The 50 Best 10th Albums of All Time

Last year, we named Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait the third most disappointing album in music history. As we pointed out back then, it inspired Greil Marcus to write the famous lede to a review in the history of music criticism: “What is this shit?” And we stand by our assertion that this oddball mix of covers, live cuts, and half-hearted originals was massively disappointing, especially considering the albums that it followed. All of that said…we can’t help but love the damn thing. Where else can you hear Bob Dylan duet with himself on a cover of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer,” utilizing his Nashville Skyline croon and his normal voice? Would any other artist of Dylan’s stature kick off an album with a trio of female singers repeating “All the tired horses in the sun, how we supposed to get any writing done?” over and over while his voice is totally absent? Self Portrait is a mess of an album that Dylan has dubiously claimed a few times he tanked on purpose. We’ll never know if that’s true, but we do know that there’s something about it that brings us back over and over.

This is going to be a controversial choice since an outspoken group of Duranies loathe Pop Trash. It was cut at a low point when the band was reduced to just two founding members, singer Simon Le Bon and keyboardist Nick Rhodes, and it was largely erased from existence when the original five-man lineup reformed shortly after its release. But we have a lot of love for the Warren Cuccurullo era of Duran Duran, which gave the world “Come Undone” and “Ordinary World” back in the early-Nineties. There’s nothing on Pop Trash to rival those classics, but “Someone Else Not Me,” “Playing With Uranium,” Pop Trash” and several other songs on this LP are lost gems. They’re also the sound of a band trying to move forward without any eyes on the past. They gained a lot when the three Taylors rejoined in 2001, but they also lost a lot when Cuccurullo was tossed out. If you doubt us, put on this record and, in the words of a Duran Duran peer who never reached the milestone of a 10th album, listen without prejudice.

The sparse, introspective piano ballads at the core of Nick Cave’s 1997 LP The Boatman’s Call are a stark departure from practically every other album he’s made over his long career with the Bad Seeds. It came at a time when former Birthday Party frontman had a brief flirtation with the mainstream thanks to a Kylie Minogue guest spot on “Where the Wild Roses Grow,” and MTV’s slightly baffling decision to not only put it in rotation, but nominate him for Best Male Artist at the VMAs. (They withdrew it at his request.) With more eyes on him than ever, Cave delivered a fantastically un-MTV friendly record with The Boatman’s Call that earned him universal praise. “If you think you’ve got Cave pigeonholed, think again,” wrote Rolling Stone’s Matt Diehl. “Boatman is a gloved fist pounding the final nail in the coffin of his tortured-goth image.”

This Loretta Lynn album has been out of print for decades and until the era of easy YouTube piracy arrived, was nearly impossible to find outside of vintage vinyl shops. That’s a shame since the 1967 LP – her third of that year – is packed with classic Lynn tales of heartbreak, loneliness, sorrow, and the rotten men responsible for it all. Things briefly pick up for the optimistic “It’s Such a Pretty World Today” where she finally looks at the bright side of life. Hopefully, Singin’ with Feelin’ will make it onto streaming services some day. In the meantime, spend time with the YouTube vinyl rips. 

Lou Reed’s early-Eighties comeback period, which ultimately produced the remarkable 1982 album The Blue Mask, began with Growing Up In Public. It’s a deeply personal work that touches on his family (“My Old Man”), romance (“How Do You Speak to an Angel”) and substance abuse (“The Power of Positive Drinking”). “On its most immediate level, the new record is a polished package of bombastic rock & roll — indeed, probably Reed’s best commercial shot since his 1974 Top Ten anomaly, Sally Can’t Dance,” wrote Rolling Stone’s Mikal Gilmore. “Much of this record is like the family scrapbook that nobody wants to share with polite company: sharp recountings of the ways in which parents thrust their disillusions upon their children.”

The post-punk and New Wave period of the early-Eighties posed the same challenge to every superstar act of the Seventies: evolve or die. Not every New Wave makeover was successful – check out the Village People’s 1981 album Renaissance for proof of that – but it somehow worked out for everyone from James Taylor and Rod Stewart to Yes. Linda Rondstadt’s New Wave period was essentially limited to 1980’s Mad Love, but she made the most of it by covering Neil Young’s “Look Out For My Love,” the Hollies’ “I Can’t Let Go,” and no less than three Elvis Costello tunes, “Party Girl,” “Girls Talk” and “Talking In The Dark.” Rondstadt went back to her country-rock roots on 1982’s Get Closer, leaving Mad Love as a fascinating one-off. 

J. Geils spent the Seventies slogging it out on the club circuit, scoring the occasional minor hit like “Must Have Got Lost,” but largely flying under the radar of most pop fans. That finally changed in 1980 when they dropped “Love Stinks,” but that just set the stage for Freeze Frame the following year. They lost some older fans by largely abandoning their blues-rock roots in favor of a radio friendly New Wave sound, but that mattered little when “Centerfield” shot to the top of the Hot 100 and the title track reached Number Four. For a hot minute, they were one of the biggest bands in America, with videos airing round the clock on MTV. But lead singer Peter Wolf hated the new direction and left the band before they could release a follow-up. They briefly limped ahead with keyboardist Seth Justman on lead vocals, but split after a single failed album. 

The Eighties were a rocky time for Jackson Browne despite the huge success of “Somebody’s Baby” from the Fast Times at Ridgemont High soundtrack. Lawyers In Love, Lives in the Balance, and World In Motion simply didn’t connect with fans like his Seventies albums, and he never figured out the whole music video thing. (If you ever need a good laugh, check out the “Lawyers In Love” video.) In 1993, after a four-year break, he gave his recording career a soft reboot with I’m Alive. Produced by Don Was and the Heartbreakers’ Scott Thurston, I’m Alive makes no attempt to sound modern. It’s instead a classic Jackson Browne record featuring an incredible crew of musicians, including Benmont Tench, Jim Keltner, David Lindley, and Dean Parks. The title track is a mission statement for the whole album, and the piano ballad “Sky, Blue, and Black” evokes the majesty of “Lake For the Sky.” It would have been a big hit back in 1974. And even though I’m Alive wasn’t a massive success, it’s a stellar record.

The pressure that Nas faced after the release of his 1994 debut masterpiece Illmatic was enormous. The years that followed were marked by wildly inconsistent albums, a marriage to Kellis that ultimately failed, and significant issues with the Internal Revenue Service. But in 2012, Nas silenced all the doubters with the brilliant Life Is Good. It faces all of his most personal issues head on, and he even poses with Kellis’ green wedding dress on the cover. The highlight is “Daughters” where he addresses the difficulties of single fatherhood, and references a rather unfortunate incident when his 17-year-old daughter posted a photo of a box filled with condoms on the side of her bed. And on “Bye Baby,” he looks back at the happier days with Kelis. “When we walked to the altar that was an awesome day,” he raps. “Did counseling couldn’t force me to stay.” 

An outspoken contingent of Rush fans look down at the group’s mid-Eighties albums when Alex Lifeson’s guitars took a backseat to Geddy Lee’s synthesizers. To these people, 1984’s Grace Under Pressure marked a key turning point since it’s their first album without producer Terry Brown since their 1974 debut, and Lifeson is mixed so far down that his guitar is sometimes barely audible. But fans willing to leave 2112 and Motion Pictures in the past recognized that Grace Under Pressure is a remarkable collection of songs that tackled subject matter as serious as the Holocaust (“Red Sector A”) and the death of band associate Robbie Whelan (“Afterimage”). Rolling Stone’s Kurt Loder was underwhelmed (“If you like Rush, you’ll love it; if not, then Grace Under Pressure is unlikely to alter your assessment of the band as a lumbering metal anachronism”), but time has been kind to Grace Under Pressure. It’s a document of a band at a turning point, unafraid to try new things even if it means alienating some of their core followers. 

On March 31, 1992, Bruce Springsteen released two albums on the same day, Human Touch and Lucky Town. That’s why it seems a bit odd to call one the 9th record and the other his 10th record since it seems like they’re basically a double album, little different than GNR’s Use Your Illusion I and II from the prior year. But that’s not the case. Human Touch was painfully recorded in fits and starts between the fall of 1989 and the spring of 1991. Lucky Town was banged out much faster in the final months of 1991. It’s a looser, more organic album with stronger songs, most notable the title track, “Better Days,” “If I Should Fall Behind,” “Souls of the Departed,” and “My Beautiful Reward.” To be clear, all of these songs were better either in their original demo form or latter-day live releases with the E Street Band. That said, Lucky Town is still a vastly under-appreciated album. It just had the misfortune of hitting at the peak of grunge when Mr. Glory Days seemed like a faded Eighties relic to many listeners. (He’d prove them very, very wrong in the years to come.)

In the early Eighties, Seventies prog giants like Yes, Genesis, and Rush cut their hair, cut the lengths of their songs, and wound up with very unlikely Top 40 hits. King Crimson – the granddaddy of all prog rock bands – also came back around with a new, modern sound in the Eighties, and an innovative new guitarist, Adrian Belew. But it was as off-putting to mainstream pop fans as their Seventies work. More adventurous listeners, however, were enthralled by 1981’s Discipline and 1982’s Beat. The same can’t be said for 1984’s Three of a Perfect Pair where bandleader Robert Fripp attempted to separate side one’s “accessible” music with side two’s “expressive” music. (“Accessible” is a relative term when it comes to King Crimson.) Audiences were mixed, and the band split for a decade shortly after it came out. Still, time has been kind to Three of a Perfect Fair. It’s now seen as the natural final step of their Eighties journey. 

Al Green and producer Willie Mitchell weren’t scoring “Let’s Stay Together”-sized hits by the time 1976’s Full of Fire came around, but their creative spark was undiminished. The album is more concerned with matters of the immortal soul than matters of the heart, but there’s little overt preaching. (That would come just a few years later.) Instead there’s originals like “Glory, Glory” and “That’s The Way It Is” mixed with covers like Buck Owen’ “Together Again” that stand up to anything in the Green catalog.  “Their music may not spark that exhilarating flash of discovery anymore, and it may not make the Top Ten, but it’s never dispirited or routine,” writer Rolling Stone’s Robert Palmer. “The band that gave Green’s first hits their Memphis punch has survived without any personnel changes, Mitchell continues to arrange and engineer the recordings himself, and Green is still a unique stylist who can make recycled material sound stunningly fresh.”

In late 1978, shortly before his death from Lou Gehrgig’s Disease, Charlie Mingus teamed up with Joni Mithell and some of the top jazz artists of the time – including bassist Jaco Pastorius, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, pianist Herbie Hancock, and drummer Peter Erskine – to create Mingus. Mingus wasn’t able to play an instrument at this point, but he did provide Mitchell with several compositions that needed lyrics. She also mixed in a few songs of her own, including “God Must Be a Boogie Man.” The result is a wildly-uncommercial album punctuated by brief spoken word tracks by Mingus. “I was lucky, man,” he says near the end of the album. “God blessed me.” Mingus was a commercial dud that marked the end of Mitchell’s time with Asylum Records, but it’s found a cult audience over the past few decades.

In 1995, after a six-year break from the road that happened to coincide with the most successful and beloved albums of their career, R.E.M. finally went on tour. During their downtime, the group worked on new material they cut during soundchecks and dressing room jam sessions. When they got home, they refined the music further in the studio. The result is a collection of songs like “Wake Up Bomb” and “Leave” that leave the bombast of Monster behind for something looser, chiller, and more introspective. The highlight is “E-Bow” the letter, a soaring duet with Patti Smith that stands up with some of the best songs R.E.M. ever cut. The absence of a big hit like “Losing My Religion” or “Man on the Moon” caused some to dismiss New Adventures in Hi-Fi as a somewhat underwhelming release, but that’s only true from a commercial perspective. From an artistic perspective, it’s R.E.M. at the peak of their abilities.  

If this was a list of best 9th albums, Black Sabbath’s Heaven and Hell would rank extremely high. That’s the one where they proved they no longer needed Ozzy Osbourne, seamlessly ingratiated Ronnie James Dio into their sound, and cranked out some of their best songs since Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. Their 1981 follow-up Mob Rules doesn’t quite soar to those extreme heights, but the title track, “Country Girl,” “The Sign of the Southern Cross,” “Falling Off The Edge of the World,” and the instrumental “E5150” are all metal classics they played live for decades to come. Sadly, this lineup of Sabbath fizzled after this album, and their next album – 1983’s Born Again with Deep Purple’s Ian Paice on vocals – was such a fiasco that it helped inspire Spinal Tap. In the minds of many Sabbath fans, Mob Rules was their final truly classic album. It was a sad, inglorious downhill slide from there. 

Elton John fans have spent decades debating when exactly his streak of perfect records ended in the Seventies. Some point to 1974’s Caribou since there’s a lot of whiffs on there despite “The Bitch is Back,” “Pinky,” “Ticking” and “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down on Me.” But it was followed by the majestic Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, and is often lumped in with his other classics. But most Elton aficionados pinpoint 1975’s Rock of the Westies as the real turning point. They have a strong argument since the dip in quality from Captain Fantastic is very clear, and “Island Girl” is one of the worst (not to mention offensive) singles he ever released. We thought about simply not including the album here, but the rest of it doesn’t come near the horrifying lows of “Island Girl.” “I Feel Like a Bullet (in the Gun of Robert Ford)” is an overlooked classic, and “Street Kids” and “Hard Luck Story” are great showcases for his new band. And compared to many of the albums that came later, Rock of the Westies is a genuine masterpiece. (If we ever get around to a best 20th album list, don’t expect to see Leather Jackets make the cut.)

Bob Marley’s 1978 LP Kaya was the most polarizing release of his lifetime. Mellow love songs like “Is This Love” and “Satisfy My Soul” won over new fans that were perhaps turned off by some of the more political songs off his recent records. But many critics thought he was watering down his message and his music to reach the masses. “This is quite possibly the blandest set of reggae music I have ever heard,” wrote Rolling Stone’s Lester Bangs in a brutal (and deeply problematic) takedown. “Musically, Kaya is a succession of the most tepid reggae clichés, pristinely performed and recorded, every last bit of tourist bait (down to the wood blocks) in place just like a Martin Denny record. Marley sings in a cheerful lilt light and bouncy enough for panty-hose commercials.” And while we agree that Kaya isn’t one of the best Marley releases, this review is, quite frankly, insane. Kaya is a beautiful record. But in response to the criticism, Marley retreated back to more familiar subject matter on 1979’s Survival. It leaves Kaya as a fascinating outlier in the catalog.

Yes fans and the broader music world were primed to hate Drama before they heard a note of it. Not only was progressive rock epically uncool at the time thanks to punk and New Wave, but Yes had just parted ways with singer Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman. They replaced them with vocalist Trevor Horn and keyboardist Geoff Downes, a.k.a. the Buggles. (This was a year after they cut “Video Killed The Radio Star,” and a year before it became the first video aired on MTV.) Somehow or another, this Frankenstein band managed to assemble a very credible Yes album, highlighted by songs like “Machine Messiah” and “Tempus Fugit” the band still plays today. If this same album had arrived in 1974 with Jon Anderson on lead vocals, it would have been greeted with great joy by prog fans. But in 1980, it was largely ignored, and the group broke up after an ill-fated tour to support it. But with the benefit of great critical distance, it’s clear that Drama is a truly great Yes record. And since they basically became a different band in the “Owner of the Lonely Hearts” days, it marked the end of an incredible era.

The slow motion disintegration of James Taylor’s marriage to Carly Simon was a brutal time for all parties involved, and the reverberations continue to this day. But it did produce some pretty memorable music. Taylor’s 1981 LP Dad Loves His Work is basically a concept record about the pain of the breakup. That’s clear from opening track “Hard Times” (“An angry man, hungry woman, driving each other crazy”), and impossible to miss on the hit single “Her Town Too,” a duet with Eagles songwriter J.D. Souther. “She gets the house and the garden,” Taylor sings. “He gets the boys in the band.” Backed by a crew of top-shelf musicians including guitarist Waddy Wachtell, bassist Leland Sklar, and drummer Rick Marotta, Taylor is near the peak of his game here. 

There’s an argument to be made that Prince’s tenth album is actually The Black Album since he finished it prior to the release of Lovesexy, sent promotional copies out to the press, and printed half a million copies. But at the last second, when the album was literally on the loading docks ready to be sent to record stores, Prince changed his mind and recalled it due to a “spiritual epiphany” that told him the music was too sexual. He then rushed back to Paisley Park and crammed out Lovesexy, his tenth album to receive a proper release, in a mere seven weeks. It’s a spiritual release about the battle between good and evil, mirroring his own inner-conflict at the time. Leadoff single “Alphabet St” is a funk-rock song that would have easily fit on Prince’s earlier albums, but many of the others are joyful, bouncy members pulsating with spiritual yearning. “Dense and murky even during its peppiest moments, Lovesexy catches Prince in moods we normally don’t associate with him,” wrote Rolling Stone’s David Browne, “frisky but contemplative, sly yet introspective.”

In the summer of 1985, the Tom Waits musical Frank’s Wild Years debuted at Chicago’s Briar Street Theatre. The low budget production starred Waits himself, and fleshed out a down-and-out character first introduced on his 1983 song “Frank’s Wild Years.” “It’s really, simply enough, the story of a guy from a small town who goes out to seek his fame and fortune; a standard odyssey,” Waits said. “He’s no hero, he is no champion; wasn’t what he says he was. He was really a guy who stepped on every bucket on the road.” The musical folded up shop after just a few weeks and is now just a tiny footnote to his career, but the songs lived on through his 1987 LP Frank’s Wild Years. It’s impossible to follow the plot of the musical through these songs alone, but it doesn’t matter. “Hang on Saint Christopher,” “Temptation,” and “Yesterday Is Here” are quintessential Waits tunes that sound like nothing else from the late-Eighties or really any other musical era.

Jay-Z’s musical career was in a precarious state before the release of American Gangster. His 2003 LP The Black Album was marketed as his final release, but he came back just three years later with the underwhelming Kingdom Come that caused many longtime fans to fear his time had passed. He responded just 12 months later with American Gangster and silenced all his critics. Heavily inspired by the 2007 Ridley Scott movie American Gangster, which traces the life story of Harlem drug lord Frank Lucas, the album utilizes Seventies funk and R&B sounds and production work by Diddy, the Neptunes, Just Blaze, and Bigg D to tell the story of a violent life on the streets, and the pursuit of the American Dream, by any means necessary. “It’s the same old story he’s told since Reasonable Doubt,” wrote Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield. “But having a fictional character to play around with gets Jay out of his post-retirement rut. Lucas may not cut it as a hero — but it doesn’t matter as long as he gets Jay feeling like one.”

Countless Last Waltz viewers have asked the same question over the years: “What the hell is Neil Diamond doing at this thing?” The answer is that the Band’s final show took place just months after Robbie Robbertson produced Diamond’s album Beautiful Noise. One of Diamond’s weaknesses up to that point is that he was somewhat of a singles artist. Beautiful Noise changed that since it’s a strong, cohesive work featuring some of the best songs of his career, including the title track, “Dry Your Eyes,” and “If You Know What I Mean.” The latter is an achingly tender ballad where Diamond looks back at a lost love from his past. “Took a drag from my last cigarette,” he sings. “Took a drink from a glass of old wine/I closed my eyes and I could make it real/And feel it one more time.” This is Diamond at the top of his songwriting powers. And despite the snickers over the years, he deserved to be on that Last Waltz stage alongside greats like Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Van Morrison. With Beautiful Noise, he earned it.

By the time A Thousand Leaves hit, Sonic Youth had survived the No Wave movement that birthed them in the early Eighties, the college rock scene that embraced them in the mid-Eighties, and the alt-rock revolution they inspired in the early Nineties. It was now 1998 and the band had no logical place in the music world, but they did have enough cash to finally build their own studio and make music at their own pace. The result was an experimental LP packed with long songs that alienated some critics, (“Most of the songs are aromatherapy, relaxing and vaporous” noted Pitchfork), but stunned others, most notably the Robert Christgau of Village Voice. “Awash in connubial ardor and childhood bliss, undergirded by the strength-through-strangeness of angry tunings grown familiar, it’s the music of a daydream nation old enough to treasure whatever time it finds on its hands,” Christgau wrote in an A-plus review. “Where a decade ago they plunged and plodded, drunk on the forward notion of the van they were stuck in, here they wander at will, dazzled by sunshine, greenery, hoarfrost, and machines that go squish in the night.”

To many casual Kinks fans in America who know their music purely through classic rock radio and movie soundtracks, their legacy is little more than “You Really Got Me,” “Lola,” “All Day and All of the Night,” and maybe “Waterloo Sunset” and “Sunny Afternoon.” But the real aficionados know the Kinks are truly an album band, and their output throughout the Sixties and Seventies is staggering. Their tenth album, Muswell Hillbillies, was their first release after jumping from Reprise to RCA. The new label was surely anxious for another radio-friendly song like “Lola,” released a year earlier, but instead they got a series of vignettes about everyday life in the working class London neighborhood of Muswell Hill, where the Davies brothers grew up. Unsurprisingly, the album fared better in England than it did in America, where Muswell Hill was as foreign to most listeners as an alien planet. But it’s reputation grew over the years, and it’s now seen widely as one of their best records. “Overall, Muswell Hillbillies is a weird tangent for a group that’ve always been at their best when rocking their asses,” wrote Rolling Stone’s Mike Saunders, who appreciated it back in when it was new, “but the album succeeds, where it does, largely on its combination of cynicism, tenderness, and wit that the Kinks have long been known for.”

Leonard Cohen started working with background singer Sharon Robinson when he took her on the road in 1979. It didn’t take him long to figure out she had enormous talent as a songwriter, and they teamed up to create the classics “Everybody Knows” and “Waiting For The Miracle” in the late-Eighties and early-Nineties. After vanishing from the public sphere for nearly a decade around the turn of the millennium, Cohen decided to stage a comeback by teaming up with Robinson for Ten New Songs. It’s a haunting, sparse, darky introspective work highlighted by the songs “In My Secret Life,” “A Thousand Kisses Deep” and “Alexandra Leaving.” The album sold virtually no copies in America, but the reviews were universally glowing. “Ten New Songs manages to sustain loss’s fragile beauty like never before,” wrote Rolling Stone’s Steven Chean, “and might just be the Cohen’s most exquisite ode yet to the midnight hour.”

By most measurements, Madonna’s 2003 LP American Life was a success since it sold over 5 million copies and topped the album charts all across the globe. But it failed to generate a big hit, didn’t do as well commercially as her previous records, and faced rather mixed reviews. For the followup, Madonna teamed up with producer Stuart Price and made a bombastic, unapologetic dance record that drew inspiration from giants of the past like the Bee Gees and ABBA. The influence of the latter was most obvious on leadoff single “Hung Up” since it’s built around a heavy sample of ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight).” The song was an enormous hit that helped Confessions on a Dance Floor sell 10 million copies worldwide. (Follow-up singles “Sorry,” “Get Together” and “Jump” didn’t connect in the same way, but are all excellent.) Madonna would have more successful albums after Confessions on a Dance Floor, but never one universally adored by her fans quite like it. 

As the title suggests, McCartney II is Paul McCartney’s second solo album where he’s not sharing the bill with either Wings or Linda McCartney. And it’s a solo album in the truest sense of the word since he plays every single instrument and wrote every song. There’s an argument to be made that this should count as his second record, and 1997’s Flaming Pie is the tenth. But we’re not doing that. Wings may have been a band, but Paul basically wrote all the songs. And some of the albums were even credited to “Paul McCartney and Wings.” It’s not quite a Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band situation, but it’s close enough that we’re considering Wings albums the equivalent of Paul McCarntey solo albums. By that logic, Paul McCartney II is his tenth record. And it’s a great one. He gets super experimental and churns out killer New Wave songs like “Coming Up” and “Temporary Secretary.” The entire record doesn’t quite stand up to those two tracks, but it’s still fun all the way through. 

At the peak of Covid in 2020, Taylor Swift stunned fans by dropping two stark, stripped-down albums, Folklore and Evermore, devoid of any “Shake It Off” or “Cruel Summer”-style pop anthems. Two years later, shortly after telling the world her next album was imminent at the MTV VMAs, she shared the details online: “This is a collection of music written in the middle of the night,” she said, “a journey through terrors and sweet dreams.” Midnights wasn’t a third album in the Folklore trilogy, but it also wasn’t a return to the joyful pop of 1989. It was instead a middle ground that exposed some of her greatest fears and vulnerabilities as she navigated a romance on the verge of fizzling out. The entire album dropped prior to the release of any singles, forcing the world to digest it all at once. And in a bonus surprise, she released seven more bonus songs just three hours later. “But both halves of the album are essential,” wrote Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield. “It all adds up to the mastermind’s ultimate power move. Midnights sounds nothing like Folklore/Evermore — no banjos, no willows, no fuzzy sweaters. Yet it still feels intimately connected.”

When Genesis decided to take an extended break after the conclusion of their 1978 tour, Phil Collins came home to an empty house and a broken marriage. With the help of a synthesizer and brand new Roland CR-78 drum machine, he began writing songs as a means to vent his anger and heartbreak. Some of the tracks, including “In The Air Tonight,” were destined for his debut solo LP, Face Value. But another batch went to Genesis for Duke, their first album of the Eighties. And even though hardcore Seventies prog fans recoiled at their use of drum machines and the relative brevity of the songs, radio embraced “Turn It On Again” and “Misunderstanding.” But that doesn’t mean Genesis had completely turned their backs on their past. The extended “Duke” suite at the end of the record is as progressive as anything on Foxtrot or The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, albeit with a bright Eighties sheen. This is the album that forever moved Genesis into basketball arenas, and the last one before “In The Air Tonight” hit and their one-time drummer transformed into a superstar. 

There are not many acts on this list who reached the ten album mark in a mere three years. But the Beach Boys were red hot in the early years of their career, capable of releasing hit singles practically at will, and their label Capitol had a voracious appetite for new product. That’s why they demanded a new album for the 1965 holiday season even though the Beach Boys had already released two albums that year, and bandleader Brian Wilson was in the early stages of plotting out Pet Sounds. To appease the label and buy himself some time, Wilson booked time at Western studio, and basically staged a hootenanny where the group tackled Beatles songs (“You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away,” “Tell Me Why,” “I Should Have Known Better”), golden oldies (“Mountain of Love” by Harold Dorman, “Devoted To You” by the Everly Brothers), and a very memorable take on “Barbara Ann” by the doo-wop group the Regents, which became yet another Beach Boys smash. It’s a remarkably loose and light album with party chatter and jokes between every song. For a multitude of reasons, they’d never sound this carefree again. 

In the early Eighties, Aerosmith were headed towards oblivion. Steven Tyler was a hopeless drug addict, guitarists Joe Perry and Brad Whitford were out of the band, and their new albums were selling about as well as the latest offerings by Thin Lizzy and Grand Funk Railroad. But they hit a winning streak in the middle of the decade thanks to Run DMC and Rick Rubin turning “Walk This Way” into an unlikely rock/rap crossover hit. They took that momentum into the studio, acquiesced to label demands they use outside songwriters, and emerged with the hit album Permanent Vacation. Two years later, they crafted an even bigger one with Pump thanks to hit singles “Janie’s Got a Gun,” “Love in An Elevator,” “What It Takes” and “The Other Side.” If you were anywhere near MTV or FM radio in 1989, you know those songs quite well. They represent the pinnacle of one of the most impressive comebacks in rock history.  

In the early Eighties, Elvis Costello and his longtime band the Attractions alienated many longtime fans with albums like Punch The Clock and Goodbye Cruel World that traced the musical trends of the time and felt halfhearted, at best. But a stripped-down acoustic tour with T-Bone Burnett in 1985 where they billed themselves as the Coward Brothers reignited his creativity, and inspired him to cut an album with Burnett where he ditched any attempt to sound current along with his longtime pseudonym. King of America is credited to “The Costello Show featuring the Attractions and Confederates,” and even lists his real name, Declan MacManus, in the credits. But the songs are classic Elvis Costello, including “Brilliant Mistake,” “Indoor Fireworks,” and “American Without Tears,” and they easily stand up to his best works from the Seventies.

Shakedown Street is often called the Grateful Dead’s “disco” album, but that’s way too simplistic, and the truth is even stranger. Produced by Little Feat’s Lowell George just one year before his untimely death, Shakedown Street is a stylistic hodgepodge that attempted to simultaneously appease Arista head Clive Davis by giving them a hit, modernize their sound, please longtime fans, and further incorporate singer Donna Jean Godchaux, who joined the band in 1972. Not everyone was impressed. “Shakedown Street meanders mercilessly, and its indulgences wind up overwhelming the album as a whole,” writes All Music critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine. “And there isn’t just one kind of indulgence here; there’s a plethora of them, ranging from the disco pulse of the title track to the fuzziness of the two songs sung by Donna Jean. This can make Shakedown Street a bit of a difficult, dated listen.” On the other hand, it’s a fascinating document of a time, and it’s hard to hate an album that contains both “Shakedown Street” and “Fire on the Mountain.”

According to rock lore, the Elvis Presley movies of the Sixties are unwatchable, and their soundtracks are simply embarrassments. And while it’s true that Clambake, Harum Scarum, Spinout, and many of the other movies are unfortunate artifacts of their time with few redeeming qualities, Elvis did occasionally create something of real value like Viva Las Vegas or Blue Hawaii. The latter has a killer soundtrack that gave the world “Can’t Help Falling In Love With You,” which was a worldwide hit and holds the record today for his most streamed song. The Blue Hawaii soundtrack is also the home to “Island of Love,” “Moonlight Swim,” and several others that are revered by Presley aficionados. The quality of the movies and their soundtracks would dip as the decade wore on, but Blue Hawaii is an overlooked classic.

Bob Seger’s early catalog is a confusing mess since much of it has been out of print for decades, and he released albums as a solo artist, the Bob Seger System, and Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. But when you assemble it all together, it’s clear that Stranger in Town is his tenth album by any fair count. (That said, Seger wishes he could remove the Bob Seger System’s 1969 LP Noah from the face of the planet since his label had the insane idea that guitarist Tom Neme should be pushed to the forefron,t and write and sing half the songs.) Stranger In Town arrived in 1978, just a couple of years after Live Bullet and Night Moves turned Seger into a superstar after of years of toiling in semi-obscurity. It’s packed with hits like “Hollywood Nights,” “Still The Same,” “Old time Rock and Roll,” and “We’ve Got Tonite” that have been a constant presence on classic rock radio since the format was created. This is Seger at the zenith of his powers. Many artists on this list got to the point after just one or two albums. For Seger, it took ten. But it was worth the wait. (Now he just needs to get around to reissuing all of the early albums. It’s madness that they remain impossible to find.)

The conventional wisdom around U2 at the turn of the millennium was that they were a great band of the Eighties and early Nineties who lost their way with the sonic experimentations of Pop and their Passengers spinoff project. It was now a time of Korn, Blink-182, the Backstreet Boys, and Britney Spears, and there was simply no room for a bunch of Irish dudes in their forties who played Live Aid and formed during the Ford administration. And then they dropped “Beautiful Day.” The soaring ballad flew up the charts all across the globe, shortly before they released their back-to-basics LP All That You Can’t Leave Behind. It’s packed with tunes like “Elevation,” “Kite,” “Stuck in a Moment You Can’t Get Out of” and “Walk On” that stir up memories of their best Eighties work without being even remotely derivative or retro. Somehow or another, they found a way to be U2 in the 2000s. It was the start of an entirely new chapter in their sage that few people saw coming.

If the Flaming Lips broke up in 1998, they’d go down as that weirdo band from Oklahoma who had a fluke hit with “She Don’t Use Jelly,” performed on Beverly Hills: 90210, and released a bunch of psychedelic alt-rock albums that never connected with a mass audience. But they hit an entirely new gear of creativity and pop craftsmanship on 1999’s The Soft Bulletin, and stayed there for the 2002 follow-up, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. In an extremely loose sense, it’s a concept album about a battle between a young woman named Yoshimi and evil robots “programmed to destroy.” But the concept is abandoned after just four songs, and the album instead becomes a meditation on life, love, loss, and the preciousness of time. This is all summed up on the anthemic “Do You Realize??” where Lips frontman Wayne Coyne sings “Do you realize/That everyone you know someday will die?” and somehow makes it sound like a joyful observation. 

John Lennon’s solo catalog presents three challenges when trying to determine a proper count: 1968’s Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, 1969’s Unfinished Music No. 2: Life With the Lions, and 1969’s Wedding Album. These are the three under-the-radar, audio-verite albums he created with Yoko Ono in the early days of their relationship. He was one of the most famous men on the planet when these hit, but they barely charted due to limited distribution and their wild uncommerciality. That’s why John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band was greeted as his solo debut in 1970. But we can’t find a legit argument for erasing the three prior albums from the count. One might argue we should since Ono receives equal billing, but the same is true of Some Time in New York City and Double Fantasy. And those are widely seen as part of Lennon’s solo catalog. By that count, Double Fantasy is his tenth album. It’s also the last album he created in his lifetime, and the first he made after a five-year break. “(Just Like) Starting Over,” “Woman,” and “Watching The Wheels” are the best songs he’d written since the early Seventies, and a glimpse into a future that never happened due to the actions of a deranged gunman who killed Lennon shortly after asking him to sign a copy of Double Fantasy.

Fleetwood Mac didn’t form in 1975 and this isn’t their first record. But it represents a year zero for many fans since it marked the introduction of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham, and a goodbye to the band’s blues-rock roots and everything that came before. Leadoff singles “Over My Head” and “Warm Ways” teased the band’s new direction, but it was the third single, “Rhiannon,” that finally introduced Nicks to the world. It became their biggest single up to that point, and helped the album hit Number One on the Billboard 200. Amazingly, the album’s classic centerpiece, “Landslide,” wasn’t released as a single, even though it’s become one of the group’s most enduring songs. (Forgive Rolling Stone’s Bud Scoppa for not fully recognizing her accomplishments in his original review of the album: “Compared to McVie’s, her singing seems callow and mannered, especially on ‘Landslide,’ where she sounds lost and out of place – although to be fair, this is more a problem of context than of absolute quality. Her ‘Rhiannon,’ colored by Buckingham’s Kirwan-style guitar, works a little better.”)

Pink Floyd were a mere decade into their recording career when Animals hit in 1977, but the Piper at the Gates of Dawn days must have felt like a lifetime ago. During that time they hired David Gilmour, parted ways with Syd Barrett, moved away from the psychedelic scene, experimented with art rock, and became successful on a wild, grandiose scale thanks to Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here. Roger Waters was the primary songwriter that moved them into stadiums, though he had considerable help from Gilmour. On Animals, however, he essentially did it alone, crafting a dark album about the grimness of humanity – we’re all apparently either dogs, sheep or pigs – that didn’t have a single song suitable for the radio. That’s why it underwhelmed some fans back in 1977, but time has been very kind to Animals. It’s now seen as a bold, uncompromising statement that works that speaks to every political era, especially right now.

George Clinton cut records with his pioneering funk rock band Funkadelic at an astonishing clip throughout the Seventies, but they rarely connected with mainstream audiences. That changed in 1978 when One Nation Under a Groove – a wild concoction of funk, R&B and even prog that could only come from the mind of George Clinton – landed in stores. “Who Says a Funk Band Can’t Play Rock?!” is a bold statement of purpose (“We’re gonna play some funk so loud/We’re gonna rock ‘n’ roll the crowd”), while “One Nation Under a Groove” became a sensation at discos, and their first single to sell a million copies. The party ended for Funkadelic in the early Eighties, and One Nation Under a Groove has been out of print for years (it isn’t even available on Spotify), but true funk fans know its a high water mark for the entire movement.

Merle Haggard was at the absolute pinnacle of his powers when he cut 1969’s A Portrait of Merle Haggard, which was his tenth record in a mere four years. The highlights are “Hungry Eyes,” “Silver Wings,” and “Working Man Blues” – inarguably three of the best works of Haggard’s long career, if not the entire history of country music – but there isn’t a weak moment here, including mournful covers of the George Jones hit “She Thinks I Still Care” and Leon Payne’s “I Die Ten Thousand Times a Day.” The album hit weeks after Woodstock when the music press was fixated on Jimi Hendrix, CSNY, the Grateful Dead, CCR, and other rock acts. It overshadowed the stunning country music happening at the same time, even though Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline arrived months earlier. And speaking of Dylan, he paid Haggard the ultimate compliment decades later when he wrote a song called “Working Man’s Blues #2.” When Bob Dylan is writing sequels to your songs you know you’ve done something right.

Aretha Franklin’s recording career can be divided into two very distinct eras: everything that came prior to 1967’s I Never Loved a Man The Way I Love You, and everything that came after. Prior to the album, Franklin was languishing on Columbia records and churning out albums of jazz standards that failed to utilize her vast talents. At the urging of producer Jerry Wexler, she signed with Atlantic, and set up shop at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Backed by excellent musicians like pianist pianist Spooner Oldham, guitarist Chips Moman, and saxophonist King Curtis, Franklin put jazz standards aside, and instead fused together gospel and R&B on Otis Redding’s “Respect,” Ronnie Shannon’s “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You),” and Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.” It was the sound she’d been seeking out her entire life. The album was an instant hit that finally catapulted Franklin to her rightful place in the music world. From this point on, she was a legend. 

We won’t waste time arguing that Rust Never Sleeps is an album worthy of inclusion on this list. The track list (“Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black),” “Powderfiner,” “Sedan Delivery,” “Thrasher”) speaks for itself. The question becomes whether or not this should count for the list since seven of the nine songs were recorded at various concerts in 1978, even though none of them had been released before. He did something very similar for Time Fades Away back in 1973, but we’re not counting that as a proper LP since it’s a live album. The difference is that Young removed nearly all the audience sounds from Rust Never Sleeps, overdubbed additional instrumentation on top of some of the songs taped on concert stages, and included two studio tracks. It was also marketed and received as a new studio album, not a live album. It’s somewhat of a close call, but we feel that this just barely falls over the line from live album to studio album. Good people can disagree on this. And if you want to call Hawks and Doves his 10th album, you have a decent case. But it’s a huge decline in quality from Rust Never Sleeps, and would be much lower on this list.

The commentary surrounding Station to Station usually revolves around David Bowie’s mental state and drug intake around the time he was recording it. And while he was indeed doing enough coke to make Tony Montana squirm, which in turn led to some deeply unfortunate public utterances (“I believe very strongly in fascism. Adolf Hitler was one of the first rock stars.”), this often overshadows the incandescently brilliant music on the album. Working with a one-off all-star crew that included E Street Band keyboardist Roy Bittan, on loan from the Born to Run tour, guitarists Earl Slick and Carlos Alomar, drummer Dennis Davis, and bassist George Murray, Bowie crafted catchy pop tunes like “Golden Years,” “TVC15,” lush ballads like “World on a Wing,” and a devastating take on the Fifties pop standard “Wild Is the Wind” that stands up to renditions by Johnny Mathis and Nina Simone. The centerpiece of the album, however, is the trippy, ten-minute title track where Bowie tries to convince us that what we’re hearing isn’t the “side effects of the cocaine.” He wouldn’t write another song on this grand scale until “Blackstar,” just a few months before he died.

This issue with the Beatles isn’t whether or not their tenth album deserves a spot on this list. There’s no such thing as a bad or underwhelming Beatles record. The issue is how exactly to count their releases. For starters, with apologies to every American boomer with fond memories of The Beatles’ Second Album and Beatles ‘65, we’re going with the U.K. releases. Do the math on those records is pretty easy until we reach Magical Mystery Tour, which has been labelled a “double EP” in England and not a proper LP. We’re calling bullshit on that. The U.K. Magical Mystery Tour has 19 minutes of new Beatles music and 6 new songs. Yellow Submarine is considered a proper record with just 15 minutes of new Beatles music and 4 new songs. It makes no sense to call Yellow Submarine a proper Beatles album, and not Magical Mystery Tour. The good people of Wikipedia might consider Yellow Submarine the 10th Beatles record, but we do not. It’s The White Album. 

It wouldn’t be crazily out of line to consider Wildflowers the second Tom Petty solo record, and call Echo the tenth Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers album. But we’re not separating Neil Young from Neil Young and Crazy Horse, Bob Seger from the Silver Bullet Band, or Elvis Costello from Elvis Costello and the Attractions. In each case, the bandleader wrote and sang nearly all of the songs, and used several backing bands along the way. It makes the most sense to see the albums as a continuum and lump them all together. With that said, Wildflowers is an undisputed masterpiece and quite possibly the greatest achievement of Tom Petty’s recording career. That’s true not only because of hits like “You Wreck Me,” “It’s Good to Be King” and “You Don’t Know How It Feels,” but also deep cuts like “Don’t Fade on Me,” “To Find a Friend” and the sublime “Crawling Back To Me.” At a time when most Seventies stars were coasting on old glories, Petty was soaring to new heights.

If we stick to Beatles rules and only count the U.K. releases, Exile On Main Street is the Stones 10th album. But that means discounting 12X5 and December’s Children, and the 1967 compilation Flowers, even if they’re treated as canonical albums by the band’s U.S. label ABKO, and feel far more credible than Beatles ‘65 and other US Beatles LPs. For the sake of consistency, we’re counting Exile on this list. It should be noted, however, that RS contributing editor and Stones authority Rob Sheffield dissents, and sees Beggars Banquet as the 10th, and Exile as the 13th. He makes a strong case for the reasons stated above. Fortunately, Exile and Beggars Banquet are arguably the Stones two best albums. Had we gone the other way with this list, they still would have topped it.