Ink Tea Stone Leaf

A place to get the words out

The Album of the Year Parade

We will start today with an unusual premise: that on June 1st, 2024, I had in my personal possession at least one (1) copy of every music album that had ever seen wide release. Whether analog or digital, on disc or mp3, officially purchased or acquired by other, undisclosed means, I could access every last bit of recorded music the world had to offer, not with recourse to an internet connection but from my own private library of sounds. Beginning from this premise, we must all agree that this is extremely rad and that I am something like the greatest music collector of all time. It also puts me in a position to do what many have tried, but few have been truly equipped to achieve: create a definitive list of the greatest works of recorded music by year, stretching from the 1950s to the 2020s.

Unfortunately, the premise is not without faults. The gravest fault is that I can only maintain that it is true by positing that the albums I do not own do not exist. This is a crime against art, but I am willing to commit it for the sake of this premise. In the real world, any list-maker must confront the fact that their experience is limited to the albums they’ve heard, or that they have both the means to hear and the perspective to appreciate on their own terms. Rather than waste my time justifying why my collection is representative of all the Earth’s music most worthy to be included, I thought it would be better to commit to a self-aggrandizing fiction.

(The fact of the matter is that I do not even currently possess all the music I’ve ever had, or wanted to have, in my collection. Sometimes, CDs get lost behind the seat of a car you haven’t seen in twenty years. Sometimes your computer’s hard drive catches on fire and you lose all the cool mp3 files you got from your friends in college. Many incredible albums have lost their place in this definitive historical account by such misfortunes.)

As we return to our premise, a few questions present themselves. First: what is an album? I’ve adopted an ad hoc definition, which I have applied as consistently as I am able: an album is a named package of original musical recordings, made live or in studio by one or more artists, longer than about fifteen minutes. This includes packages traditionally known as EPs and LPs, as well as packages that contain multiple units under a single name (double albums, triple albums, etc). It excludes compilations of songs that are drawn from earlier album releases, though I’ve waffled and included a few that were a mix of new and older material if I thought it made sense to do so. Greatest Hits, Best Of, and other such formulations just don’t make the cut, and neither do recordings of stand-up comedy, spoken word, and other non-musical material.

Second, how are these albums to be placed, year by year? In many cases, albums have been released on different dates in different countries, or re-released years later in “deluxe” or “special” editions with new mixes or altered track lists. My approach has been to assign an album to the year of its earliest commercial release, regardless of which country this release took place in. You’d think this would make it easy and it usually did, but if you apply any rule to a large enough set you’ll find weird edge cases. That, however, is for me to worry about, not the reader.

Third, what makes an album “great?” Philosophers have posed this question on forums and message boards since the dawn of time. It is weighted with matters of aesthetics, semantics, and more than a little too much ideology. For the purposes of this list, each year’s winner must exceed its competitors in the following ways: it is aesthetically appealing to me personally, and I want you to listen to it now.

Finally, just how many albums are there? According to Wikipedia, the concept of a record album was established and refined in the early decades of the 20th century, as companies explored different formats for packaging and selling long selections of music. The first 12 inch vinyl record that played at 33 1/3 revolutions per minute was introduced in 1948. This became the standard “album” format which dominated the record industry from the 1960s, and would continue to loom large in the popular conception of the term “album,” even after the adoption of intangible formats and streaming.

By contrast, according to the inane conceit of my premise, the album sprang into this world fully formed in 1953 with a pair of recordings of classical music, after which the public spent 1954 attempting to catch its collective breath and comprehend the incredible forces that had been unleashed. With the genie having been let out of the bottle, however, albums began to be released with greater frequency and in a wider variety of styles until the year 2023, by which point approximately five hundred and fifty one (551) such entities existed, released at an average rate of 7.87 per year. If any albums have been released in 2024, they remain unknown to science.

Some years have seen more albums than others. In the seventy years of history documented by my music library, one year (1954) is unrepresented by any albums whatsoever, while a handful have only one or two. In twenty of those years, more than ten albums are to be found:

1975, 1994 – 10 albums

2001, 2007, 2008 – 11 albums

2006, 2018 – 12 albums

1968, 1995 – 13 albums

1967, 1972, 1996 – 14 albums

1971 – 15 albums

1969, 2002, 2004, 2005 – 16 albums

1973, 2003 – 17 albums

1970 – 20 albums

These twenty years were incredibly fertile times for album releases, accounting for about 53% of all known albums. Nobody knows for sure why this is so, though it has been speculated that the fact that I was a teenager in the first decade of the 2000’s and my parents were teenagers in the 60’s and 70’s might have something to do with it. I would remind the speculators that correlation does not prove causation.

Whatever the reason, selecting a single album to stand above its cohort for each of these years was obviously a greater than usual challenge, so pay attention to those years, because you have to be pretty good to beat out ten to twenty competitors.

But enough with the math – it’s time for music. Please enjoy this highly scientific, deeply considered and definitive list of the greatest albums of each year for the past seven decades.

There they are – the titans of their respective ages, monuments to musical excellence in a myriad of ways. To better this list would require a much larger sample of albums, something which cannot be done within the bounds of our premise: these are the best of all the albums that exist, which are the albums that are presently in front of me.

If you should wish to second guess my assessments, you can view the master list of albums at this link. Setting aside the premise, if you should find fault in my limited selection of albums by artist, year, or genre, I can only remind you that my old hard drive did in fact explode and there was quite a bit of music on there that I’ve yet to get back.

David Miller's avatar

Posted by:

David Miller

Educator, poet, husband, bird dad.

Leave a comment