TOP TEN ALBUM OF ALL TIME

1.Dark Side of the Moon - Pink Floyd

The Dark Side of the Moon is the eighth studio album by the English progressive rock band Pink Floyd, released on 1 March 1973. It built on ideas explored in the band's earlier recordings and live shows, but lacks the extended instrumental excursions that characterised their work following the departure in 1968 of founder member, principal composer, and lyricist, Syd Barrett. The themes on The Dark Side of the Moon include conflict, greed, the passage of time, and mental illness, the latter partly inspired by Barrett's deteriorating mental state.

Developed during live performances, an early version of the suite was premiered several months before studio recording began; new material was recorded in two sessions in 1972 and 1973 at Abbey Road Studios in London. The group used some of the most advanced recording techniques of the time, including multitrack recording and tape loops. Analogue synthesizers were given prominence in several tracks, and a series of recorded interviews with the band's road crew and others provided the philosophical quotations used throughout. Engineer Alan Parsons was responsible for some of the album's most notable sonic aspects and the recruitment of non-lexical singer Clare Torry. The album's iconic sleeve, designed by Storm Thorgerson, features a prism dispersing light into color and represents the band's stage lighting, the record's lyrical themes, and keyboardist Richard Wright's request for a "simple and bold" design.

The Dark Side of the Moon was an immediate success; it topped the Billboard Top LPs & Tapes chart for one week and remained in the charts for 741 weeks from 1973 to 1988. With an estimated 50 million copies sold, it is Pink Floyd's most commercially successful album and one of the best-selling albums worldwide. It has twice been remastered and re-released, and has been covered in its entirety by several other acts. It produced two singles, "Money" and "Time". The Dark Side of the Moon is Pink Floyd's most popular album among fans and critics, and has been ranked as one of the greatest albums of all time.

2.Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - The Beatles

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the eighth studio album by the English rock band the Beatles. Released on 1 June 1967, it was an immediate commercial and critical success, spending 27 weeks at the top of the albums chart in the United Kingdom and 15 weeks at number one in the United States. Time magazine declared it "a historic departure in the progress of music" and theNew Statesman praised its elevation of pop to the level of fine art. It won four Grammy Awards in 1968, including Album of the Year, the first rock LP to receive this honour.

In August 1966, the Beatles permanently retired from touring and began a three-month holiday from recording. During a return flight to London in November, Paul McCartney had an idea for a song involving an Edwardian era military band that would eventually form the impetus of the Sgt. Pepper concept. Sessions for the Beatles' eighth studio album began on 24 November in Abbey Road Studio Two with two compositions inspired from their youth, "Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Penny Lane", but after pressure from EMI, the songs were released as a double A-side single; they were not included on the album.

In February 1967, after recording "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", McCartney suggested that the Beatles should release an entire album that would represent a performance by the fictional Sgt. Pepper band. This alter ego group would give them the freedom to experiment musically. During the recording sessions, the band endeavoured to improve upon the production quality of their prior releases. Knowing they would not have to perform the tracks live, they adopted an experimental approach to composition, writing songs such as "With a Little Help from My Friends", "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "A Day in the Life". Producer George Martin's innovative recording of the album included the liberal application of sound shaping signal processing and the use of a 40-piece orchestra performing aleatoric crescendos. Recording was completed on 21 April 1967. The cover, depicting the band posing in front of a tableau of celebrities and historical figures, was designed by the British pop artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth.

Sgt. Pepper is regarded by musicologists as an early concept album that advanced the use of extended form in popular music while continuing the artistic maturation seen on the Beatles' preceding releases. It has been described as one of the first art rock LPs, aiding the development of progressive rock, and credited with marking the beginning of the Album Era. An important work of Britishpsychedelia, the album incorporates a range of stylistic influences, including vaudeville, circus, music hall, avant-garde, and Westernand Indian classical music. In 2003, the Library of Congress placed Sgt. Pepper in the National Recording Registry, honouring the work as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". That same year, Rolling Stone magazine ranked it number one in its list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". As of 2014, it has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling albums in history. Professor Kevin J. Dettmar, writing in the Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, described it as "the most important and influential rock and roll album ever recorded".

3.Led Zeppelin IV (aka ZOSO) - Led Zeppelin

The untitled fourth studio album by the English rock band Led Zeppelin, commonly referred to as Led Zeppelin IV, was released on 8 November 1971 on Atlantic Records. Produced by guitarist Jimmy Page, it was recorded between December 1970 and March 1971 at several locations, most prominently the Victorian house Headley Grange.

After the group's 1970 album Led Zeppelin III received lukewarm reviews from critics, Page decided their fourth album would officially be untitled. This, along with the inner sleeve's design featuring four symbols that represented each band member, led to the album being referred to variously as , Four Symbols, The Fourth Album, Untitled, Runes, The Hermit, and ZoSo (which was derived from Page's symbol). In addition to lacking a title, the original cover featured no band name, as the group wished to be anonymous and to avoid easy pigeonholing by the press.

Led Zeppelin IV was a commercial and critical success, producing many of the band's most well-known songs, including "Black Dog", "Rock and Roll", "Misty Mountain Hop", "Going to California", and the band's signature song, "Stairway to Heaven". The album is one of the best-selling albums worldwide at 37 million units,and with a 23-times platinum certification by the Recording Industry Association of America, it is the fourth-best-selling album in the United States.Writers and critics have regularly cited it on lists of rock's greatest album

4.Thriller - Michael Jackson

Thriller is the sixth studio album by the American singer Michael Jackson. It was released on November 30, 1982, by Epic Records, as the follow-up to Jackson's critically and commercially successful 1979 album Off the Wall. Thriller explores similar genres to those of Off the Wall, including pop, post-disco, rock and funk. Recording sessions took place on April to November 1982 at Westlake Recording Studios in Los Angeles with a production budget of $750,000, assisted by producer Quincy Jones.

Of the album's nine tracks, four were written by Jackson. Seven singles were released from the album, all of which reached the top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100. Three of the singles had music videos released. "Baby Be Mine" and "The Lady in My Life" were the only tracks that were not released as singles. In just over a year, Thriller became—and currently remains—the best-selling album of all time, with estimate sales of 65 million copies worldwide according to various sources.In the United States, it is the best-selling album and has become the first album ever to be certified 30 times multi-platinum for U.S. sales, marking more than 30 million sales shipped. The album won a record-breaking eight Grammy Awards in 1984, including for Album of the Year.

Thriller enabled Jackson to break down racial barriers in pop music via his appearances on MTV and meeting with President of the United States Ronald Reagan at the White House. The album was one of the first to use music videos as successful promotional tools—the videos for "Thriller", "Billie Jean" and "Beat It" all received regular rotation on MTV. In 2001, a special edition issue of the album was released, which contains additional audio interviews, demo recordings and the song "Someone in the Dark", which was a Grammy-winning track from the E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial storybook. In 2008, the album was reissued again as Thriller 25, containing re-mixes that feature contemporary artists, a previously unreleased song and a DVD, which features the short films from the album and the Motown 25 performance of "Billie Jean". That same year the album was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Famealong with Jackson's Off The Wall LP.

Thriller was ranked number 20 on Rolling Stone magazine's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list in 2003,and was listed by theNational Association of Recording Merchandisers at number three in its "Definitive 200" albums of all time. The Thriller album was included in the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry of culturally significant recordings and the Thriller video was included in the National Film Preservation Board's National Film Registry of "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films". In 2012, Slant Magazine listed the album at number one on its list of "Best Albums of the 1980s"

5.Abbey Road - The Beatles

Abbey Road is the 11th studio album by the English rock band the Beatles, released on 26 September 1969 in the United Kingdom and on 1 October 1969 in the United States. The recording sessions for the album were the last in which all four Beatles participated. Although Let It Be was the final album that the Beatles completed before the band's dissolution in April 1970, most of the album had been recorded before the Abbey Road sessions began. A double A-side single from the album, "Something"/"Come Together", released in October, topped the Billboard chart in the US.

Abbey Road is a rock albumthat incorporates genres such as blues, pop and progressive rock,and it makes prominent use of the Moog synthesizer and the Leslie speaker. Side two contains a medley of song fragments edited together to form a single piece. The album was recorded amidst a more collegial atmosphere than the Get Back/Let It Be sessions earlier in the year, but there were still frequent confrontations within the band, particularly over Paul McCartney's song "Maxwell's Silver Hammer", one of four tracks on which John Lennon did not perform. He had privately left the group by the time the album was released and McCartney publicly quit the following year.

Although Abbey Road was an immediate commercial success and reached number one in the UK and US, it received mixed reviews, with some critics describing its music as inauthentic and bemoaning the production's artificial effects. Many critics now view the album as the Beatles' best and rank it as one of the greatest albums of all time. In particular, George Harrison's contributions, "Something" and "Here Comes the Sun", are considered to be among the best songs he wrote for the group. The album's cover features the four band members walking across a zebra crossing outside Abbey Road Studios and has become one of the most famous and imitated images in the history of recorded music. As of 2009, Abbey Road remains the Beatles' best-selling album.

6.Nevermind - Nirvana

Nevermind is the second studio album by the American rock band Nirvana, released on September 24, 1991. Produced by Butch Vig, Nevermind was the group's first release on DGC Records. Frontman Kurt Cobain sought to make music outside the restrictive confines of the Seattle grunge scene, drawing influence from groups such as the Pixies and their use of "loud/quiet" dynamics. It is their first album to feature drummer Dave Grohl.

Despite low commercial expectations by the band and its record label, Nevermind became a surprise success in late 1991, largely due to the popularity of its first single, "Smells Like Teen Spirit". By January 1992, it had replaced Michael Jackson's albumDangerous at number one on the Billboard 200 chart. The album also produced three other successful singles: "Come as You Are", "Lithium", and "In Bloom". The Recording Industry Association of America has certified the album diamond (at least 10 million copies shipped), and the album has sold at least 24 million copies worldwide. Nevermind was in part responsible for bringing bothalternative rock and grunge to a large, mainstream audience, and has been ranked highly on lists of the greatest albums of all time by publications such as Rolling Stone and Time.

7.Revolver - The Beatles

Revolver is the seventh studio album by the English rock band the Beatles. It was released on 5 August 1966 in the United Kingdom and three days later in the United States. The album marked a progression from their 1965 release Rubber Soul and heralded the band's arrival as studio innovators, a year before the seminal Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. On release, Revolver was widely recognised by critics as having redefined the parameters of popular music, yet its reception in America was muted initially, due to the controversy surrounding John Lennon's statement that the Beatles had become "bigger than Jesus". The album's diverse influences and sounds include the incorporation of tape loops on the experimental "Tomorrow Never Knows", the use of a classicalstring octet on "Eleanor Rigby", and the Indian-music setting of "Love You To". Together with the children's novelty song "Yellow Submarine", "Eleanor Rigby" became an international hit when issued as a double A-side single.

The album's Grammy Award-winning cover design was created by Klaus Voormann, one of the Beatles' friends from their fledgling years in Hamburg. In the UK, Revolver's fourteen tracks were released to radio stations throughout July 1966, with the music signifying what author Ian MacDonald later described as "a radical new phase in the group's recording career". Aside from innovations such as varispeeding, reversed tapes, and close audio miking, the sessions for the album resulted in the invention ofautomatic double tracking (ADT), a technique that was soon adopted throughout the recording industry. The sessions also produced a non-album single, "Paperback Writer" backed with "Rain", for which the Beatles filmed their first on-location promotional films.

The record spent 34 weeks on the UK Albums Chart, for seven of which it held the number one spot.^[2] Reduced to eleven songs for the North American market, Revolver was the last Beatles album to be subjected to Capitol Records' policy of altering the band's intended running order and content. Its US release coincided with the Beatles' final concert tour, during which they refrained from performing any of the songs live. In America, the album topped the Billboard Top LPs listings for six weeks.

Revolver was ranked first in Colin Larkin's book All-Time Top 1000 Albums and third in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. A remastered CD of the album was released on 9 September 2009. In 2013, after the British Phonographic Industry had changed its sales award rules, Revolver was certified platinum in the UK. The album has been certified 5x platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America.

8.The Wall - Pink Floyd

The Wall is the eleventh studio album by the English progressive rock band Pink Floyd. It is the last studio album released with the classic lineup of guitarist David Gilmour, bassist/lyricist Roger Waters, keyboardist Richard Wright and drummer Nick Mason before Wright left the band. Released as a double album on 30 November 1979, it was supported by a tour with elaborate theatrical effects, and adapted into a 1982 feature film, Pink Floyd – The Wall. The album features the band's only number one single; "Another Brick in the Wall Part 2".

As with Pink Floyd's previous three albums, The Wall is a concept album and explores themes of abandonment and personal isolation. The album is a rock opera that follows Pink, a character whom Waters modelled after himself and the band's original leader, Syd Barrett. Pink's life begins with the loss of his father during the Second World War and continues with abuse from his schoolteachers, an overprotective mother, and the breakdown of his marriage; all contribute to his eventual self-imposed isolation from society, represented by a metaphorical wall. Waters conceived the album during Pink Floyd's 1977 In the Flesh Tour, when his frustration with the audience became so acute that he imagined a wall between the audience and the stage.

The Wall features a harsher and more theatrical style than Pink Floyd's previous albums. Wright left the band during its production but remained as a salaried musician, performing with Pink Floyd during the Wall tour. The album was one of the best selling of 1980, and by 1999 it had sold over 23 million RIAA-certified units (11.5 million albums), making it the third highest certified album in the United States.Rolling Stone placed The Wall at number 87 on its list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time".

9.A Night at the Opera - Queen

A Night at the Opera is the fourth studio album by the British rock band Queen, released in November 1975. Co-produced by Roy Thomas Baker and Queen, it was the most expensive album ever recorded at the time of its release. The album takes its name from the Marx Brothers film A Night at the Opera, which the band watched one night at the studio complex when recording. The album was originally released by EMI in the United Kingdom, where it topped the UK Albums Chart for four non-consecutive weeks, and Elektra Records in the United States, where it peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard 200 and became the band's first platinum selling album in the US. The worldwide sales for the album are currently over 6 million copies.

A Night at the Opera has been voted by the public and cited by music publications as Queen's finest work and many critics consider it the band's definitive album. It incorporates a wide range of styles, from ballads and music hall style songs to hard rock numbers and progressive rock influences. It also produced the band's most successful single in the UK, "Bohemian Rhapsody", which went on to become their first UK number one and one of the best-selling singles in both the UK and the world

10.Pet Sounds - The Beach Boys

Pet Sounds is the 11th studio album by the American rock band the Beach Boys. Released on May 16, 1966, it met a lukewarm critical and commercial reception in the United States, but received immediate success abroad, where British publications declared it "the most progressive pop album ever". It charted at number two in the UK but number ten in the US, a significantly lower placement than the band's preceding albums. In later years, Pet Sounds garnered enormous worldwide acclaim by critics and musicians alike, and is regarded as one of the most influential albums in the history of popular music.

The album was produced and arranged by Brian Wilson, who also wrote and composed almost all of its music, with an unprecedented budget exceeding $70,000 (today over $510,000). Sessions were conducted several months after he had quittouring with the Beach Boys in order to focus his attention on writing and recording. Collaborating with lyricist Tony Asher, Wilson's symphonic arrangements wove elaborate layers of vocal harmonies, coupled with sound effects and unconventional instruments such as bicycle bells, buzzing organs, harpsichords, flutes, Electro-Theremin, dog whistles, trains, Hawaiian-sounding string instruments, Coca-Cola cans and barking dogs, along with the more usual keyboards and guitars. Together, they comprised Wilson's "pet sounds", incorporating elements of jazz, exotica, classical, and the avant-garde. It was led by the singles "Wouldn't It Be Nice" (backed with "God Only Knows") and "Sloop John B", while Wilson made his solo debut with "Caroline, No", issued a few months earlier. Due to its highly personal, artistic nature, Pet Sounds is sometimes considered a Brian Wilson solo album in all but name.

A heralding work in the emerging psychedelic rock style, Pet Sounds signaled an aesthetic trend within rock by transforming it from dance music into music that was made for listening to, elevating itself to the level of art rock.It was one of the first rockconcept albums, and has been suggested to follow a lyrical song cycle format,although Wilson has maintained that the album's real unified theme lies within its cohesive production style.Writer Bill Martin said that within Pet Sounds, "[The Beach Boys] brought expansions in harmony, instrumentation (and therefore timbre), duration, rhythm, and the use of recording technology. Of these elements, the first and last were the most important in clearing a pathway toward the development of progressive rock."Beyond pop and rock, Pet Sounds expanded the field of music production.

Several publications have deemed it "the greatest album of all time", including NME, The Times, Mojo, and Uncut In 2003, Rolling Stone ranked it second on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. In 2004, Pet Sounds was preserved in theNational Recording Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."In 1997, The Pet Sounds Sessions was released containing instrumental tracks, vocals-only tracks, alternate mixes, outtakes, and edited recording session highlights, as well as the album's first true stereo mix.