugar and sleaze" before it was even released in 2001. That frenzy of buzz paid off. Is This It moved nearly 200,000 units, becoming the cosmopolitan currency of cool and coming to embody "a sort of global downtown culture."
LISTEN The Strokes, Is This It

SPIN Archive on Google

• The New "It" Band (November 2001)
• Strokes feature (November 2003)

17 De La Soul, 3 Feet High and Rising

1989 SPIN called De La Soul a "new wave rap crew" when 3 Feet High and Rising came out and threw day-glo flower signs over a rap landscape more often given to the dark and grim. The group's mix of "Steely Dan, Sesame Street, and Kraftwerk breaks" would prove improbably influential, if only for a short while. And there's been ample time since to lay praise on a group that, as SPIN wrote in 1991, "gave voice to a new black bohemianism that was at once suburban and urbane, politically aware and strictly nonbourgeoise, multicultural and strongly rooted in African-American experience."
LISTEN De La Soul, 3 Feet High and Rising

SPIN Archive on Google

• De La Soul profile (May 1989)
• De La Soul profile (May 1991)

16 Pixies, Doolittle

1989 Wrote SPIN reviewer Joe Levy of this late '80s gem: "By turns sweet and sick, Doolittle is full of angels posing as whores, taking your money and giving you divine pleasure." Divine pleasure is one of the best kinds, and credit for such descriptions goes in part to the kind of rich writing favored by ace songsmith Frank Black. It also goes to the calm live-wire spirit that led Michael Azerrad to remember, in an oral history of the Pixies from 2004: "When they opened [in 1989] for the Cure, they were so confident that they arranged their set in alphabetical order. They knew they were so shit-hot that they could shuffle their deck any which way and still win the game."
LISTEN Pixies, Doolittle

SPIN Archive on Google

• Doolittle review (June 1989)
• Pixies oral history (September 2004)

15 Hüsker Dü, New Day Rising

1985 More melodic than their early hardcore records and less scrambled than their manically experimental double-album Zen Arcade, New Day Rising established Hüsker Dü as makers of rousing rock anthems that could be hummed after all the heaving was done. "The album has everything going for it," raved SPIN's John Leland, who thought New Day "affirms everything that was good about punk in the first place and sums up all the variants that have developed in the years since the Sex Pistols." Its propulsive angst and distorted textures also had an effect going forward: As Dennis Cooper wrote of Hüsker Dü in 1995: "The list of admirers and protégés is as long and varied as that of any band's in rock."
LISTEN Hüsker Dü, New Day Rising

SPIN Archive on Google

• New Day Rising review (May 1985)
• The Ten That Matter Most (April 1995)

14 Beastie Boys, Paul's Boutique

1989 The Beastie Boys' second album went way beyond what they'd done on Licensed to Ill, which rates as a classic of an almost entirely different kind. In 1989, SPIN writer Frank Owen chronicled the "bitter legal battle" with their label Def Jam that had kept the Beastie Boys off the scene for a while. But their return release, with its thick, infectious grooves and delirious collage flow, introduced the Beastie Boys as far more than a novelty act -- enough so that they landed a SPIN cover story called "Living X-tra Large" just a few years later in 1992.
LISTEN Beastie Boys, Paul's Boutique

SPIN Archive on Google

• Beastie Boys profile (October 1989)
• Beastie Boys cover (May 1992)

13 Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation

1988 SPIN's Erik Davis, trying to tell the story of a new underground album called Daydream Nation: "There are just fragments of some grand cabal, after-images, bits of torn messages, patches of infection, arrows pointing in a thousand directions: genetic engineering, Walt Disney, the Illuminati, Madonna, the dog-star Sirius, compact discs, Thomas Pynchon, guitar rock, video games, LSD." The list of ideas and images evoked goes on, as suits a sprawling and rich double-album that announced Sonic Youth as a major force. They were more than just a scuzzy downtown noise-rock band -- they were a group that, as SPIN said in 1992, "played a major formative role in the alternative scene now coming, kicking and screaming, into the big time."
LISTEN Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation

SPIN Archive on Google

• Sonic Youth profile (January, 1989)
• Sonic Youth Q&A (July, 1992)

12 OutKast, Stankonia

2000 "Sunk deep in the funk, Atlanta 'hood cats Big Boi and Andre 3000 memorized a decade of East and West Coast hip-hop before they were old enough to sneak a snifter of Hennessy," SPIN wrote in 2002, giving props to this "future-gangsta-leanin' masterpiece." The sound was exciting and inclusive; as SPIN mentioned in a March cover story: "A lot more white brothers and sisters" were visiting Stankonia. "As long as we're making music that is true to ourselves," Big Boi said, "we want as many people to hear it as possible."
LISTEN OutKast, Stankonia

SPIN Archive on Google

• 50 Greatest Bands of All Time (February 2002)
• OutKast cover story (March 2001)

11 The Replacements, Tim

1985 The famously ragtag Replacements moved to a major label and cleaned up, comparatively speaking, for Tim, an album that melded the band's early punk raucousness -- "which doesn't sound half-bad when you've got a stomach full of bourbon and Spaghetti-O's," we wrote in 1989 -- with some gloriously searching ballads by tussle-haired bard Paul Westerberg. The sharp songwriter proved adept with both "no-future punk lyrics" and sentiments as nuanced as "wondering if 'growing old in a bar' is a waste of talent or a sign of underground purity." While doing all that, he also happened to write arguably the greatest last-call song of all time in the doleful outro ballad "Here Comes a Regular."
LISTEN The Replacements, Tim

SPIN Archive on Google

• Replacements feature (April 1989)
• Tim review, 100 Greatest Albums list (July 2005)

10 Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral

1994 "To me, Downward Spiral builds to a certain degree of madness, then it changes. That would be the last stage of delirium." That's Trent Reznor talking to SPIN in 1996, a couple years after the second Nine Inch Nails album vastly expanded the sound of an artist known at the start for his rage. As Ann Powers put it in her review at the time, "Reznor also knows the value of a caress. He understands that after the basic catharsis it offers, pure, aggressive noise numbs, and he always wants to pierce another layer."
LISTEN Nine Inch Nails, The Downward Spiral

SPIN Archive on Google

• Downward Spiral review (May 1994)
• Trent Reznor cover (February 1996)

9 Pavement, Slanted and Enchanted

1992 Pavement had gotten critics in a lather before their full-length debut. "Their new seven-song EP, Perfect Sound Forever, bubbles over with more ideas than on the last three Sonic Youth albums combined," SPIN wrote in 1991. But it was with the gloriously grotty LP Slanted and Enchanted that the indie-rock nation was given a new set of national anthems. The band was "an unreasonably good-looking bunch of fellows," the magazine noted later, but the songs were a beautiful mess of fuzz, literary word games, and a sense of wandering that made Slanted and Enchanted a "masterpiece of melody and murk."
LISTEN Pavement, Slanted and Enchanted

SPIN Archive on Google

• Single review (September 1991)
• Pavement profile (April 1994)

8 PJ Harvey, Rid of Me

1993 PJ Harvey's incomparably baring and bad-ass second album advanced the curious case of a diminutive English woman named Polly Jean, who rocked like a monster. She stared intensely, in nothing but a bra, from the cover of SPIN in May 1995, and the story inside surveyed her power as "the first important female rocker to play guitar better than she sang" and as a singer who was "no slouch either." Indeed, Rid of Me trades well in all of Harvey's charms -- culminating, in the words of SPIN's Joy Press, in "a truly savage record, full of torrid obsession and untethered rage."
LISTEN PJ Harvey, Rid of Me

SPIN Archive on Google

• PJ Harvey profile (August 1993)
• PJ Harvey cover (May 1995)

7 Guns N' Roses, Appetite for Destruction

1987 Bon Jovi was on the cover, hair billowing and shades stylishly askew, when Guns N' Roses warranted a big feature in SPIN in 1990, which says something about the state of bad-boy rock when Axl Rose and company made their name. That issue came a few years after the explosive debut of Appetite for Destruction, and the concussive charge of anthems like "Welcome to the Jungle" and "Paradise City" could still be felt. Problems within the band were already apparent, though: "Clearly these guys are fuck-ups...failures even at success," wrote Danny Sugerman. Then in the next year came a report of a group visited by "tepid-to-torrid mood swings." And then....
LISTEN Guns N' Roses, Appetite for Destruction

SPIN Archive on Google

• GNR profile (November 1990)
• GNR profile (September 1991)

6 Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

1988 Even millions wouldn't seem to be enough. Public Enemy's second album is one of those big-event records for which the word cataclysm doesn't count as overblown. The group, which SPIN said "hit the stage like an alliance of shock troop and rap group," had already made noise with their 1987 debut. But it was this follow-up, with its incendiary message-minded vocals and insane Bomb Squad production, that made Public Enemy an ensemble that, as SPIN noted in 1989, managed to "change the way hip-hop sounds."
LISTEN Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back

SPIN Archive on Google

• Chuck D Q&A (January 1988)
• PE profile feature (September 1989)

5 Radiohead, OK Computer

1997 There are certain records that disrupt the space-time continuum of musical history, issuing a pointed warning to anything that follows. Critics were shocked at Thom Yorke and company's ingenuity, as if Radiohead had simply conjured new aural ingredients from thin air. ("Completely the opposite," bassist Colin Greenwood humbly told SPIN in 1998. "To us, it's rooted in obvious things -- what we've listened to, that is.") From "Paranoid Android" to "Karma Police," "Yorke was trying to make each sound like reportage from inside 12 different brains," SPIN wrote in 1998. "Through the speakers of a stereo, OK Computer is 'conceptual,' but in a way that's difficult to quantify; somehow, it manages to sound how the future will feel," Chuck Klosterman said in 2005 of the band's electronically enhanced magnum opus. "No upstart musician hears OK Computer and thinks, 'Wow, I could do this.' It's more likely they think, "Fuck, this is impossible.'"
LISTEN Radiohead, OK Computer

Spin Archive on Google

• Q&A with Colin Greenwood (May 1998)
• Radiohead feature (January 1998)
• Chuck Klosterman review (July 2005)

4 Nirvana, Nevermind

1991 No album in the history of modern rock has had such a decisive influence. The Seattle trio's 1991 release woke up MTV, the Billboard charts, and pop culture as a whole. It redefined music A&R, launched Seattle's iconic grunge scene, and canonized Kurt Cobain as the "voice of a generation," a sarcastic, moody black humorist who bitched about his childhood over catchy pop vocals and heavy guitar hooks indebted as much to ABBA and the Beatles as Black Sabbath and the Sex Pistols. "There's an old Black Flag lyric that screams, 'I wanna live / I wish I was dead,' and that was Nevermind's eternal tangle," Charles Aaron wrote in SPIN. "Nevermind shakes the walls like a storm...[and] most of all you feel it in Cobain's paper-thin voice, as he stares down the lethal horrors of growing up, and somehow manages to rock a shit-eating grin."
LISTEN Nirvana, Nevermind

Spin Archive on Google

• First Nirvana cover (January 1992)
• Posthumous tribute to Cobain (June 1994)
• Best Albums of the '90s (September 1999)

3 The Smiths, The Queen Is Dead

1986 "How about those Smiths, huh?" So goes the start of SPIN's review of the fabled band's best album, and the opinion that follows is decidedly mixed. "If you sift through the early writings of Oscar Wilde," wrote Rich Stim, "you end up with a few gems at best. Ditto for Morrissey on Queen." But then, of course, he issues praise as well for what stands as the high point of the Smiths' discography in terms of both writerly focus and stylistic range: "You gotta admire a guy who can rhyme 'rusty spanner' with 'play pianner' and who can espouse the beauty of a double-decker bus collision." As Morrissey himself told SPIN about his attempts to bring meaning to everyday life: "Music as it stands now has very little to do with human truth and I think that's very sad."
LISTEN The Smiths, The Queen Is Dead

Spin Archive on Google

• Smiths profile (June 1985)
• Queen is Dead review (August, 1986)

2 Prince, Sign O' the Times

1987 Prince's divinely, defiantly eclectic double-album came out at a time when SPIN was all agog. "I guess you know what the problem with Prince is: he's too good," goes the start of Bart Bull's review. "He's so good he can do anything he wants...and sometimes the dumb stuff he does works out to be the best stuff anybody's ever done. Ever." That even-the-dumb-stuff-works spirit imbued an album as personally pointed and stylistically varied as any ever made, and it's aged well enough that, in a 2005 tribute, SPIN's Michaelangelo Matos called it a "one-stop superstore for the past two decades of pop."
LISTEN Prince, Sign O' the Times

Spin Archive on Google

• Sign O' the Times review (May 1987)
• 100 Greatest Albums List (July 2005)

1 U2, Achtung Baby

With the middling reaction to last year's better-than-you'll-admit No Line on the Horizon, U2's chest-heaving big-box spectacle seems to be fatiguing more of pop's body politic than it's inspiring. Weirdly, this was exactly the case more than 20 years ago. After the critical and commercial sweep of Joshua Tree, the Irish conglomerate followed its bombastic muse with the ponderous 1988 docu-fiasco Rattle and Hum, which featured a Bono mot that would haunt many of us for years to come: "Okay, Edge, play the blues!" Flailing and directionless, the band retreated and reconsidered whether it was time to fold up their flag for good.

Instead, three years later they emerged with the album -- Achtung Baby, cheekily titled as a nod to German reunification -- that would energize their career and genetically engineer rock music into the hybridized mutant we know today. Initially recorded at Hansa Studios, a former SS ballroom near the reopened Berlin Wall (and later completed back home in Dublin), Achtung was an effort, stoked primarily by Bono and the Edge, to "deconstruct" the band and rewire it with jolts of beat-generated clutter and collage, nicked from industrial music, hip-hop, dance remixes, and the Madchester scene. That method almost collapsed the band -- bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr., as well as coproducer Daniel Lanois, were left bewildered and cranky.

But the frisson found expression in U2's most immediately dynamic music since 1982's War, and its most emotionally frank songs to date, capturing that particular early-'90s rub of boundless possibility and worn-down despair. Bono's lyrical flights had a battered grit, like a defrocked cleric stirred to regain his flock without the usual trick bag of bullshit. "One" became an indelible anthem because it admitted "we're not the same" but urged that we've gotta "carry each other" nonetheless. The squalling swagger of "The Fly" resonated due to the rock star at its center confessing he's a liar and a thief. And for "Mysterious Ways," the Edge somehow concocted a jubilantly snarling riff that transformed Bono's gospel come-on so it didn't feel gross the morning after.

Unlike Radiohead with OK Computer and Kid A, U2 took their post-industrial, trad-rock disillusionment not as a symbol of overall cultural malaise, but as a challenge to buck up and transcend. Their confessions of frailty and blindness amid murky atmospherics (no doubt egged on by coproducer Brian Eno) had an air of cleansing rather than whining. That the album trails off introspectively is brave in its own quiet way.

Though they continued to bumble through periods of bloat and self-delusion and irrelevance, U2 became the emblematic band of the alternative-rock era with Achtung Baby. Struggling to simultaneously embrace and blow up the world, they were never more inspirational. -- Charles Aaron

U2 on Past SPIN Covers:

• 

  What Makes U2 Run? Excerpt from the SPIN April 2009 Issue:

  "The essence of the album was very spontaneous," says guitarist the Edge. "You don't want it to sound all fussed-with to the point where it's impressive but ultimately doesn't stand the test of time." Read More

• 

  Getting Personal with the World's Biggest Band Excerpt from the SPIN December 2004 Issue:

  "I think we weave God, sex, and politics together in a way that's very unusual in white music," explains Bono. "And I'm not saying this is a reason that someone should like our music, or that it proves we're great... I hope that doesn't sound arrogant." Read More

• 

  Band of the Year Excerpt from the SPIN January 2002 Issue:

  "We were very conscious of wanting to be on the radio. We wanted to compete with what was going on around us, with the boy bands and with the Christinas and all that," says drummer Larry Mullen. "There's no point being in the ghetto. Unless we're making music that's vital and that people can hear, we're wasting our time." Read More

• 

  Defusing Their Own Myth Excerpt from the SPIN March 1997 Issue:

  "The most interesting stuff comes from people doing things they shouldn't really be doing, acting outside of the boundaries of convention," says the Edge. "I'm not in the least bit apologetic if people think we're pretentious." Read More

• 

  U2 on Tour Excerpt from the SPIN July 1992 Issue:

  "Someone tells me that Bono's arm is killing him as a result of being pulled on all the time by overeager audience members. The price (sigh) of fame." Read More

• 

  Defusing Their Own Myth Excerpt from the SPIN January 1989 Issue:

  "Everything I say becomes some sort of statement, something of vast importance," says Bono. "I could go on stage, unzip my pants, and hang my dick out and people would think it was some statement about something." Read More