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Apple Music 100 Best Albums

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ANTI

Rihanna

55

The blueprint for 21st-century pop domination.

When Rihanna unleashed ANTI on the world, it quickly became clear that this wasn’t the Rihanna we’d come to know. Having left her longtime label and tossed her own hit-factory formula—which she had polished to perfection since her 2005 debut—out the window, she was free from expectation, free to cultivate her own mystique, and free to rethink what a modern pop blockbuster could sound like.

“ANTI was the first time I took my time making an album. [It] for sure is my top favorite album I’ve ever made.”

Rihanna

The evolution starts with her bigger, bolder voice—from her whiskey-coated wails on the late-night voicemail that is “Higher” to breathing smoke on her cover of Tame Impala’s “New Person, Same Old Mistakes.” She proudly celebrates her Caribbean heritage on “Work”; she presents women with yet another kiss-off anthem with “Needed Me” and flaunts her erotic side on “Sex With Me.” She also mines and updates genres by going full ’50s doo-wop on “Love on the Brain” and channeling Prince for the velvety ’80s power-pop ballad “Kiss It Better.” Yet it all feels thoroughly modern and thoroughly distinct—the blueprint for 21st-century pop domination.

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A Love Supreme

John Coltrane

54

Spiritual jazz’s founding document.

Recorded on December 9, 1964, A Love Supreme raised the bar in terms of what jazz could strive to express. It is devotional in intent, with a long religious poem printed on the sleeve, plus a liner note in which John Coltrane alludes to his overcoming addiction and pinpoints his “spiritual awakening” in 1957.

As such, there’s an aura of solemnity here, clear from the opening notes of “Acknowledgement.” Coltrane weaves incantational tenor sax phrases until bassist Jimmy Garrison takes up the main four-note “A Love Supreme” motif, and drummer Elvin Jones drops a driving, multilayered beat with the subtlest Afro-Latin tinge. That group sound—that moment—became etched into jazz history like scripture on a stone tablet.

“My guys at the time weren’t really listening to Coltrane, but I was like, ‘This is what it is. This is where I am.’”

Common

It’s astonishing to think of what Coltrane achieved in 10 years, between his debut as a leader in 1957 and his death in 1967 at age 40. A Love Supreme remains the watershed—concise yet thoroughly immersive, a founding document in the genre that would become known as spiritual jazz.

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A Love Supreme by John Coltrane