Apple Music 100 Best Albums

Abbey Road

The Beatles

The Beatles’ grand exit is also the ultimate entry point into their universe.

Giles Martin, son of legendary Beatles producer George Martin, once told Apple Music that Abbey Road is the perfect gateway into the Beatles universe because it sounds so contemporary. And it’s true: While other Beatles albums conjure a specific moment frozen in amber—the matching suits and mop-tops or the mid-period mischievous experimentation with pop form or the technicolor burst into psychedelia—Abbey Road sounds like nothing more or less than four extremely gifted humans playing one indelible song after another in the same room together.

“We hardly ever sat down and had nothing. There was always some sort of idea.”

Paul McCartney

The Beatles

The 11th and penultimate album in The Beatles’ historic catalog was the last on which all four members worked in the studio as a unit, all at the same time. And while singling out one album as their most impactful is a fool’s errand, 1969’s Abbey Road is indeed the most ageless, simply an immaculate, unmatched collection of songs by a world-changing band at their creative peak.

Following the sprawl of 1968’s White Album, Abbey Road is a relatively concise representation of The Beatles’ entire deal: wholesome (“Here Comes the Sun”), a little freaky (“Come Together,” “Polythene Pam”), macabre and wholesome (“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”), first-wedding-dance romantic (“Something”), whimsical (“Octopus’s Garden,” “Mean Mr. Mustard”), and, with its album-closing eight-song, 16-minute medley, playful with form. The embers of pop music’s most dynamic collaborative force were dying out, but not before yielding one final and definitive document of unmatched creativity and camaraderie.

Thriller

Michael Jackson

A landmark that did nothing less than redefine the scope and reach of pop music.

There are few pop albums, or even works of art, that denote a wholesale shift in time and space the way Michael Jackson’s Thriller did in 1982. Noting its impact on the career trajectory of a child star turned R&B hitmaker feels reductive; talking about its record-smashing commercial success diminishes its creative leaps. It did nothing less than define the modern pop blockbuster and redefine the scope and reach of music.

Stripping the weight of history from Thriller is a big job, but hearing the record as a statement in itself remains hugely rewarding. Seven of its nine original cuts were Top 10 singles, and it became one of the best-selling albums ever made, but more important is the way Jackson and producer Quincy Jones turned the singer’s obsessions into intricate, stunningly sung pop-funk.

“No one else could perform infectious songs of that quality at that high a level.”

Nile Rodgers

The album’s opening throwdown, “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” is Jackson at his fiercest and funkiest, picking up right where 1979’s Off the Wall left off—and shoring up his R&B bona fides. But from the Paul McCartney-blessed pop of the first hit single “The Girl Is Mine” to the Eddie Van Halen-revved pyrotechnics of “Beat It,” Jackson’s crossover moves opened up the eyes and ears of the industry—and audiences around the world—to what music could sound, look, and feel like if we blurred those old color lines. “Billie Jean” is a gripping psycho-study of the paranoia and persecution that he was already feeling—yet it still maintains the mysterious allure of an artist who became the avatar for the omnipresent global pop superstar.