Apple Music 100 Best Albums

The Downward Spiral

Nine Inch Nails

An extreme, downbeat mix of industrial noise and pop that became massive anyway.

Even at a moment when bands like Nirvana could become famous, The Downward Spiral felt extreme. Trent Reznor once called Nine Inch Nails’ second full-length album a “celebration of self-destruction in the form of a concept record that somehow managed to become a multiplatinum worldwide hit.”

Inspired by Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, and David Bowie’s Berlin trilogy, Spiral pushed the industrial pop of Pretty Hate Machine in unexpected directions, experimenting with torch songs (“Piggy”), disco and soul (“Closer”), and ballads of such unnerving fragility that listening to them feels voyeuristic (“Hurt”). Even tracks that found continuity with the band’s earlier music—like the stuttering hardcore of “March of the Pigs”—were drastically more aggressive, making the album’s quieter moments feel all the more exhausted.

The album’s sound is just as polarized, mixing digital and analog, sample collages with live, and naturalistic performances. If the album has a defining moment, it’s the climax of “Closer”: mechanistic synth-funk that gives way to a warped, solitary piano. After Spiral, artists didn’t have to decide whether to be a rock band or an electronic producer—Reznor had bridged the two.

Aja

Steely Dan

At their most direct, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker delivered a masterpiece, full of tragic romanticism.

Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s approach to recording had evolved from a fixed group of people playing a set of songs from start to finish to a piecemeal process in which they tried out multiple players for the same part until they found a satisfactory combination—all before doing it all over again on the next song. As sophisticated as the process was, Steely Dan never sounded as direct as they do on Aja. There’s the R&B of “Josie,” the bounce of “Black Cow,” and the fact that “Peg” felt like actual dance music rather than a dissertation on it.

“Steely Dan is the band that every song that you love that you don’t know who it is, it’s them.”

Mayer Hawthorne

In the coastal fog of 1970s California pop, Fagen and Becker had always appeared like bookish New York hipsters raised on R&B and jazz. But Aja was the first time that identity had come through so clearly in the music. And while there are plenty of close seconds, no character captured Steely Dan’s tragic romanticism like the suburban guy on “Deacon Blues,” who fantasizes about becoming a saxophone player—only to get drunk and die in a car wreck. Yeah, he’s a misfit. But least he believed in something.