Every album I’ve ever encountered seems to have a mixture of bangers and one or more meh or outright flops. It’s easier than ever to skip over the tracks now, but as the question asks: what’s is, in your opinion, the perfect album, or does one/can one even exist?

  • southsamurai
    9·
    7 months ago

    No, but there can be perfect albums for an individual.

    For me, there’s a decent number. I tend to have broad taste in music, so I have the advantage of genre access in this kind of thing.

    Master of Puppets, Metallica, was the first perfect album I ran across. Not a single track I wanted to skip, and it’s still pretty much impossible for me to make a playlist that includes Metallica that doesn’t have the entire album on it. For years, I would play it to go to sleep to, my tape deck could auto flip, so I would just dub a few from the vinyl (showing my age here lol) and use them for that.

    Iron Maiden’s Somewhere in Time is another.

    Adele, 21 is brilliant from front to back.

    Tracy Chapman, New Beginning is a fucking masterpiece.

    Springsteen’s Born in the USA is perfect.

    Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, the album by that name is a great one.

    Depeche Mode, Violator. There’s not a stinker on it.

    Guns & Roses, Appetite for Destruction was and is a perfect album for sure.

    John Lennon did it with Imagine, though barely; there are a couple of tracks that aren’t as good as the rest, but they’re still amazing overall.

    Linkin Park could have two; One More Light is definitely perfect in my ears, and hybrid theory is right there with it, though I don’t mind skipping a couple of tracks off of HT sometimes.

    Nappy Roots managed a perfect hip-hop album (which isn’t actually easy with me) in Watermelon, Chicken and Grits. Sublimely perfect southern rap. Every track a winner.

    Biggie did Ready to Die, and I’d argue it’s the second best hip-hop album of all time.

    The greatest is Run-DMC with Raising Hell. How can you top that album as a whole? Every track a banger, every rhyme a killer.

    The list could go on. Obviously, I tend to lean into rock, metal, and hip-hop as my most listened genres, but there’s at least one album for me in almost any genre. I’m sure if I delved deeper in some, I would find more.