Homogenic by Björk

Exodus

Bob Marley & The Wailers

Songs about the tension between the hope that every little thing will be all right—and the worry that it won’t.

In the years leading up to the recording of Bob Marley’s ninth album in early 1977, Jamaica had experienced a tremendous swell in political violence, with gang and paramilitary groups affiliated with the country’s two main parties—the Jamaica Labour Party and the People’s National Party—killing each other in triple-digit numbers. Marley had stepped in to try and alleviate the mood with the Smile Jamaica Concert shortly before the country’s elections in December 1976, only to be shot during a home invasion two days before the show. He played anyway.

What you hear on Exodus is the tension between the hope that every little thing will be all right and the creeping worry that it won’t. Marley recorded the album during a self-imposed exile in London, a distance that cast his optimism about Jamaica in a cautious light. And while his politics had never been of more public interest, the album’s most uplifting songs turned inward toward matters personal, romantic, and spiritual: “Three Little Birds,” the lovelorn “Waiting in Vain,” the legacy-defining “One Love.”

“Exodus is Bob and the band’s most groundbreaking record in terms of what it did for them as artists and what it did for the music in general… It was such a revolutionary sound.”

Ziggy Marley

Homogenic

Björk

An influential tapestry of techno innovation and orchestral songcraft.

“I’m the hunter/I’ll bring back the goods,” Björk intones on Homogenic’s spooky, skittering opener. In fact, the Icelandic superstar’s third album is a rippling tapestry of techno innovation and orchestral songcraft. The urgency of the lyrics is real: The singer had been deeply affected by a string of personal incidents, including the highly publicized suicide of a stalker who had attempted to assassinate her with a letter bomb. That tension manifests on tracks like the towering, string-laden “Bachelorette”—“I’m a fountain of blood/In the shape of a girl”—and siren-like ballad “Jóga,” with its urgent couplets about emotional rescue and states of emergency.

“That was the first time I was like, ‘Oh, there’s music that’s no genre.’”

Empress Of

The album soon found fans all over: Thom Yorke famously called “Unravel” one of the most beautiful songs he’d ever heard—Radiohead covered it reverently in 2007—and legendary fashion designer Alexander McQueen directed the video for “Alarm Call,” reportedly with so much enthusiasm that he provided a 100-page treatment detailing his ideas. It’s now considered a modern classic, as is the whole of Homogenic: an unforgettable melding of electronic and organic artistry, sung in the key of strange.

Apple Music 100 Best Albums

Exodus

Homogenic