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These 27 albums changed the world – how many have you heard?
From Broadway cast recordings to K-pop, the blues to Britpop, Jonathan Wright tells the stories behind the LPs that have helped shape history
- Jonathan Wright
Published: November 15, 2026 at 3:30 PM
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It wasn’t until the 1890s that German-American inventor Emil Berliner unleashed the first shellac-based discs on the market. An era when you had to go out to hear music or play an instrument or sing yourself, either solo or with friends, ended. As the 20th century progressed and costs came down, it was possible to listen to recordings that captured moments in time.
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But these discs could only hold a song or two on each side. They were noisy when you played them back. Then, in 1948, Columbia Records began selling LPs. Made of black vinyl, these ‘microgroove’ marvels could hold 20–25 minutes of music. The age of the LP had begun.
Its demise has often been predicted in subsequent years, most recently because of the advent of downloads and streaming. Nevertheless, the album format endures, and today’s self-aware pop artists work as hard as any prog rocker from the 1970s to craft collections that show their art in its best light.
And sometimes in this creative process, as the 27 selections here prove in their different ways, the resulting albums tell us much about the history of the times in which they were created…
Oklahoma! was released across six 78-RPM discs, demonstrating the growing US appetite for original Broadway cast recordings
1. Selections from the Theatre Guild musical play Oklahoma!
Original Broadway cast recording (1943)
In 1948, Columbia Records first began releasing 12-inch LPs that played at 33 1/3 RPM. Running to 20 minutes of audio a side, this technological and sonic breakthrough massively changed how people could access music at home. The album age had arrived and there was pent-up demand.
For evidence, go back to 1943, when Decca had the bright idea of releasing a cast recording of that year’s smash musical on Broadway, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! With 12 songs split over six 78-RPM discs, it took patience to play, but the release proved there was a market for ‘original cast’ recordings in the US.
The King Cole Trio’s debut became the first number-one album on Billboard’s new Best-Selling Popular Record Albums chart in 1945 | Credit: Trio Collins
2. The King Cole Trio
The King Cole Trio (1944)
Another key pre-LP development was Billboard launching its Best-Selling Popular Record Albums chart in 1945. This tracked sales of albums that, with their heavy outer covers to protect multiple 10-inch discs, looked a little like photo books.
In a top 10 based on sales, the first album to reach number one was the debut from the band fronted by jazz singer and pianist Nat King Cole.
While some early chart toppers, such as Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, had a chance to craft collections specifically for the LP age, others weren’t so lucky. In May 1945, Glenn Miller, a posthumously released compilation by the bandleader and his orchestra, topped the charts.
It may not have troubled the mainstream charts, but Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue is among the best-selling jazz albums of all time, with more than 6 million copies sold worldwide | Credit: Sony Music
3. Kind of Blue
Miles Davis (1959)
By May 1956, when Elvis Presley’s self-titled debut topped the charts, the LP was an established format for albums. But if The King was recording short songs that you could imagine being released on collections of 78-RPM discs, others used the LP to stretch out and experiment.
One such artist was trumpeter and bandleader Miles Davis, whose five-track Kind of Blue saw him honing the concept of modal jazz. This gave players, including saxophonist John Coltrane, a set of scales that helped determine the melodies of their improvisations.
It didn’t trouble the mainstream charts, but the thing with the greatest LPs is their longevity. To date, Kind of Blue has sold at least 6 million copies worldwide.
The Rolling Stones became global stars with the release of their self-titled debut album, which bore the helpful subtitle England’s Newest Hit Makers for its US edition | Credit: Record Mecca
4. The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones (1964)
The growth in LP catalogues meant people could hear music from around the world. But in a pre-digital age, many albums were difficult to source and the mere fact of their ownership could suggest a kindred spirit.
In 1961, at Dartford railway station, Mick Jagger met a childhood friend he hadn’t seen for years, Keith Richards. Jagger was carrying albums by Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters, Richards his guitar, and a musical partnership was born.
By 1964, The Rolling Stones were pop stars and, again emphasising the importance of the LP, were able to export the blues back to America with their debut album, subtitled England’s Newest Hit Makers for the US market.
Highway 61 Revisited cemented Bob Dylan’s embrace of electric rock – despite protests from sections of his fanbase
5. Highway 61 Revisited
Bob Dylan (1965)
By the middle of the 1960s, the rock album was developing into a distinct art form. And despite sections of his audience howling their protest at their hero picking up an electric guitar, Bob Dylan wanted in.
Recorded in New York in the summer of 1965, Highway 61 Revisited found His Bobness recording with a band featuring the likes of blues player Mike Bloomfield. The lead single from the LP, ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, with its distinctive off-the-beat Hammond organ riff improvised by Al Kooper, was a statement of intent.
Not content with being the voice of his generation, Dylan had found a new mode of expression – and his lyrical barbs were sharper and more personal than ever.
I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You made Aretha Franklin a soul star – and transformed Otis Redding’s ‘Respect’ into a feminist anthem
6. I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You
Aretha Franklin (1967)
Aretha the soul legend took a lot of years to find focus. Initially signed to Columbia Records, she struggled for hits or even to find the right songs. Legendary A&R man John Hammond later said the label didn’t fully understand how Franklin needed material that reflected her gospel background.
Enter producer Jerry Wexler, who persuaded Franklin to sign for Atlantic. Despite tensions during a first recording session at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, her debut LP for the label captured Franklin’s power and range.
Sessions for I Never Loved spawned two hits, ‘I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)’ and a righteous reframing of Otis Redding’s ‘Respect’. Aretha the civil rights activist and feminist icon came into view.
Widely banned and initially a poor seller, The Velvet Underground & Nico nevertheless became one of the most influential albums of its era | Credit: Courtesy of Bonhams
7. The Velvet Underground & Nico
The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)
Not everyone wanted to go to San Francisco in 1967. In New York, The Velvet Underground were making something very different from similar countercultural ingredients to those that played into hippiedom, and in doing so greatly widened the range of subjects rock musicians could talk about.
Hanging out at Andy Warhol’s Factory, Lou Reed and co sang about sadomasochism, seedy drug deals and sordid street life, while their music incorporated avant-garde influences.
The LP was widely banned and sold relatively poorly. And that might have been that except, as Brian Eno later noted, the influence of the LP on the 30,000 people who bought it in the first five years (a figure disputed by music historians) was such that “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band”.
Released at the dawn of the Summer of Love in 1967, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band saw the Fab Four push the limits of what a pop album could be | Credit: Getty Images
8. Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
The Beatles (1967)
Such is the Fab Four’s cultural and historical significance that there are arguments for all but a couple of their LPs to be on this list. So why Pepper? In part because Paul McCartney, having heard Pet Sounds (1966), with its complex harmonies, unusual instrumentation and layering of sounds, thought The Beach Boys’ leader Brian Wilson had upped the ante.
He intended to go further than The Beach Boys. In this competition, the idea the studio itself could be a kind of musical instrument took shape.
Then there’s Pepper’s extraordinary cultural impact. Released on 26 May in the UK and 1 June in the US, it became integral to the soundtrack of the Summer of Love. The Beatles hadn’t just gone from monochrome to colour, they had jumped into psychedelic Technicolor.
How were other artists to compete? The Rolling Stones’ messy and incoherent Their Satanic Majesties Request (1967) underlined how difficult it was for beat bands to reinvent themselves. One band, however, were unfazed.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience added Pepper’s title track to their live set, something McCartney and George Harrison experienced in person when the trio opened with the song at London’s Saville Theatre on 4 June. “I put that down as one of the great honours of my career,” McCartney later noted.
Johnny Cash’s landmark Folsom Prison album put him back in the spotlight and became a blue-collar symbol of rebellion
9. Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison
Johnny Cash (1968)
In 1955, Johnny Cash recorded ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ for Sun Records. While Cash never “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die”, it was one of the songs that cemented his country outlaw image.
In 1968, though, relatively few outside the country music world were much interested in The Man in Black who, over the years, had become pitifully addicted to a cocktail of amphetamines, downers and booze. But Folsom Prison, on which Cash fulfilled a long-held ambition of recording a live LP in a jail, put him back in the spotlight for the right kinds of reasons.
It endures today as a blue-collar counterpoint to artier countercultural rebellions in the 1960s.
Black Sabbath’s 1970 debut is widely regarded as the first true heavy metal album
10. Black Sabbath
Black Sabbath (1970)
“Heavy metal is the folk music of the provinces,” John Peel is widely reputed to have said, although the first person to say this appears to have been the music critic Simon Frith. Whatever, it’s a remark that captures a truth about how metal, rarely taken seriously, never really goes away.
Today, it’s the music of struggling towns and the rust belt. In which context, Black Sabbath’s debut, heavy industry rendered in musical form and the first true metal album, has a claim on being one of the most influential LPs ever released.
The outpouring of grief that followed the 2025 death of Ozzy Osbourne, the stumblebum’s stumblebum yet vulnerable and sweet, confirmed the band’s unlikely international treasure status.
Joni Mitchell’s Blue captured the unease of the early 1970s, as the optimism of 1960s counterculture began to fade
11. Blue
Joni Mitchell (1971)
If 1967 has retrospectively become identified with the Summer of Love, 1968 was a year when things turned visibly nasty. In May that year, Paris was gripped by protests, strikes and civil unrest against conditions at the country’s universities and repression under the government led by Charles de Gaulle.
The 1970s, the decade of oil shocks and the end of the post-war settlement, was on the horizon. Blue is a song cycle rooted in Canadian singer Joni Mitchell’s own life yet simultaneously captures the edginess of changing times. Notably on the title track, which comments on the destructiveness of the counterculture: “Acid, booze and ass/Needles, guns and grass/Lots of laughs, lots of laughs.”
Released in the same year as Marvin Gaye’s era-defining What’s Going On, Isaac Hayes’s Shaft helped redefine soul and R&B for a new decade | Credit: Alamy
12. Shaft
Isaac Hayes (1971)
In 1971, Marvin Gaye released his classic state-of-the-nation protest album, What’s Going On (Motown). That same year, songwriter and producer Isaac Hayes, one of the key figures at soul label Stax, received a commission to score a blaxploitation film about an inner-city private investigator called John Shaft.
Both LPs were, in their different ways, as influential as each other, reframing soul and R&B for the 1970s. While What’s Going On foregrounded social protest, Shaft was the propulsive soundtrack to an action flick that gave actor Richard Roundtree a then rare opportunity to portray a black man who was bold, confident and in control of his own destiny.
Ziggy Stardust helped bring queer culture into the musical mainstream – and established David Bowie as a glam rock icon | Credit: Alamy
13. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
David Bowie (1972)
In July 1972, David Bowie appeared on Top of the Pops with the lead single from his Ziggy Stardust LP. Wearing a rainbow jumpsuit, he draped his arm around guitarist Mick Ronson and, pointing at the camera, sang the line, “I had to phone someone so I picked on you”, as a kind of universal call to arms.
Here was glam rock that, in an arch and sophisticated fashion, leaned into its own campness rather than merely sprinkled glitter over men who looked like brickies. Bowie himself was an androgynous figure who had, in January, outed himself as “gay”. All this was hugely daring, even dangerous, for its time. The mainstreaming of queer culture had begun.
The Dark Side of the Moon captured the unease of the early 1970s, exploring themes such as greed and alienation | Credit: Getty Images
14. The Dark Side of the Moon
Pink Floyd (1973)
For anyone not around at the time and who wants to discover what it felt like to live in Britain as the postwar settlement broke down, The Dark Side of the Moon should be required listening.
Dealing with such themes as alienation, greed, death and insanity, it most of all conveyed a sense of a nation gripped by a deep malaise. As Time put it by mapping out the limits of what you might call the ingrained stoicism of the stiff upper lip: “Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.”
The LP sounded glorious too, a testament in this case to the brilliance of Abbey Road staff engineer Alan Parsons, but which heralded an era when bands spent vast sums on recording.
Catch a Fire helped The Wailers – and reggae – reach a new international audience | Credit: Alamy
15. Catch a Fire
The Wailers (1973)
Born in London but raised in Jamaica, Island Records boss Chris Blackwell had long been looking for an artist who could popularise reggae in the wider world. He found him in Bob Marley.
Catch a Fire was the band’s fifth LP, recorded in Kingston in 1972. The tapes were then flown to London, where Blackwell remixed them, adding in overdubs, including guitar parts from Wayne Perkins, a veteran of Muscle Shoals, a studio synonymous with southern soul. It worked.
The Wailers began to make commercial inroads outside the Caribbean. Catch a Fire was deeply political, yet also found space for tracks such as the joyful ‘Stir it Up’.
A paean to the joys of motorway driving, Kraftwerk’s Autobahn became an unlikely international triumph for the West German band
16. Autobahn
Kraftwerk (1974)
Now recognised as pioneers of electronic music, Düsseldorf-based Kraftwerk were, in 1974, at best a cult proposition even in their native West Germany. Autobahn, the band’s fourth LP, changed all this when its title track, a paean to the joys of motorway driving, unexpectedly became an international hit.
It probably helped that the German word for ‘drive’ in the lyrics, fahren, sounded like ‘fun’, which gave the track a kind of Beach Boys-like innocence to balance the strangeness of its instrumentation.
A generation of future synthpop stars were hugely impressed at this evidence of Germany finding its voice culturally.
The Sex Pistols channelled working-class anger into their controversial 1977 debut – and made punk impossible to ignore
17. Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols
Sex Pistols (1977)
By the time their debut album was released in October 1977, the Sex Pistols were collectively exhausted by their own infamy as the world’s biggest punk band.
Its packaging hardly helped deflect attention as the police in Nottingham visited a Virgin record store to warn about the possibility of being prosecuted under the 1889 Indecent Advertisements Act for having the balls to display the LP cover in its window.
Get past the filth and the fury that always surrounded the Pistols, though, and the LP itself is extraordinary. If the middle-class Britain Pink Floyd described was tired and wan, the working-class Britain the Pistols inhabited was livid over the state of things. An LP that seems to anticipate the imminent demise of the postwar settlement.
Released in 1982, Michael Jackson’s Thriller became a global phenomenon – and remains the best-selling album of all time, more than four decades later | Credit: Alamy
18. Thriller
Michael Jackson (1982)
The numbers that surround Michael Jackson’s most successful album are boggling. Co-produced by the perfectionist duo of Jackson and Quincy Jones, it cost $750,000 to record, equivalent to $2.5 million today. It handsomely repaid this investment.
Seven of its nine tracks made the US Top 10 when released as singles. It remains the best-selling album of all time, with sales in excess of 70 million copies.
Jackson, a 20-something black man who worried his star might fade in the wake of disco, instead became ‘the King of Pop’ whose videos are widely credited with breaking what was perceived as an unofficial colour bar on MTV. Whatever you make of what happened next, his cultural influence endures.
Raising Hell became hip-hop’s first multiple-platinum album, helping bring the genre into the mainstream
19. Raising hell
Run-D.M.C. (1986)
By 1985, when Run-D.M.C. began work on their third LP, Raising Hell, the trio had already enjoyed two successful albums.
Working with producers Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin, the band were about to take hip-hop into the mainstream with the genre’s first multiple-platinum and Grammy-nominated LP.
Helping it along its way was ‘Walk This Way’, a collaboration with Aerosmith that was a huge hit and rescued the rockers’ careers despite, it seems, nobody involved really thinking it was going to be a single.
Run-D.M.C.’s success in the 1980s paved the way for others, helping to launch an era that saw hip-hop culture go global.
Tracy Chapman’s 1988 debut album soared up the charts following her performance of ‘Fast Car’ at a Nelson Mandela birthday concert
20. Tracy Chapman
Tracy Chapman (1988)
Sometimes, a career turns on a single performance. In June 1988, Tracy Chapman, having already played earlier in the day at a concert to honour Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday, returned to the stage at Wembley Stadium to perform again after Stevie Wonder hit technical difficulties.
With the TV cameras looking on, she connected and her debut album began to ascend the charts. Here was a new kind of socially conscious singer-songwriter, whose ‘Fast Car’ told a story of a young woman, a member of the precariat, greeting disappointment and hardship with resilience.
When country star Luke Combs covered the song in 2023, Chapman became the first black songwriter to win a CMA Award for song of the year.
Nirvana’s Nevermind made the band global stars – while Kurt Cobain’s vulnerability helped open up “space for artists to discuss mental health” | Credit: Alamy
21. Nevermind
Nirvana (1991)
The beginning of 1991 found Seattle-based trio Nirvana unhappy with life on the indie label Sub Pop. Signing to DGC, a subsidiary of Geffen, was a way to get more money and continue what had hitherto been a slow build towards success.
Instead, the lead single from Nevermind, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, became a slacker anthem, Nirvana the world’s biggest band and frontman Kurt Cobain an unwilling spokesman for Gen X.
For Cobain, subject to depression and stomach pains, a heroin addict and someone who genuinely valued authenticity, this was arguably a personal disaster. In 1994, he committed suicide. The work he left behind allied vulnerability to dynamic hard rock in a way that was new and, sadly too late for Cobain himself, opened up space for other artists to discuss mental health.
Released three years before Tony Blair’s 1997 general election victory, Parklife captured the optimism of mid-1990s Britain
22. Parklife
Blur (1994)
In July 1997, new prime minister Tony Blair threw a drinks bash at 10 Downing Street. Well, a new era of New Labour hegemony had begun, had it not? That was the hope, anyway.
Those invited to the peak-Cool Britannia party included Britpop luminaries Noel Gallagher of Oasis and Damon Albarn of Blur. Gallagher showed up and was pictured meeting Blair. Albarn, fearing political manipulation, declined the invitation. Retrospectively, Albarn’s decision seems smart. Gallagher later regretted his decision.
In addition, Blur’s Parklife both celebrated and critiqued British life in all its mucky and contradictory glory, helping to define the upbeat mood of the mid-1990s. Somehow, Albarn’s absence from the party emphasised how this optimism preceded Blair’s election rather than grew from it.
Spice helped turn ‘girl power’ into a global cultural phenomenon – one that continues to influence pop artists today
23. Spice
Spice Girls (1996)
Listen to the Spice Girls’ debut single, ‘Wannabe’, without understanding who’s singing it and it’s easy to think it’s a callout to a potential lover. Which it is. But the key lines have nothing to do with romance.
“If you wanna be my lover/You gotta get with my friends,” sing the Spice Girls, a line that, when sung by five young women you could easily imagine meeting on a local high street, instantly connected with teenage girls – and boys.
Spicemania followed and, for all they were a ‘manufactured’ pop band, Baby, Ginger, Posh, Scary and Sporty always seemed completely themselves. ‘Girl power’ was culturally significant. Today’s pop stars, who insist upon control of their own careers, owe them a debt.
Amy Winehouse’s second album drew on 1960s soul and R&B while still sounding unmistakably contemporary
24. Back to Black
Amy Winehouse (2006)
We live, noted the music critic Paul Morley in a 2003 article lamenting the demise of the single as a physical object, in a world “where everything happens at once”. In the future, he thought, when accessing music: “People will simply collect lists.”
Despite the rise in popularity in physical media, he’s in many respects been proved correct. The charts used to be key in defining what songs people listened to. Today, via music streaming services, you can basically listen to what you like.
In cultural-historical terms, this has had a huge effect as musicians are easily able to magpie-pick elements of music from the past. Drawing heavily on 1960s soul and girl-group R&B in its songwriting yet sounding utterly contemporary, Amy Winehouse’s second LP was a case in point.
Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly confronted racial inequality and discrimination, continuing a long tradition of socially conscious music
25. To Pimp a Butterfly
Kendrick Lamar (2015)
By 2015, hip-hop had a more than 40-year history behind it. Where could it go next? Californian rapper Kendrick Lamar had some ideas. So varied were its samples that his third album could be heard almost as a history of black American music.
After Lamar visited sites associated with apartheid in South Africa, including Nelson Mandela’s jail cell on Robben Island, it dealt with racial inequality and institutional discrimination.
Here was an LP that nodded to the past, including the socially conscious soul albums of the 1970s, but also looked ahead. It changed the cultural landscape in ways that are still playing out.
To quote jazz saxophonist Kamasi Washington, who contributed to the LP: “[Its success] meant that intellectually stimulating music doesn’t have to be underground. It didn’t just change the music, it changed the audience.”
BTS’s third album, Love Yourself: Tear, brought K-pop to a new global audience – and became the genre’s first album to top the Billboard 200
26. Love Yourself: Tear
BTS (2018)
The 21st century has seen pop become a genuinely global business. A key moment in this cultural shift arrived in May 2018 when the third Korean-language studio album by South Korean boy band BTS went to the top of the Billboard 200 in the first week of release. It was the first K-pop album to achieve this feat.
When the band went on hiatus in 2022 so its seven members could complete mandatory military service, it was a global news event. When BTS returned, their status was such that they performed at the World Cup halftime show.
Brat became the soundtrack of summer 2024, infiltrating not only pop culture but the political landscape, too
27. Brat
Charli XCX (2024)
Can an LP be a meme? British singer Charli XCX’s sixth studio album suggested yes. Promoting the LP involved the heavy use of social media and creating a ‘Brat Generator’ website where people could make images with their text in the same simple-black-text-on-green style as the cover.
The viral nature of all this was confirmed when, in the wake of Joe Biden stepping aside as the Democrats’ presidential candidate in July, Charli XCX posted “kamala IS brat” via X.
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The Kamala Harris presidential campaign, ‘Kamala HQ’, updated its banner to mimic the LP cover. The Brat Summer was now in full swing.
Authors
Jonathan Wright
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