Demon Days by Gorillaz
Silent Alarm by Bloc Party
Metallica (Black Album)
NIN - The Fragile
This is exactly what I was coming here to comment. This album was fucking astounding, complex, beautiful, intense, musical, destructive… Every single noise in that album was intentional and meant something. Trent was making music at the time that was so far above and beyond what anybody else was doing or has done since.
Then Atticus Ross joined. Now they make background music for movies. It is fucking heartbreaking.
Magnus Opus yes. With Teeth is still an amazing album.
Kendrick Lamar - To Pimp a Butterfly
Disagree about he falling off. TPAB is probably one of the albuns of the century and gonna be really difficult someone create an album just like TPAB, on hiphop scene.
All media claims TPAB as a masterpiece and they put Kendrick on one level I guess almost nobody can take. And TPAB isnt my favourite album from him. Mr. Morale is a good LP , btw.
Btw, in relation to many bands that appeared on this new century, it is a bit controversial to say they are falling off after their first album.
Since 2000, countless bands have released a great first album and then ““disappeared”” or the hype just stopped. Alt-J are a good example.
Lonerism - Tame Impala
Dunno if they are falling off, but since Lonerism , they (or just Kevin Parker) are more focus producing music aside psych rock. Nowadays, Its visible Kevin is more focus on pop music, and his collaborations explains his focus.
He is now producing the new album of Dua Lipa. And the last song from her, has clearly new Kevin vibes
Smashing Pumpkins: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
R.E.M. - Automatic for the people
I don’t know is Mellon collie was a huge drop off, but their direction definitely changed.
I agree with both of you. I’m very fond of everything by them up through the American Gothic EP, but Mellon Collie is still kinda the peak.
Peak, yes. But it’s not like their next couple of albums were terrible. They were just a different direction.
Oh absolutely. Adore was actually the album that got me into them.
Gish is a transcendental album that created the genre that dominated the next 20 years: alternative rock.
Everything after Gish might have been more popular or well known, but none of it will ever approach being as influential.
These are great. In this vein I add:
Pearl Jam - Yield
(and forgive me but)
Radiohead - OK Computer
As massive R.E.M. fan, this made me conflicted! Automatic for the People is beautiful, and most days my favourite, but I wouldn’t want to miss where the band went after.
Their last album was brilliant, Accelerate was fun… I know AftP was a hell of a peak, but I can’t find it in me to write off anything except a chunk of Around the Sun…
Thank you for allowing me to talk about my favourite band. :)
Accelerate was a lot of fun, but for me the last album that was stellar front to back was Life’s Rich Pageant. It was joyous, raucous, and they hit their signature sound head on. Every track sparkled (even the Superman cover that Michael hated).
That’s a very fair opinion too! I feel they changed about 4 times as a band (understandably I guess as they were about for 3 decades), and damn Life’s Rich Pageant was special - it’s one I play very often, and it is stacked! :)
It’s the best they sounded as a pure rock band, even though I have such a soft spot for Murmur. New Adventures touched on that feeling again, but it wasn’t front to back perfect in the same way (partly because of its length!)
The trouble I have is I couldn’t imagine life without what came after Life’s Rich Pageant, for instance Automatic meant a great deal to me, as it was the first album I remember hearing and loving growing up. :)
For sure! One of the reasons they’re such an amazing band is that they were able to innovate and adapt over a long career without losing their core style. They grew with their audience instead of apart from it.
My opinion is based on my own music preference (I’m a sucker for power pop) but there’s no denying R.E.M. stayed at the top of their game far longer than most bands even stay together.
Pink Floyd - The Wall
Not their last album before Roger Waters left the band - that was The Final Cut, the album which followed - but it was far superior, and arguably their best album.
The David Gilbour-led era of Pink Floyd was ok, but it would never reach the fevered heights and sick intensity of the Roger Waters days.
Everyone knows Ummagumma was their best album, they’re just too scared to admit it!
Best song is several small species
I agree except that Dark side of the moon is clearly Pink Floyds magnum opus.
I understand that Roger is a divisive character (personally I love him despite his flaws), but god damn he could write an album.
More popular, more commercially successful, and more accessible to casual fans. Agreed.
But for magnum opus, I gotta agree with the wall for a few reasons
- They made a movie out of it
- The ode to the intense para social relationships that revolve around stardom and how a truly crazy creative can take advantage of it in scary ways was not only true back then, but predictive of how much worse it would get in current time.
- DSotM always seemed like a lot of good ideas in an unordered list. I felt like they could be scrambled and the album would be similar, except for the first and last songs… Meanwhile the wall tells a story of pain, alienation, search for meaning, lashing out, and then a quest for self-forgiveness.
Best guitar solo of all time helps too
It’s good album. But I view The Wall as a Waters solo album than a Pink Floyd one.
It’s an okay album. It’s a rock opera. It’s very melodramatic. There are some great songs.
I go back and forth on Animals or Meddle as their best record, with Wish You Were Here close behind.
Definitely The Wall feels much more like the solo Roger stuff than the best of Floyd.
Though the real purists only like the Barrett stuff.
how do you figure that?
Some of the tracks are based on his childhood, and seeing how many The Wall tours he did. In 2016 he turned it into an opera. So the album is very personal to him.
A lot of the tracks have to do with what both Waters and Gilmour went through as children, as they both lost their fathers to World War II. David Gilmour got writing credit on a bunch of the tracks as well. And given the amount of work that both Waters and Gilmore put into the album, it’s not really right to say that it was a solo project. Not even to mention what Nick Mason put into it. If you wanna cut out Richard Wright’s contributions, considering that he got fired during this album’s production, that would be fair. 
He essentially did write the whole thing.
Except for the parts that David Gilmour wrote
David Gilmour was good at solos, not song writing.
He wrote all of The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and Animals.
He essentially wrote everything post Syd Barret all the way up to the Final Cut which was supposed to be Floyd’s last album.
No. Dark Side was the first album Waters wrote all of it.
Except for the parts that David Gilmour wrote
Wait you think the Gorillaz fell off after Demon Days???
Not dramatically but it was the best and none topped it.
That’s arguable, and even then it could only ever be considered marginally better than Plastic Beach. Even if you don’t like the new stuff, PB is fire.
Plastic beach is orders of magnitude better
That’s a controversial opinion right there!
Plastic Beach was straight fire IMO
Maybe my notion of falling off is different, I consider falling off “and then they were irrelevant” so to speak. I could just have the wrong idea
Why wherever did you get that idea
The Suburbs by Arcade Fire
Modest Mouse - The Moon and Antarctica
This is really the only band I have that hipster thought that they were better before they got big. This was the last album they made that I love every song on. Then they dropped Good News for People Who Like Bad News and their style was almost completely different, but also got many more people listening to the band.
Similarly I liked Kings of Leon before they changed the original vocalist. They had a rather unique sound when I discovered Aha Shake Heartbreak, but by Only By The Night, they had completely lost everything about their sound that I liked.
I’m in agreement that The Moon and Antarctica is the peak album, but I feel Good News is a great representation of the band transcending into something brand new rather than just fizzling. It’s Iike going out with a bang. Then after that it feels like fizzle haha.
I would probably have hated Good News if I had followed them before it came out, but it has a great representation of rebirth and becoming an unapologetically new person. I return to it usually when I go through loss.
Funny with Metallica … I think there’s an argument that Death Magnetic (2008) is, for the thrash fans, the “Black Album” they wanted.
I feel like this is a based take (as a Death Magnetic fan myself). My favorite is still the Black album, but Death Magnetic is a very close second
Yea … apart from the “loudness wars” tone, which in the early 90s might actually have come off as an attempt to get back to the garage band early days vibe, it’s very easy to imagine Death Magnetic as the follow up to Justice.
The bad thing about Death Magnetic. You have the loudness war thing about the album. To an point you have people saying the Guitar Hero version sounds better then the album version.
Bad mastering in an album has ruined many great albums.
It seems popular to think that Load, Reload, and St. Anger are the worst Metallica albums. If that’s the truth, they fell off after the Black Album. In this case, Death Magnetic is a comeback album, not the creative zenith before their worst albums because it happened after their worst albums. With that said, my vote would be And Justice For All… if we’re speaking about their creative zenith. It’s the most progressive musically. The Black Album is more representative of their sound at the zenith of their popularity.
Yep agreed. I think it’s fair to call the black album a successful and good album for what they were trying to do, which was walk back the progressive metal thing and go for punchy simpler music. Enter Sandman and Nothing Else Matters are basically pop classics now, which in the case of Sandman is really something as it’s undoubtedly a metal or heavy track.
Otherwise yea, Justice is awesome, and my personal favourite, however much Master might be objectively better or more consistent. Something people forget about Justice, but which always resonated when I first gave it a listen, is the progressive themes.
First four tracks: Blackened, And Justice For All, Eye of the Beholder, One, which are thematically Environmentalism, Corruption, “Manufactured Consent” (free thinking), War.
Sex Pistols - Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols.
I’d agree with this, except they only really recorded a single album. The Rock n Roll Swindle was just a bunch of outtakes and session recordings mostly done after Johnny had left
That was the joke.
D’oh…
Bush: Sixteen Stone
Mathew Sweet: Girlfriend
Nine Inch Nails - Pretty Hate Machine
as nin albums became less driven by chunky 80s synthesisers and more driven by guitars, they got worse. however, the quake soundtrack and ghosts I-IV are excellent, in my opinion.
I find myself listening to year zero a lot, maybe I’m too big a fan of NIN in general. Something I like from every album.
I really enjoyed year zero as well. It felt fresh, there was a decent amount of experimentation, and I appreciated the lyrical themes
I’ve been a NIN fan since way back and I felt like every album was their best before falling off with pretty much every album when it first releases. After a couple of listens and thinking I’m not gonna ever get into the new stuff, I catch myself having songs off their newest album stuck in my head only to repeat the process with the next one.
This happens to Queens of the Stone Age with me too but less so. I always go into a new Qotsa album with the understanding that it’s going to take a couple listens before it becomes my new favorite album.
lmao.
if you don’t get it — it’s his first album
I would push this to The Downward Spiral.
Broken is my absolute favorite. But starting with The Perfect Drug he began to do nothing but suck at ever greater intensity.
At the drive in - Relationship of Command Refused - The Shape Of Punk To Come
I def used “one armed scissor” as a screen name back in high school.
Stone Roses - Stone Roses.
Their debut album put them on a very high pedestal that they were never able to match.
