Top 100 Music Albums of the 1970s
by 
buzzdainer 
I was born and raised in a New England mill town that had seen better days. The textile mills and shoe factories had mostly closed down, and the river that passed through town was rated by the EPA as one of the seven most polluted in the country. My neighborhood was rough by Maine standards: a working-class French Canadian community where teenagers wielding knives roamed the streets looking for trouble. Especially during the summer, though, I spent most of my time outside, building forts in the woods, playing pickup baseball in the sandlot, and swinging like Tarzan on a makeshift rope swing somebody had rigged to a high limb behind the school.
When I was cooped up indoors, I remember playing my parents' records on my own little record player in the basement. My favorite was the Beach Boys, but I also distinctly remember listening to Fleetwood Mac, Boston, Stevie Wonder, the Everly Brothers, Doobie Brothers, Meat Loaf, Jim Croce, America, the Association, Paul Simon, Elton John, the Eagles, Electric Light Orchestra, the Beatles, and many others. I didn't fully develop my own individual musical tastes until I was older, but it's actually quite amazing to me how much of that stuff stuck. With the benefit of hindsight, I've added great artists like Nick Drake and Big Star, whom I never heard at the time, as well as lots of great funk, country, folk, proto-punk, and reggae. I'm a little less enamored of the so-called classic rock from this period, as I think I've been oversaturated with it, thanks to the local radio station, WBLM, the Rock and Roll Blimp, that was wall-to-wall seventies rock. You'll see Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin in my year charts, but I can't get quite excited enough about them to include them here.
- Chart updated: 11/07/2022 20:15
- (Created: 02/16/2016 17:23).
- Chart size: 100 albums.
There are 23 comments for this chart from BestEverAlbums.com members and Top 100 Music Albums of the 1970s has an average rating of 91 out of 100 (from 23 votes). Please log in or register to leave a comment or assign a rating.
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I like just about everything Tom Waits has ever recorded, but Closing Time is my favorite of all his albums. Which probably says a lot about me as a listener. While I love the weirdness, goofiness, and twistedness of later Waits albums, it is this collection of guilelessly sentimental, lonesome love songs that reaches my heart the most. In addition to being Tom Waits's finest, this also earns the distinction of the greatest debut of all time. To gain a sense of the beer-soaked pathos of this album, check out "Ol' 55" and "I Hope That I Don't Fall in Love with You."
[First added to this chart: 02/16/2016]
Year of Release:
1973
Appears in:
Rank Score:
3,148
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This album remains one of punk's defining moments, if not its single, signature document. Yet it hardly sounds like a punk rock record. In fact, it's as much a reggae record, as much a dub record, as much a werewolf-rock record, as it is a punk record. Whatever this is, though, it's stood the test of time better than any other punk album ever made. I doubt I really need to sell you on the merits of this sprawling, wonderful album, but in case I do, start with the gorgeous anthem "Train in Vain (Stand by Me)," both homage to the Ben E. King song that preceded it specifically and to pop music in general, especially early Beatles.
[First added to this chart: 02/16/2016]
Year of Release:
1979
Appears in:
Rank Score:
30,851
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It's a genuine achievement when an artist can be innovative and influential while at the same time creating something that feels familiar and timeless. Gram Parsons is one of those artists. He wrote songs that felt unironically straight out of a decades-old Nashville country tradition, yet managed to carve out for himself a unique niche in the history of both rock and country music. His songs are respectful of the conservative and Christian roots of the bluegrass and country artists who came before him, yet he really felt more at home among the innovators of the Bay Area scene of the late sixties and early seventies. If you've never heard of Gram Parsons, you'll immediately recognize most any track on Grievous Angel, particularly the oft-covered "Return of the Grievous Angel"--or at least, you'll insist you've heard it someplace before.
[First added to this chart: 03/15/2016]
Year of Release:
1974
Appears in:
Rank Score:
1,193
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"Timeless" is a word that gets used far too often when people express praise for albums, but it's the right word to describe John Prine's debut album. When I was in my twenties, I played guitar often with friends I worked with in environmental education, and many of the songs we played together came from a folk songbook called Rise Up Singing, a book my buddy Mike calls "the Bible." A number of John Prine's songs appear there, and at the time I didn't know who he was. I've come to understand him as one of America's most important folk songwriters, alongside Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. The song on this album that flipped the switch for me is the classic environmentalist credo "Paradise," but every song on this album is beautiful and important, yet often funny and self effacing.
[First added to this chart: 04/03/2016]
Year of Release:
1971
Appears in:
Rank Score:
1,127
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"The Blue album, there's hardly a dishonest note in the vocals," Joni Mitchell told Rolling Stone in 1979. "At that period of my life, I had no persona defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world, and I couldn't pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy." To be sure, there's a lot of delicate vulnerability in Blue's minimalist Canadian folk. But there's also a kind of reckless joy that surfaces here from time to time, as in these lines from the gorgeous "Carey": "And we'll laugh and toast to nothing / And smash our empty glasses down." Maybe vulnerability is less about sadness and more about openness to a wide range of emotions--and letting them pour forth, as she does here on song after song. It's quite a gift to offer to the world.
[First added to this chart: 05/13/2016]
Year of Release:
1971
Appears in:
Rank Score:
16,145
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I was first introduced to Parliament a year after I graduated from college by a girl who put "P. Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up)" and "Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker)" on a mix tape for me. It was only then that I discovered how badly I had needed to improve my interplanetary funksmanship. And that that was a thing. George Clinton's place in the world of music is all his own--the most bizarre combination of seventies funk and space-age psychedelia, hilarious self-promotion, and an unapologetically playful and self-deprecating take on blackness. This album never fails to make me smile.
[First added to this chart: 02/16/2016]
Year of Release:
1975
Appears in:
Rank Score:
2,452
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Electric Light Orchestra's frontman Jeff Lynne is a musician's musican, in the sense that he always seems to appear in celebrity all-star lineups of musicians, including his involvement in supergroup the Traveling Wilburys in the 1980s. This has probably had a mixed effect on people's impressions of ELO: simultaneously attracting new listeners to his back catalog and causing his work to be overshadowed in comparison to collaborators such as Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty. A New World Record is clear evidence that ELO deserves consideration in the same conversation with those other giants. It's an incredibly expansive, ambitious piece of work, with soaring orchestral arrangements blending with driving guitar-driven rock. "Telephone Line" is rightly the song most people know here, but sibling singles "Do Ya" and "Living Thing" are fantastic, too.
[First added to this chart: 06/04/2016]
Year of Release:
1976
Appears in:
Rank Score:
3,081
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On Pink Moon, the notoriously reclusive English folklorist Nick Drake pares down his songs to the simplest of elements: his breathy, whispering vocals; his signature fingerpicking guitar style; and a simple piano melody added to the title track. The spare instrumentation and production create an incredibly intimate listening experience, but the lyrics themselves are often obscure and impenetrable. This paradox of simultaneous communion and distance lies at the heart of the emotional experience of Pink Moon. It's sometimes dismissed as a "depressed" record, but that's not really what I hear in these songs. There is sadness here, of course, but also cracks where the light gets in. Nothing quite like it has been recorded before or since.
[First added to this chart: 02/17/2016]
Year of Release:
1972
Appears in:
Rank Score:
17,658
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Comments:
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Marquee Moon wasn't in my parents' record collection when I was growing up, so I never heard it until many years later. This was an album I came to almost entirely because of its ubiquitous presence in greatest-albums-ever lists such as this one (I probably saw it first in a Rolling Stone list), since I never heard it on the radio or had any friends who listened to it. What a great album I was missing. The strength of the songs here lies in the interlacing guitar work of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd. Sometimes they are perfectly in sync, creating an incredible droning effect, while at other times Lloyd provides the perfect counterpoint to Verlaine, Lloyd's zig to Verlaine's zag. The result is one of the most creative and unique rock albums ever made.
[First added to this chart: 02/17/2016]
Year of Release:
1977
Appears in:
Rank Score:
20,137
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Toots and the Maytals are often regarded as the quintessential roots reggae band, and one of Bob Marley's key influences. I love them, but I did have a bit of a challenge deciding which of their albums to rank highest, especially since there are multiple versions of Funky Kingston that are quite different from one another. My first and only purchase of a Toots album was a compilation that included tracks from both Funky Kingston and In the Dark. In the end, I decided to give the nod to Funky Kingston, as it's the one that most fully captures the fun and soul of Toots Hibbert's vocals and songwriting. Even if you're referring to the original 1972 album under the Funky Kingston name, every song here is a gem.
[First added to this chart: 10/26/2020]
Year of Release:
1973
Appears in:
Rank Score:
535
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Total albums: 100. Page 1 of 10
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Top 100 Music Albums of the 1970s composition
| Year | Albums | % | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1970 | 9 | 9% | |
| 1971 | 10 | 10% | |
| 1972 | 13 | 13% | |
| 1973 | 12 | 12% | |
| 1974 | 9 | 9% | |
| 1975 | 10 | 10% | |
| 1976 | 10 | 10% | |
| 1977 | 8 | 8% | |
| 1978 | 10 | 10% | |
| 1979 | 9 | 9% |
| Artist | Albums | % | |
|---|---|---|---|
|
|
|||
| Neil Young | 4 | 4% | |
| Stevie Wonder | 4 | 4% | |
| David Bowie | 4 | 4% | |
| Grateful Dead | 3 | 3% | |
| Talking Heads | 3 | 3% | |
| Neil Young & Crazy Horse | 3 | 3% | |
| The Who | 3 | 3% | |
| Show all | |||
Top 100 Music Albums of the 1970s chart changes
There have been no changes to this chart.Top 100 Music Albums of the 1970s similar charts
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Other decade charts by buzzdainer
| Title | Source | Type | Published | Country |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Top 100 Music Albums of the 2020s | buzzdainer | 2020s decade chart | 2025 | |
| Top 100 Music Albums of the 2010s | buzzdainer | 2010s decade chart | 2024 | |
| Top 100 Music Albums of the 2000s | buzzdainer | 2000s decade chart | 2024 | |
| Top 100 Music Albums of the 1990s | buzzdainer | 1990s decade chart | 2024 | |
| Top 100 Music Albums of the 1980s | buzzdainer | 1980s decade chart | 2024 | |
buzzdainer has created 4 other 1970s decade charts - click here to explore them all.
Top 100 Music Albums of the 1970s ratings
Average Rating = (n ÷ (n + m)) × av + (m ÷ (n + m)) × AVwhere:
av = trimmed mean average rating an item has currently received.
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Showing latest 5 ratings for this chart. | Show all 23 ratings for this chart.
| Rating | Date updated | Member | Chart ratings | Avg. chart rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ! | 11/07/2022 02:25 |  Larcx13 | 1,145 | 86/100 |
| ! | 11/06/2022 20:47 | adbrack1988 | 25 | 97/100 |
| ! | 11/06/2022 20:34 | Johnnyo | 2,557 | 80/100 |
| ! | 11/06/2022 17:07 | Rm12398 | 99 | 89/100 |
| ! | 11/06/2022 11:05 | Moondance | 476 | 85/100 |
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 2% of all charts on BestEverAlbums.com. This chart has a Bayesian average rating of 91.2/100, a mean average of 93.5/100, and a trimmed mean (excluding outliers) of 93.5/100. The standard deviation for this chart is 6.7.
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Top 100 Music Albums of the 1970s comments
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From buzzdainer 04/22/2024 15:48 | #303127
buzzdainer 04/22/2024 15:48 | #303127
Thank you, Larcx13! Glad to hear there's another Toots fan out there!
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From Larcx13 11/07/2022 02:31 | #291113
Larcx13 11/07/2022 02:31 | #291113
Damn that's some gnarly picks in that top 10. Maytals, The clash, Tom waits, marquee moon & Mothership Connection! Good stuff. This whole list is great.
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From Johnnyo 11/06/2022 20:35 | #291106
Top notch chart with great notes. Very enjoyable read
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From buzzdainer 11/06/2022 15:30 | #291092
buzzdainer 11/06/2022 15:30 | #291092
Thank you, Moondance and JoeyBones1986, for those generous comments. It's been a little bit since I've looked at this chart as a whole, and although I'm pretty happy with the first 40 selections or so, I feel like there are some omissions from the second half of the chart that would make it a little more varied and interesting. Like most things in life, it remains a work in progress.
Helpful? (Log in to vote) | 0 votes (0 helpful | 0 unhelpful)
From Moondance 11/06/2022 11:14 | #291088
Always enjoy checking out your charts & reading how the albums connect to your life journey. The 70's were such a rich period of music ¬ I sometimes think my top 101-200 is as good as my top 100. We were very fortunate to live that period of music in real time.
Helpful? (Log in to vote) | +1 votes (1 helpful | 0 unhelpful)
From JoeyBones1986 03/10/2022 17:03 | #282644
Great selections, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading your personal notes
Helpful? (Log in to vote) | +1 votes (1 helpful | 0 unhelpful)
From buzzdainer 12/16/2020 20:58 | #262785
buzzdainer 12/16/2020 20:58 | #262785
Thanks for your comment and rating, Larcx13! I'm not so sure my lack of interest in Pink Floyd has to do with not getting them so much as being oversaturated with them during my formative years. For many of my generation, it was an unquestioned truth that Dark Side of the Moon is the greatest album of all time. These days I just have little interest in it. I will say I love the song "Wish You Were Here" and think of it as one of the great songs of the seventies. But I'm not so sure I need 25+ minutes of "Shine on You Crazy Diamond."
Helpful? (Log in to vote) | 0 votes (0 helpful | 0 unhelpful)
From Larcx13 12/05/2020 15:58 | #262061
Larcx13 12/05/2020 15:58 | #262061
I love Closing Time! Im disappointed you dont get Pink Floyd, but good list.
Helpful? (Log in to vote) | +1 votes (1 helpful | 0 unhelpful)
From buzzdainer 06/04/2017 16:18 | #192007
buzzdainer 06/04/2017 16:18 | #192007
I think we basically agree that the seventies was a really fun decade for music, as evidenced by both of us selecting Tusk (which has some pensive moments, but the title track is a pretty wild ride), Innervisions, Ziggy Stardust, and the B-52's self-titled debut for our seventies charts. But I'll concede that my chart has a fair amount of what Jack Black's character in High Fidelity calls "sad bastard" music. Nick Drake, to be sure. Maybe early Tom Waits too, although I think Closing Time is a beautiful meditation on a wide array of human emotional experience. And then there's stuff on my chart like Parliament's Mothership Connection--we're not calling that grim, are we? It's some of the most unabashedly goofy funk ever made, in my opinion. But maybe that just illustrates how very distinctly two different music lovers can experience the same album.
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From 
bobbyb5 06/04/2017 09:17 | #191974
bobbyb5 06/04/2017 09:17 | #191974
Really thoughtful chart and well-condidered, obviously. But you'd never know from it that the 70s was an unbelievably FUN decade for music. Its a little grim considering how raucous and wild and full of variety the 70s was. But people today have an image of the 70s as being depressing, but it was actually a hoot. 70s made music proves this.
Helpful? (Log in to vote) | +1 votes (1 helpful | 0 unhelpful)
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| Best Ever Artists | |
|---|---|
| 1. The Beatles | |
| 2. Radiohead | |
| 3. Pink Floyd | |
| 4. David Bowie | |
| 5. Bob Dylan | |
| 6. Led Zeppelin | |
| 7. The Rolling Stones | |
| 8. Arcade Fire | |
| 9. Nirvana | |
| 10. Neil Young | |
| 11. The Velvet Underground | |
| 12. Kendrick Lamar | |
| 13. Miles Davis | |
| 14. The Smiths | |
| 15. The Beach Boys | |
| 16. R.E.M. | |
| 17. Kanye West | |
| 18. Pixies | |
| 19. Bruce Springsteen | |
| 20. Jimi Hendrix |
