100 Best Debut Albums of All Time

Don Omar had spent years boomeranging around Puerto Rico’s growing reggaeton scene, popping up on compilation tapes for rising artists and producers, before deciding to make his mark with an album of his own. In 2003, he released The Last Don, so full of bombast, swagger, and complexity that it ossified his place as a leading pioneer in the genre. The music was both forceful and vulnerable, with songs that drew on intimate experiences and struggles, some of them even touching on Don’s faith and an adolescence spent as a youth preacher before leaving his church. But it also produced hits: “Dile” and “Intocable” were massive tracks that helped define reggaeton.

The Clash and the Sex Pistols had raged at rock’s corporate structure but Marxist punks the Gang of Four dug into “the dirt behind the daydream” of capitalism without sounding like pallid grad students. In fact, Entertainment!‘s mix of punk fury and funk attack was a revelation. Andy Gill’s staccato guitar hits played perfectly off of singer-lyricist Jon King’s bleat. The stiff, jerky aggression of songs such as “Damaged Goods,” “Anthrax” and “I Found That Essence Rare” influenced everyone from the Red Hot Chili Peppers to the whole DFA Records dance-rock scene of the early ’00s..

A statement so powerful, so fully-realized, that the Beastie Boys spent the rest of their careers living it down. Licensed to Ill created a new way for middle America to rock – with thundering combination of hip-hop beats, metal riffs and exuberant smart-aleck rhymes – even as it picked up the flag from Run-DMC and delivered rap music irrevocably into the Heartland. It would become hip-hop’s first Number One album, and one of the best-selling rap album of all time. Mike D, Ad-Rock, and MCA grew out of the record’s frat boy sexual politics and party hearty world view, but head-smacking hits like “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party!)” and “Rhymin’ & Stealin'”, like the AC/DC and Led Zeppelin songs that were the Beasties’ early touchstones, keep getting discovered by new generations of hell-raisers. It’s the definition of the debut album that takes over the world: the shock of the new, with an impact that extends for decades.

After blowing minds as the house band at the Whisky-a-Go-Go, where they were fired for playing the Oedipal drama “The End,” the Doors were ready to unleash their organ-driven rock on the world. “On each song we had tried every possible arrangement,” drummer John Densmore said, “so we felt the whole album was tight.” “Break On Through (to the Other Side),” “Twentieth-Century Fox” and “Crystal Ship” are pop-art songs that were beyond Top Forty attention spans. But the Doors hit pay dirt by editing one of their jam songs for airplay: ”Light My Fire,” written by guitarist Robby Krieger when Jim Morrison told everybody in the band to write a song with universal imagery.

On the breakout hit “Fallin’,” Keys showed off her uncanny ability at creating music that literally bridged centuries, placing classical piano and strings in a laid-back New York boom-bap setting. Songs in A Minor was the work of an ambitious artist who could still score huge hits. Songs like  “How Come You Don’t Call Me” and “A Woman’s Worth” were bounteous moments of organic soulfulness, with Keys mixing grace and gravity, a friendly presence who could still dispense real talk. In an increasingly digitized pop age, this album was a reminder that history still lived and talent still mattered.

Portishead used some of the same building blocks as fellow Bristol, England, trip-hoppers Massive Attack – woozy break beats, jazzy samples, live guitar, girl singer/guy programmer dynamic – but Beth Gibbon’s brooding, pop-cabaret vocals showed to the world that you could feel real pain over a slow-dissolve groove. Dummy had a lot in common with the creepy beatscapes of the Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA but its depth-charge emotional power also evoked Forties noir and late-night, last-cigarette balladry. When Gibbons’ sings “nobody loves me…it’s true/Not like you do,” against the fragile, cold-storage Lalo Schifrin sample of “Sour Times,” she’s a Billie Holiday for the chillout room.

First salvos in pop rarely have backstories like this: At 39, an established poet and novelist, with a singing voice of a depressed mule, ventures into music. But producer John Simon smartly placed Cohen’s voice on a fluffy-pillow cushion of strings and consoling female choirs, brilliantly transforming Cohen into a mesmerizing balladeer — and one who, with his literary chops, could blend the sacred, the solemn, and the sensuous. Because so many of Cohen’s standards — “Suzanne,” “So Long, Marianne,” “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,” “Sisters of Mercy” — are here, Songs of Leonard Cohen almost feels like a hits package.

The debut by the B-52’s sounds like a bunch of high school friends cramming all their running jokes, goofy sounds and private nicknames into a New Wave record. “We never thought it would get past our circle of friends in Athens [Georgia],” vocalist Fred Schneider told Rolling Stone. It turned out nobody could resist the band’s campy, arty funk, or the eccentric squeals and bouffant hairdos of Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson. (Playing organ, Pierson also defined the band’s sound.) They played toy instruments, and their thrift-store image was as inventive and colorful as their music – which, with “Rock Lobster,” was pretty inventive and colorful.

At the end of the Eighties, De La Soul rolled out a new style called “D.A.I.S.Y. Age,” which stood for “Da Inner Sound, Y’All.” They led the Native Tongues posse – no gold chains, just samples, skits, jokes and beats. This happily sprawling album is the sound of middle class pals pushing rap’s possibilities by expanding its subject matter and sonic makeup; their ingenious producer Prince Paul bit everyone from P-Funk to Hall and Oates and Johnny Cash. And on tracks like “Eye Know” and “Me, Myself, and I” De La Soul presented an optimistic eclecticism that served as a buoyant alternative to the rap scene’s swaggering conformity.

From the very beginning of his career, just as he was going from a local grocery bagger to a full-fledged star, Bad Bunny mastered the singles game. The prolific Puerto Rican artist spent about two years releasing a nonstop parade of gigantic, record-smashing hits and collaborations, like the Grammy-nominated Cardi B track “I Like It,” building an ardent fanbase that eagerly awaited a full-length project one day. His exceptional, airtight debut, X 100pre, finally came on Christmas Eve in 2018, a surprise, top-secret drop fit for a wellspring of unexpected sounds — prescient pop rock on “Tenemos Que Hablar,” electric dembow and beat flips on “La Romana” — that showed Bad Bunny could perfect the art of the album, too.

The strutting frontman as spandex-clad love machine, the finger-flying guitar hero, the kegstand rhythm section: Van Halen was the ultimate party band and their debut feels like the Eighties arriving two years ahead of schedule. Tunes like the fist pumping “Runnin’ With the Devil,” the muscular “Atomic Punk,” a thunderous cover of “You Really Got Me” and “Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love” put the show-biz swagger back in hard rock, and Eddie Van Halen’s jaw-dropping technique raised the bar for six-string pyrotechnics, particularly on “Eruption,” the solo that launched a thousand dudes messing around at Guitar Center.

Rodrigo isn’t wrong: God, it’s brutal out here. But with Sour, the teen queen dropped a blockbuster debut so loaded with hits, she practically made a greatest-hits album on the first try. “Drivers License” makes an epic quest out of driving past your ex’s house. “Good 4 U” is a pop-punk feminist rager. “Deja Vu” mixes Clash guitars and Phil Collins drums into a weird hit about two teens arguing over who was the first to get into Billy Joel. And “Brutal” poses the big question “I’m so sick of 17/Where’s my fucking teenage dream?” Rage on, Olivia.

When the members of Television materialized in New York, at the dawn of punk, they played an incongruous, soaring amalgam of genres: the noirish howl of the Velvet Underground, brainy art rock, the double-helix guitar sculpture of Quicksilver Messenger Service. As exhilarating in its lyrical ambitions as the Ramones‘ debut was in its brutal simplicity, Marquee Moon‘s singular vision still amazes. “Friction,” “Venus” and the mighty title track are jagged, desperate and beautiful all at once. As for punk credentials, don’t forget the cryptic electricity and strangled existentialism of guitarist Tom Verlaine’s voice and songwriting.

A rap album? The idea was esoteric back in 1984, but the debut full-length by Joseph “Run” Simmons, Darryl “D.M.C.” McDaniels, and D.J. Jason “Jam Master J” Mizell changed that—and transformed American pop culture. Songs like “Sucker M.C.s” and “Hard Times” jettisoned the party-hearty disco bounce of early rap for blunt, blasting beats and rhymes. It was music that had the swagger, the attitude—the volume—of rock and roll; on “Rock Box,” Run-D.M.C. even had the audacity to toss in a wailing heavy metal guitar. “Our DJ’s better than all these bands,” they rapped, a boast that turned out to be a prophecy.

Teenage multiracial London girl Poly Styrene was proud of being an outcast, wearing braces on her teeth and Day-Go outfits she made herself. With X-Ray Spex, she became a punk icon, speaking up for the losers and misfits in anthems like “Art-I-Ficial” and “Plastic Bag.” Poly screeched over sax blasts, chanting, “I am a poseur and I don’t care! I like to make people stare!” In the classic punk style, X-Ray Spex threw everything they had into one flawless 1978 debut, then immediately fell apart. But the legacy of the late great Poly Styrene lives on forever.

“The studio was like a psychiatrist’s couch for me,” Jay-Z told Rolling Stone, and his debut is full of a hustler’s dreams and laments. It established Jay as one of his generation’s premier rappers and includes the lyrically brilliant “22 Twos” and a filthy guest appearance from a sixteen-year-old Foxy Brown on “Ain’t No Nigga.” But the centerpiece might be the still-amazing “Brooklyn’s Finest,” a duet between Jay and the Notorious B.I.G., two titans on their way to redefining their artform. Not yet the bubbly-poppin’ party man, the Jay-Z of Reasonable Doubt is a corner-boy inventing new levels of lyrical dexterity. Once it dropped, hip-hop’s center of gravity had fully shifted from the West Coast back to the East.

Pavement were the quintessential American independent rock band, and this is the quintessential indie-rock album. The playing is loose-limbed, the production laid-back and primitive, the lyrics quirky and playful, the melodies sweet and seductive. But the sound is as intense as the white noise of the Velvet Underground. Recorded on the super-cheap in Brooklyn and in their thirtysomething drummer’s Stockton, California studio, Slanted and Enchanted is one of the most influential rock albums of the 1990s; its fuzzy recording style can be heard in the music of Nirvana, Liz Phair, Beck, the Strokes and the White Stripes.

Brown Sugar is one of a handful of albums cited as the starting point for the neo-soul movement of the ’90s and early 2000s. (Meshell Ndegeocello’s Plantation Lullabies is another.) D’Angelo offered songs that evoked smoky nightclubs and jazz bands riffing late into the night, and made for a vibe with uncommon depth. Whether covering Smokey Robinson’s “Cruisin’” or offering the relatively straightforward R&B love jam “Lady,” he exuded a funky, soulful presence that felt exciting and new. When he debuted in the public eye with the marijuana haze of lead single “Brown Sugar,” it was clear that his sound was one of the past and future.

She was only 16, but this girl got the whole world listening to the teardrops on her guitar. Make no mistake: if Taylor Swift retired right after dropping her debut album, she’d still be remembered as a legend today. It was a total shock to hear the ingenious twang of “Our Song” on your car radio in 2006. But it was an equally severe shock to realize the singer was a teen country virtuoso who wrote it all by herself as a high-school freshman. Taylor debuted with complete mastery of a genre she was also completely transforming.

Nas was only 20 when he released his debut but he was already a master in the art of storytelling. Nobody captured the creeping menace of life on the streets like this lyrical prodigy from New York’s Queensbridge projects. With spotless beats from Large Professor, DJ Premier, Pete Rock, and lyrical assists from Q-Tip, the album has a no-bullshit concision that fits its stark subject matter, and quotable lines like “I never sleep, ’cause sleep is the cousin of death,” got Nas tagged as the next Rakim. Everyone was on point. Even guest rapper AZ, who never had much of a career, delivered like Domino’s on “Life’s a Bitch”: “We were beginners in the hood as Five Percenters/But something musta got in us, cuz all of us turned to sinners.” It was the dawn of a hard new era.

No band has ever knocked out a debut so packed with straight-to-car-radio classics. “We used to joke that the first album should be called TheCars’ Greatest Hits,” said guitarist Elliot Easton. The Cars was arty and punchy enough to be part of Boston’s New Wave scene and yet so catchy that nearly every track (“My Best Friend’s Girl,” “Just What I Needed”) was like a brilliant single. The very idea that cool refinement and feathered-hair heartland appeal could exist together was minted here. Bands from Weezer to the Strokes to Fountains of Wayne are unthinkable without this album’s example.

He was already a Hall of Fame-worthy beatmaker—the inventor of “Chipmunk Soul”—but Kanye West wanted to rap, and in 2004 Jay-Z, West’s mentor and Roc-A-Fella Records major domo, let the guy record his debut. The result was hip-hop like no one had heard it before: riotous gospel (“Jesus Walks”), wild boudoir music (“Slow Jamz”), tear-jerking family drama (“Family Business”). It was a sound that combined, as Kanye put it, “a Benz and a backpack,” fretting over materialism even as it reveled in it. All this, plus “Through the Wire,” the greatest song ever rapped through a jaw that was wired shut.

SZA’s excellent first album luxuriated in the conversational intimacy of spacey, low-key songs that took their sweet, slow time to render their raw epiphanies. SZA drew from her own very real experiences with bracing honesty: “Let me tell you a secret/I been secretly banging your homeboy/Why you in Vegas all up on Valentine’s Day?” she fully disclosed on “Supermodel.” Elsewhere, “Drew Barrymore” turned a riff on the actress into a metaphor for her own sense of self, and songs like “The Weekend” and “Love Galore” took on the thorny romantic subjects most singers wouldn’t have the guts to go near. She came out looking like a hero. 

On their first album, Led Zeppelin were still in the process of inventing their own sound, moving on from the heavy rave-ups of guitarist Jimmy Page‘s previous band, the Yardbirds. But from the beginning, Zeppelin had the astonishing fusion of Page’s lyrical guitar playing and Robert Plant‘s paint-peeling love-hound yowl. “We were learning what got us off most and what got people off most,” said Plant. Yet the template for everything Zeppelin achieved in the 1970s is here: brutal rock (“Communication Breakdown”), thundering power balladry (“Your Time Is Gonna Come”), acid-flavored folk blues (“Babe I’m Gonna Leave You”).

It took most of the decade and several false starts for DMX to finally get his moment. The Yonkers MC’s debut album, It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot, arrived just as audiences were tiring of disco-inflected “shiny suit” sounds and hungered for something gritty and authentic. He provided plenty of both: He rocked clubs with rowdy bangers like “Ruff Ryders’ Anthem,” “Get at Me Dog,” and “Stop Being Greedy.” But it was his songs filled with Christian iconography, from spiritual angst like “Let Me Fly” to perverse horrorcore like “Damien” and “X Is Coming,” that helped give his precipitous but hardly overnight rise deep resonance to a generation of rap fans.

In the age of Alanis and Jewel, the airwaves were crawling with troubled ingénues singing tragic ballads about their haunted eyes, but Fiona Apple stood out as a bad, bad girl. Apple was still in her teens when she made Tidal, but the New York art waif’s husky voice and jazzy piano gave her confessions a surprisingly adult tone. She also came up with a knockdown theme song in “Criminal,” the tale of a young woman who’s been careless with a delicate man and even more careless with her delicate self. Tidal was just the beginning — and Apple has kept topping herself artistically ever since.

After years of knocking around Ohio and England, writing record reviews and hanging with the Sex Pistols, Chrissie Hynde put together a band as tough as her attitude. The Pretenders’ perfect debut is filled with no-nonsense New Wave rock like “Mystery Achievement” – plus a cover of “Stop Your Sobbing,” by the Kinks‘ Ray Davies (three years later, the father of Hynde’s child). The biggest hit was “Brass in Pocket,” a song of ambition and seduction. Hynde, however, wasn’t so sure about the song’s success. “I was embarrassed by it,” she said. “I hated it so much that if I was in Woolworth’s and they started playing it, I’d have to run out of the store.”

“If the sessions had gone the way I wanted, it would have been unlistenable for most people,” Johnny Rotten said. “I guess it’s the very nature of music: If you want people to listen, you’re going to have to compromise.” But few heard it that way at the time; The Pistols’ only studio album terrified a whole nation into scared submission. It sounds like a rejection of everything rock & roll – and the world itself – had to offer. True, the music was less shocking than Rotten himself, who sang about abortions, anarchy and hatred on “Bodies” and “Anarchy in the U.K.” But Never Mind . . . is the Sermon on the Mount of U.K. punk – and its echoes are everywhere.

22-year-old singer-guitar punisher Polly Jean Harvey dropped her ferocious debut just six months after Nirvana‘s game-changing Nevermind. But this English rock’n’roll trio invented an alternate type of raw power to Seattle grunge, whether Harvey was breathlessly singing “I’m happy I’m bleeding” over Captain Beefheart slide guitar blooze riffing, easing herself metaphorically into a body-bag (“Plants and Rags”), or spinning a psychosexually amped-up remake of the Samson and Delilah myth. Biblical passion never rocked so hard. “I put everything I had into it,” she said years later. “It was a very extreme record.” It still is.

The Beatles recorded 10 of the 14 songs on their British debut album at EMI’s Abbey Road studio in just over 12 hours on February 11th, 1963. For productivity alone, it’s one of the greatest first albums in rock. The Beatles had already invented a bracing new sound for a rock band – an assault of thrumming energy and impeccable vocal harmonies – and they nailed it using the covers and originals in their live repertoire: the Shirelles‘ “Boys” and Arthur Alexander’s “Anna”; the Lennon–McCartney burners “There’s a Place” and “I Saw Her Standing There.” John Lennon finished up by shredding what was left of his vocal cords on two takes of “Twist and Shout.”

Cardi B’s first two Gangsta Bitch Music mixtapes seemed par for the course for a breakout star of the long-running Love & Hip-Hop reality-TV franchise. Few expected her to subsequently blow up with “Bodak Yellow,” her chart-topping flip of Kodak Black’s “No Flockin” … or subsequently take over the charts with Invasion of Privacy. One of the biggest pop explosions of 2018, it alternates between Bloods-inspired hood fare like “Bickenhead,” the summery Latin anthem “I Like It,” and high-wattage collaborations with Migos, SZA, and Kehlani. Through it all, Cardi B stuns with bluster and charisma, a Nuyorican hero unashamed of her humble origins and ready to exceed all expectations.

This breathtaking 1979 set was to punk what The Velvet Underground & Nico was to psychedelia – a reveal of the seething dark underbelly of a cultural movement. Produced by Martin Hannett, who makes the band sound like they’re performing in a meat cooler, it introduces Ian Curtis, who wails the Manchester existential blues with a despair so powerful, it somehow transcends hopelessness (when he sings “I’ve got the spirit,” on the amazing Arctic-chunnel of an album-opener “Disorder,” it’s as thrilling as it is blood-chilling). A model for countless brooding rock bands to come.

Few bands have packaged themselves as brilliantly as the Strokes on their debut. Before Is This It even came out, New York’s mod ragamuffins were overnight sensations, jumping from Avenue A to press hysteria and the inevitable backlash, all inside a year. Julian Casablancas, guitarists Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr., bassist Nikolai Fraiture and drummer Fabrizio Moretti were primed for star time, updating the propulsion of the Velvet Underground and the jangle of Seventies punk with Casablancas’ acidic dispatches from last night’s wreckage. They inspired a ragged revolt in Britain, led by the Libertines and Arctic Monkeys, and reverberated back home with the Kings of Leon. And for the bristling half-hour of Is This It, New York’s shadows sounded vicious and exciting again.

They played punk clubs, and sang about neighborhoods thousands of miles from Kingston. And when the band first came to Jamaica, they weren’t universally welcomed. It’s wild in retrospect, because Steel Pulse is responsible for reggae’s greatest debut album — and its first international classic. Handsworth Revolution captures a band fully formed and fully great, with haunting harmonies, prog-rock virtuosity, and rhythms that pushed the beat instead of sinking into it. Depending on the tune, the band owed as much to the Family Stone or Funkadelic than to the Wailers. But the lyrics were straight from the roots: “Give I back I witch doctor/Give I back I Black ruler/Me no want no dictator/Me no want no tyrant on yah.” Before long, songs like “Soldiers,” “Ku Klux Klan,” and the title track entered the reggae canon. And the entire planet — Jamaica included — recognized Steel Pulse as music royalty.

The artist herself would later dismiss the post-disco pop on her debut as “the aerobics album.” But it didn’t just succeed in introducing the most important female voice in the history of modern music, it’s also aged much better sonically than Like A Virgin, her blockbuster 1984 follow-up. Loaded with hits like “Borderline” and “Holiday” (the latter produced by her then-boyfriend, John “Jellybean” Benitez) and the great communal anthem “Everybody,” it put downtown New York electro grooves all over the Top 40. Fun fact: it also works great as aerobics music.

Laid-back and diamond-sharp, Rakim was the finest rapper of the Eighties, and this album is a big reason why. Paid in Full was one of the first hip-hop records to fully embrace Seventies funk samples on stone classics such as “I Know You Got Soul” and the title track. But it was Rakim’s impossibly cool voice and seemingly effortless flow that stunned listeners, along with the fearlessness of lines like: “It’s been a long time, I shouldn’t have left you/Without a strong rhyme to step to/ Think of how many weak shows you slept through.”

Every rootsy rock guy ever owes something to this record, a bold embrace of American tradition and down-to-earth simplicity released into an era of protest and psychedelia. “Big Pink” was a pink house in Woodstock, New York, where the Band – Dylan‘s ’65-66 backup band on tour – moved to be near Dylan after his motorcycle accident. While he recuperated, the Band backed him on the demos later known as The Basement Tapes and made its own debut. Dylan offered to play on the album; the Band said no thanks. “We didn’t want to just ride his shirttail,” drummer Levon Helm said. Dylan contributed “I Shall Be Released” and co-wrote two other tunes. But it was the rustic beauty of the Band’s music and the incisive drama of its own reflections on family and obligations, such as “The Weight,” that made Big Pink an instant homespun classic.

Frank Ocean seeded the ground for his debut with the stunning mixtape Nostalgia Ultra, and made good on the promise of that release here, stretching out his progressive R&B vision over the golden hour of Channel Orange. The level of ambition recalled Stevie Wonder and Prince, from the impossibly lovely slow-reveal falsetto ache of “Thinkin Bout You,” to the electro-funk psychedelia of the nine-minute “Pyramids,” to the Elton John and Mary J Blige-referencing L.A. story “Rich Kids,” to the gospel-tinged late-night cab-ride monologue “Bad Religion,” which looked back on an unrequited relationship with a man and in doing so changed the romantic possibilities of pop music forever. 

Twin brothers Pusha T and Malice struggled to land a foothold in the rap world, and even recorded a shelved 1999 album Exclusive Audio Footage before longtime friends the Neptunes finally had enough industry juice to launch them properly with Lord Willin’. The ominous, car-rattling percussion of the first single, “Grindin’,” was all it took to define Clipse as a major early-aughts force. They were a group that not only dazzled rap-heads with intricate wordplay, but also smashed nightclubs with flashy, kinetic bangers like “When’s the Last Time.” The angular way Pusha T and Malice rhymed about slanging coke and macking girls in Virginia over the Neptunes’ bouncy keyboard funk sparkled with illicit freshness.

R.E.M.
I.R.S. 1983

“We wanted to have this kind of timeless record,” guitarist Peter Buck said of R.E.M.’s debut, and this “technically limited” band (according to producer Don Dixon) did just that. Buck was a rock scholar who had worked in a record store; singer Michael Stipe unspooled his lyrics as if they constituted some new secret language. Murmur is full of ringing guitar and mystery. The lyrics and the melodies seem buried, almost subliminal, and even the songs with something approximating hooks, such as “Radio Free Europe” and “Sitting Still,” resist clarity. Murmur was a founding document of alternative rock, released just as Gen X was heading off to college.

It was pretty much impossible to hang around a cool girl’s dorm room in the mid 1990s and not see this indie-rock landmark on the CD shelf. A studio expansion of Phair’s homemade Girlysound tape, Exile was a stunning double album that sounded like its songs had gone from her firecracker brainstem straight to tape with the only slightest guitar-drums mediation. The barebones songcraft caused as much of a stir as her frank sex talk on “Flower” and “Glory.” But it’s the lacerating honesty of tracks such as “Divorce Song” that sticks, and “Fuck and Run” is one of the saddest songs ever written about dreaming of romance and settling for less.

“I haven’t got any illusions about anything,” Joe Strummer said. “Having said that, I still want to try to change things.” That youthful ambition bursts through The Clash, a machine-gun blast of shockingly great songs about unemployment (“Career Opportunities”), race (“White Riot”) and the Clash themselves (“Clash City Rockers”). Most of the guitar was played by Mick Jones, because Strummer considered studio technique insufficiently punk. The American release was delayed two years and replaced some of the U.K. tracks with recent singles, including “Complete Control” – a complaint about exactly that sort of record-company shenanigans. Still, both UK and US versions distill their radical vision with a crystal clarity.

The biggest-selling debut album of the Eighties and the biggest hard-rock game-changer since Led Zeppelin IV, Appetite features a lot more than the yowl of Indiana-bred W. Axl Rose. Guitarist Slash gave the band blues emotion and punk energy, while the rhythm section brought the funk on hits such as “Welcome to the Jungle.” When all the elements came together, as in the final two minutes of “Paradise City,” G N’ R left all other Eighties metal bands in the dust, and they knew it too. “A lot of rock bands are too fucking wimpy to have any sentiment or any emotion,” Rose said. “Unless they’re in pain.”

A less-grounded artist might have buckled under the staggering kind of hype and pressure that surrounded Billie Eilish before she dropped her debut album. But the teen anti-idol, just 17 at the time, kicked off the dark goth-gloom of When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? with a guzzle of spit and a laugh, recording the exact moment her braces got taken off: “I have taken out my Invisalign and this is the album!” she shouted gleefully before launching into a haunting, hissing collection inspired by nightmares and adolescent angst. Her brother’s beats, spun together in their L.A. childhood home, doubled the power of her whispered vocals, landing a sound so eerie and spine-chillingly lithe, it made the pop scene tremble.

Every idea we have of the guitarist as groundbreaking individual artist comes from this record. It’s what Britain sounded like in late 1966 and early 1967: ablaze with rainbow blues, orchestral guitar feedback and the personal cosmic vision of black American émigré Jimi Hendrix. Hendrixs incendiary guitar was historic in itself, the luminescent sum of his chitlin-circuit labors with Little Richard and the Isley Brothers and his melodic exploitation of amp howl. But it was the pictorial heat of songs like “Manic Depression” and “The Wind Cries Mary” that established the transcendent promise of psychedelia. Hendrix made soul music for inner space. “It’s a collection of free feeling and imagination,” he said of the album. “Imagination is very important.”

From its first defiant line, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,” the opening shot in a bold reinvention of Van Morrison‘s garage-rock classic “Gloria,” Smith’s debut album was a declaration of committed mutiny, a statement of faith in the transfigurative powers of rock & roll. Horses made her the queen of punk, but Smith cared more for the poetry in rock. She sought the visions and passions that connected Keith Richards and Rimbaud – and found them, with the intuitive assistance of a killing band (pianist Richard Sohl, guitarist Lenny Kaye, bassist Ivan Kral and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty) and her friend Robert Mapplethorpe, who shot the cover portrait.

East Coast hip-hop made a return in 1993, thanks to a nine-man troupe of Staten Island, New York, MCs with a fascination for Hong Kong martial-arts mythology and producer RZA’s love of menacing atmospherics. Hip-hop had been harder, but it had rarely been this dirty. Steeped in dusty soul samples and spine-crawling pianos, the RZA’s epochal beats seem to hang suspended in billows of weed smoke, the perfect lush, menacing ambient for the project-stairwell grandstanding of Raekwon, GZA, Method Man, Ghostface Killah, et al. As the Nineties progressed, the Wu would infect the rest of hip-hop and R&B like an unshakable virus.

Much of what we take for granted in rock would not exist without this New York band or its debut, The Velvet Underground and Nico: the androgynous sexuality of glam; punk’s raw noir; the blackened-riff howl of grunge and noise rock. It is a record of fearless breadth and lyric depth. Singer-songwriter Lou Reed documented carnal desire and drug addiction with a pop wisdom he learned as a song-factory composer for Pickwick Records. Multi-instrumentalist John Cale introduced the power of pulse and drone (from his work in early minimalism); guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen Tucker played with tribal force; Nico, a German vocalist briefly added to the band by manager Andy Warhol, brought an icy femininity to the heated ennui in Reed’s songs. Rejected as nihilistic by the love crowd in ’67, the Banana Album (so named for its Warhol-designed cover), is the most prophetic rock album ever made.

“At the time I was making the album,” B.I.G. told Rolling Stone in 1995, “I was just waking up every morning, hustling, cutting school, looking out for my moms, the police, stickup kids; just risking my life every day on the street selling drugs, you know what I’m saying?” B.I.G. (a.k.a. Biggie Smalls) took all that gritty life experience and crammed it into Ready to Die, the best record by the greatest rapper who ever lived and hip-hop’s finest debut by a stretch. “Big Poppa” is the hit sex jam; on “Things Done Changed” and “Everyday Struggle,” he relates gangsta tales in a voice as thick as his waistline. “I’m definitely a writer,” Biggie said. “I don’t even know how to freestyle.”

“Our early songs came out of our real feelings of alienation, isolation, frustration – the feelings everybody feels between seventeen and seventy-five,” said singer Joey Ramone. Clocking in at just under twenty-nine minutes, Ramones is a complete rejection of the spangled artifice of 1970s rock and ground zero for the punk-rock revolution. The songs were fast and anti-social, just like the band: “Beat on the Brat,” ”Blitzkrieg Bop,” ”Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue.” Guitarist Johnny Ramone refused to play solos – his jackhammer chords became the lingua franca of punk – and the whole record cost just over $6000 to make. But Joey’s leather-tender plea “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” showed that even punks need love.