Appetite for Destruction by Guns N' Roses

Exile on Main St.

The Rolling Stones

The Stones’ shambolic, decadent mystique in its ultimate form.

More than songs or performances, Exile on Main St. was about mood. Can you hear the young gods sweating it out in the basement of a French mansion overlooking the Mediterranean, surrounded by junkies and hangers-on, eating lobster in the afternoon and working all night? Never had the band managed to translate their myth so faithfully into sound. But Exile was also the closest The Rolling Stones ever got to something truly avant-garde, an album whose perceived mistakes—the muddy mix, the dislocated performances—conjured a feeling that something more correct would have wiped away.

“Exile on Main St. is the greatest rock ’n’ roll record of all time. It’s not just the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the South of France, in a mansion, being unimaginably beautiful and decadent. But it’s what’s going on in there that you can’t hear.”

Chris Robinson

The Black Crowes

For every “Tumbling Dice” or “Torn and Frayed”—two of the album’s more coherent moments—there was an “I Just Want to See His Face” or “Let It Loose,” tracks that functioned less as finished thoughts than open-ended suggestions. And the blues that had once served as the band’s shorthand for earthly hardships and desires now sounded mysterious and arcane. They now embodied the confusion they had once merely described.

Appetite for Destruction

Guns N' Roses

A dark, unflinching classic that brought real danger back to rock.

It isn’t just that Guns N’ Roses’ epochal 1987 debut is dark, it’s that the album never flinches from its full impact, no matter how ugly. The drug songs aren’t about getting high, they’re about blacking out (“Mr. Brownstone,” “Nightrain”). The sex songs don’t relish the physical act so much as the power that comes with it (“Anything Goes”). When they give you an anthem, it’s against a backdrop of filth and misery (“Paradise City”). And when they give you a ballad, it’s with the paranoid sense that nothing so pure could actually be real (“Sweet Child o’ Mine”).

At the time, the band was considered an antidote to the slickness of pop-metal dominating the charts and airwaves—something like The Rolling Stones in relation to the poppier bands of the early ’60s. Yet Appetite not only matched those bands commercially, it essentially supplanted them, making a lane for a grittier aesthetic and, to some degree, paving the way for grunge’s death blow a few years later. Some bands make playing loose sound liberating; Guns N’ Roses made it sound menacing.

“This album immediately existed outside of [hair metal]. I felt like all the other bands were trying to do this album.”

Pete Wentz

Apple Music 100 Best Albums

Exile on Main St.

Appetite for Destruction