Rumours by Fleetwood Mac

OK Computer

Radiohead

A dozen songs of terror and oblivion and hope.

Few albums so audacious, innovative, and anxious have ever captured the popular imagination like OK Computer. It’s a triumph that not only announced a new frontier in rock exploration, it also articulated budding pre-millennial interest in—and concern over—our technological toys. In a dozen songs of terror and oblivion, Thom Yorke is so alienated by the society spinning around him that he pines to be abducted by aliens so that he may witness “the world as I’d love to see it.” It remains a deeply unsettling song cycle that is also deeply magnetic, its reordering of rock ’n’ roll’s sounds with classical ambition making it one of the form’s most radical and necessary statements.

For all of its dread, OK Computer is ultimately an act of hope, the expression of a belief that our inexorable path of progress does not have to cost us our goodness. And if there is a remedy to the dizzying pace of, well, everything, it’s simple enough: “Idiot, slow down,” Yorke sings for the last words of closer “The Tourist.” In the decades since OK Computer made Radiohead rock’s new standard-bearers, its grievances—namely, our accelerating isolation—have only mounted. But the answers and the hope it holds linger still.

Rumours

Fleetwood Mac

Songs that somehow outshine the melodrama that forged them.

To understand what made Rumours so impactful, you have to look at the music that came out around it. This was the era of the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt—artists who, like Fleetwood Mac, combined the intimacy of singer-songwriters with a softened take on rock ’n’ roll. But it was also the era of Boston, Foreigner, Pink Floyd, and a wave of bands that scaled up the ambition of ’60s rock to blockbuster heights. And there, in the middle of the road, is Rumours. For an album that went on to sell more than 10 million copies, it’s more unsettling than it probably should be.

And while the album—and its infamously messy circumstances, which included the implosion of two intraband relationships—feels so emblematic of a very specific mid-’70s SoCal kind of indulgence, Rumours would not have endured the way it has had that pain not been rendered so universally. Later generations may know it through “Dreams” going viral in a TikTok or Daisy Jones and the Six mining the melodrama and mythology—but they know it.

Apple Music 100 Best Albums

OK Computer

Rumours