Top 100 Greatest Music Albums
by
HoldenM 
As of this edit, it's May of 2026. It's been close to a decade since the last time I gave this a proper revision. Remaking it, I had to work not to overthink whether this or that album needed to be included, how well represented one artist needed to be represented, if I was being too precious about what entries typically make the list and being able to let favorites go for the time being.
The line for this chart used to be "In Progress. Always in progress." And that's true. Yet, I found myself editing this so often it felt like it was losing its meaning. Then, I was paralyzed to canonize new favorites. What I know now, and what has taken an embarrassingly long time to come full circle to, is that this is what the list is for now. I don't want to change it every few weeks or months, but I don't want to wait several years, either. It's just a snapshot. If something isn't on here, maybe it will be later. Maybe I'll grow out of what is here into something else. Most of all, I'll do it as long as it's fun and right.
In progress. Always in progress.
Enjoy!
- Chart updated: 09/10/2026 19:45
- (Created: 03/02/2013 03:49).
- Chart size: 100 albums.
We Have the Facts isn't the first Death Cab for Cutie album I fell in love with. It's not the first I would recommend for newcomers, either. Yet, it's my favorite of theirs, and of every collection of songs. I won't argue it's the "best" or that you're crazy for not liking it; that would be dumb. For me to love it or any other album, it doesn't need to speak to anyone else but me.
While I am aging out of the perspective of mid-20s ennui that We Have the Facts is coming from, many of its observations and feelings still resonate--some more than others. Even when you settle down with a family, there's always more work to do, always something eluding you. You travel the world, friends and significant others are rarely permanent, and you're often left behind. Yet, most hardships resolve, and life goes on. Death Cab couches these ideas in evocative lyrics and intricate melodies with production whose immediacy puts you in the same space as the band. At the right time and right headspace, it's the only place I want to be.
Track picks
1. Title Tracks
3. For What Reason
6. Little Fury Things
7. Company Calls
9. No Joy in Mudville [First added to this chart: 03/02/2013]
There I was, on a beautiful spring day, listening to these vibrant songs, ruminating on love, loss, death, parrots, and so much boxing, knowing in my heart that things were going to change for the better, that I was on my way. And for a brief few months, everything clicked into place (before getting rough). I took another job instead. I directed my first short film (that I'm still proud of). I finished a double album I'd been wanting to make for a few years. When I think of that time in my life, or when I want to give myself a kick in the pants, I throw on Ghosts of the Great Highway, and it's a bright afternoon riding down 500 East, the rest of my life ahead of me.
Track picks
1. Glenn Tipton
2. Carry Me Ohio
5. Floating
8. Duk Koo Kim
10. Pancho Villa [First added to this chart: 04/13/2015]
As I get older, most beloved albums have dulled in their ability to overwhelm me. Even new discoveries rarely hit like they could when I was in my early 20s. Not Disintegration. These songs still engulf me, still haunt me, still bring me to tears. They continue to swallow me like waterfalls pouring from great heights, confounding in their natural awesomeness, and whose flow never thins. I know these songs so well, yet each time I hear them together, I explore a world I'll never see the end of.
Track picks
2. Pictures of You
3. Closedown
6. Lullaby
10. Disintegration
11. Homesick [First added to this chart: 03/02/2013]
Let It Be is their apex, where they are a unified band, where Paul Westerberg has honed his songwriting genius, where addiction has not overtaken Bob Stinson, and where they are willing to take all the help people want to give them. The Replacements have other great albums--it's not hard to have a favorite outside of this one--but Let It Be is a work of joy and longing, whose swaggering attitude balks at authority and stands up for the marginalized. It's fiery and fun and sincere to the bitter end. They are the best, most authentic versions of themselves.
Track picks
1. I Will Dare
2. My Favorite Thing
3. We're Coming Out
5. Androgynous
8. Seen Your Video [First added to this chart: 03/02/2013]
As I played through one world after another, discovering the game's spin on classic stories and characters, it was the place Sufjan Stevens was singing of that enchanted me most. Illinois just southwest of where I lived, only a few hours away, but I liked Stevens version better: a place of remarkable history, both national and personal. There was a land of great curiosity, humor, sadness, terror, and hope. They have aliens, zombies, serial killers, and expressions of love gone awry, but they also have Superman and Abraham Lincoln. I've been to Illinois many times, yet it still exists as this magical, far off place in my mind (in my mind).
Maybe it's the breadth of stories Stevens tells, maybe it's the meticulous layers of instrumentation so perfectly constructed that they never feel dull or cluttered. It's a pastoral that seems to go on forever, and why it still transports me now.
Track picks
1. Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, IL
9. Chicago
10. Casimir Pulaski Day
15. The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!
22. Out of Egypt, into the Great Laugh of Mankind, and I Shake the Dirt from My Sandals as I Run [First added to this chart: 03/02/2013]
As fate would have it, The Hold Steady write exceptional songs, and Finn approaches his downtrodden subjects with the utmost empathy. It's that very hindsight and hyper-literate perspective which allows the band to tell these stories with clarity. These kids are self-destructive, short-sighted, and chaotic. They look for relief in all the wrong places with all the wrong people, and they can't just say what they mean. That doesn't mean their heartbreak and wounded souls are any less deserving of our understanding. They want love and respite like anyone else. When these salves elude us, it's okay to have a little fun.
Track picks
1. Stuck Between Stations
5. First Night
6. Party Pit
7. You Can Make Him Like You
10. Chillout Tent [First added to this chart: 03/02/2013]
Bon Iver, Bon Iver finds Vernon and company emerging from that mythologized cabin where For Emma, Forever Ago and the name under which it was made were born, and blossoming as remnants of a passing season fade. The first sounds we here are of wind rustling metal outdoors. In a couple short minutes, the band booms forth. It's a ferocity that the album never matches again, but that clears the way for everything that follows.
These songs take us from place to place throughout America--some real, some imagined--and bittersweet fragments which linger. The specter of cities we'll never really know and memories that lose their definition never leave us. Through dense, precarious performances, a hazy sheen, and obtuse lyrics, it can be somewhat challenging to gain one's bearings here. But sometimes the feeling or the suggestion of one is all you need. The paradox of abstraction is that losing the exact shape of a thing, or seeing how it exists in a grander tapestry, often offers clarity where there was none.
Track picks
2. Minnesota, WI
3. Holocene
4. Towers
8. Calgary
10. Beth/Rest [First added to this chart: 03/02/2013]
However the band feels about it, their debut LP endures for good reason. These are skilled, but young musicians (Kinsella already part of one emo masterpiece with Cap'n Jazz as a teenager) just writing and recording songs that are exciting to them. It's that vitality and effortless sense of possibility that elevates this beyond beyond melancholy and twinkling guitars. Put on some headphones and throw this on while taking a walk during the fall and you will hear that earnestness in every moment of this flowing with you.
Track picks
1. Never Meant
3. Honestly?
7. I'll See You When We're Both Not So Emotional
8. Stay Home [First added to this chart: 06/20/2015]
At the beginning of Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City, our narrator is praying his dick gets as big as the Eiffel Tower, and at the end, he's pleading to God for salvation. The genius of this record is that the way there is a natural progression. Though we open on a prayer that becomes the emotional climax of this story, it also parallels that, for kids like Kendrick Lamar, their lives are already a foregone conclusion. He is born poor and in a violence place with a predetermined idea of who black boys like him are, so he may as well have fun with it. Talk up a girl, get into trouble with his friends, and rap some silly verses over these songs.
Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City has an elliptical structure mirroring its themes of breaking cycles. It begins and ends in parallel places. It's steeped in West Coast traditions while drawing from southern and east coast sounds, and throwing in samples from the indie darlings of the time. The low key moods and steady beats draw us into Lamar's psychology, his thoughts on what it's like to grow up in Compton, and how giving voice to wanting and chasing more when having opportunities to follow your passion are fewer and far between when you're born with less. Kendrick Lamar did not invent vulnerability in hip-hop, but there's almost no one who bears their soul with has much courage.
Track picks:
2. Bitch, Don't Kill My Vibe
4. The Art of Peer Pressure
5. Money Trees
7. Good Kid
10. Sing About Me/Dying of Thirst [First added to this chart: 03/02/2013]
How does it still sound so modern all these years later? Is it the collage of sounds and dialogue? The gliding textures from David Gilmour and Richard Wright? Is it the stylistic variation? Of course, it's a confluence of all of these elements, taking us on an odyssey through space, time, consciousness, life, and death. Many albums this colorful can be described as restless, but The Dark Side of the Moon is rather curious, probing through the major dimensions of the human experience in grand detail, offering something new as one shifts their perspective.
Track picks
1. Speak to Me/Breathe
3. Time
4. Great Gig in the Sky
7. Any Color You Like
9. Eclipse [First added to this chart: 03/02/2013]
Top 100 Greatest Music Albums composition
| Decade | Albums | % | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1930s | 0 | 0% | |
| 1940s | 0 | 0% | |
| 1950s | 0 | 0% | |
| 1960s | 4 | 4% | |
| 1970s | 3 | 3% | |
| 1980s | 13 | 13% | |
| 1990s | 14 | 14% | |
| 2000s | 40 | 40% | |
| 2010s | 23 | 23% | |
| 2020s | 3 | 3% |
| Artist | Albums | % | |
|---|---|---|---|
|
|
|||
| Death Cab For Cutie | 5 | 5% | |
| The National | 5 | 5% | |
| Radiohead | 3 | 3% | |
| Bon Iver | 2 | 2% | |
| Arcade Fire | 2 | 2% | |
| The Flaming Lips | 2 | 2% | |
| Kendrick Lamar | 2 | 2% | |
| Show all | |||
| Country | Albums | % | |
|---|---|---|---|
|
|
|||
|
65 | 65% | |
|
21 | 21% | |
|
5 | 5% | |
|
2 | 2% | |
|
2 | 2% | |
|
2 | 2% | |
|
2 | 2% | |
| Show all | |||
Top 100 Greatest Music Albums chart changes
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Top 100 Greatest Music Albums ratings
Average Rating = (n ÷ (n + m)) × av + (m ÷ (n + m)) × AVwhere:
av = trimmed mean average rating an item has currently received.
n = number of ratings an item has currently received.
m = minimum number of ratings required for an item to appear in a 'top-rated' chart (currently 10).
AV = the site mean average rating.
Showing latest 3 ratings for this chart. | Show all 145 ratings for this chart.
| Rating | Date updated | Member | Chart ratings | Avg. chart rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ! | 06/02/2026 02:32 | 19 | 100/100 | |
| ! | 06/01/2026 19:40 | 181 | 81/100 | |
| ! | 03/03/2025 14:29 | DrewHamster | 314 | 79/100 |
Rating metrics:
Outliers can be removed when calculating a mean average to dampen the effects of ratings outside the normal distribution. This figure is provided as the trimmed mean. A high standard deviation can be legitimate, but can sometimes indicate 'gaming' is occurring. Consider a simplified example* of an item receiving ratings of 100, 50, & 0. The mean average rating would be 50. However, ratings of 55, 50 & 45 could also result in the same average. The second average might be more trusted because there is more consensus around a particular rating (a lower deviation).
(*In practice, some charts can have several thousand ratings)
This chart is rated in the top 1% of all charts on BestEverAlbums.com. This chart has a Bayesian average rating of 92.8/100, a mean average of 92.9/100, and a trimmed mean (excluding outliers) of 93.2/100. The standard deviation for this chart is 7.6.
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Top 100 Greatest Music Albums comments
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Nice chart. I won't give it a rate, because I feel like I can give it a better one in time.
My only problem is the lack of 60's albums, not sure if you've just not listened to that many, or don't like them. Assuming the former, which I may assume, considering that it's likely that that is the case- I know it is for me, and am still discovering older albums at quite a pace. The only issue is that it's difficult to find what you're looking for in the 60's.
From what I've seen in your chart, though, just a few that you may like (again, assuming you've not heard) because they're just likeable:
Jimi Hendrix- Are You Experienced. Took a while for me, but it was worth the rate- as you can see in my chart. Full of absolute classics, and so is Electric Ladyland, but it's more consistent for me.
The Zombies- Odyssey and Oracle. Full of pop classics, and a very enjoyable album.
As is: Love- Forever Changes. Absolutely magnificent, so likeable, and full of nice songs really. These two are just great pop tunes, and most people like them if they hear them.
King Crimson- In the Court of the Crimson King. I see you like Pink Floyd- a lot- and this is prog, but it is definitely a different kind though. This is just an amazing album in so many ways, and blends ridiculously complex and hyper songs- 21st Century Schizoid Man- with beautiful songs- I Talk to the Wind.
(If you like that) The Soft Machine- Volume Two. It's similar, in a way, in it's wildness, and also very good.
I see you also like jazz- well, maybe just Kind of Blue- but I really enjoy the jazz fusion from around this period. There's Davis' albums from the late 60's, yes, but I prefer those by Colosseum, Chicago, Caravan and some late Soft Machine albums.
The Velvet Underground- The Velvet Underground. I had heard TVU&N, and enjoyed it, but after hearing this one, I preferred it instantly. The songs are much more chilled and softer.
I can assume you've heard the Beatles' albums (surely?) and just not liked them, but I would give Abbey Road another chance. It was what made me fall in love with them, and their most listenable and relaxed album, full of catchy songs.
I don't know really, you may have heard some or all of these, I'm just giving suggestions on what you're chart is lacking for me, to get a rate that is deserved. These are all pretty popular albums from the 60's, then and now, and they are pretty well liked. I could give you a load of albums that you may like from more recent times, but I think that you need to try and look into the past for albums. I always, to find new bands (or old bands) research on bands you like and look at their influences or genres. Don't be afraid to try anything, and try not to let any prejudices get in the way as well.
Good chart with great commentary throughout. It has a lot of my favorite albums and a lot that I really need to listen to.
You have an interesting first choice. I'm a huge Death Cab fan, but I've never been all that interested in their first two albums. I actually really like their later work. I rank their albums like so: (1) Codes and Keys, (2) Narrow Stairs, (3) Plans, (4) Transatlanticism, (5) The Photo Album, (6) We Have the Facts, (7) Something About Airplanes (just reverse chronological order, actually). I just went and gave We Have the Facts another serious listen, and it was actually somewhat better than I remember. I don't think I'll alter my list over it, but there's no doubt that it's a dang solid album.
Awesome, awesome chart. Flaming Lips, Gorillaz, Sufjan Stevens, and Modest Mouse, and even A Fever You Can't Sweat Out. Probably my favourite chart on the site; you've included most of my favourite albums.
Just a suggestion, but you should check out Images Of Sigrid by Poni Hoax. I think it's amazing, and since your chart is so similar to mine, you'd probably think so too. (Help an Indie band gain some recognition!) You can listen to the whole thing here: https://soundcloud.com/ponihoax/sets/images-of-sigrid
I absolutely love it. It has a certain indie feel, but you always succeed in counterbalancing it with older choices. It's varied and not chaotic, and most albums here are great. There are also numerous ones i've never heard, so that's also a good point. Bravo!
Welcome :). Glad to have an awesome addition to the site... Transatlanticism, will have to give that one another hear. Didn't grab me by the second listen, so I let it go. Also some good new stuff to check out here.






