1001(+) Albums I Had to Hear Before I Die, Apparently

1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die is a reference book edited by English music writer Robert Dimery. First published in 2005, this book (and the list of albums contained therein) is one of several attempts that have been made over the past few decades by various music writers and publications to document the album era of music history (roughly speaking, the late 1940s to the present day) as comprehensively as possible. There’s Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time, and many similar lists from competing publications (even music tech companies have gotten in on it); Colin Larkin’s All Time Top 1000 Albums, which was decided by public polling; and Tom Moon’s 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die, which includes certain categories of albums—soundtracks, Broadway cast recordings, classical recordings and greatest-hits compilations—that Dimery’s book omits. The vast majority of albums Dimery’s book does include are studio projects, or the occasional live album, by bands and solo artists.

As founding Rolling Stone editor Michael Lydon points out in his preface for this book, it’s undeniable that the invention of sound recording, the phonograph, the LP, the CD, and digital music services all had a profound impact on how artists go about organizing sets of multiple songs to be released for mass consumption. With that in mind, attempting to quantify the album era into a list like this is going to have limitations, and that’s for a couple reasons. First of all, there's the definitive cutoff at album number 1,001. These compendiums of music, typically credited to a single band or recording artist, often running between 20-80 minutes in length, have been at the center of my love for music since I was a child, and I’ve probably listened to thousands of them at this point. If you asked me to whittle it down to just 1,000 of them, though, it’d be a pretty tall order. The same would apply even if you gave me one extra! One thousand is a pretty big number, sure, but think about all the musicians you like and all the great albums they’ve released; if you’re like me, the records start stacking up really quickly! So, inevitably, some fantastic albums have to be left on the cutting room floor. Dimery and his team also made the decision to include multiple albums from some of the list’s featured artists, which whittles the list of artists that can make the cut down even further; it also means that I have to listen to three albums by the Smiths and, even better, four solo albums by Morrissey. How... wonderful.

That being said, although this book is framed by its title as a “must-hear” list, it’s by no means saying that these are definitively the 1,001 greatest albums of all time. It seems that one of Dimery’s main focuses in compiling this list, and a pretty ambitious one at that, is for it to act as a primer for a general audience to learn more about the history of a wide variety of music that’s been released in the album format. His introduction ends with his hope that the reader will “find that the cross-section of artists and genres contained herein makes for a stimulating introduction to some of the greatest albums released over the past 50 years” (pg. 11 of my copy). Indeed, there’s lots of great context provided for these albums by the 90+ writers who contributed essays to this book, including the historical and cultural significance behind them, and they’re all very easily digestible for a reader who might not know much technical music terminology. Producers, issuing record labels, and cover art directors are listed for every release as well (although they skimp out on actually showing the cover art for every album, for reasons that are utterly beyond me).

Secondly, despite all the effort, at the end of the day this is a list compiled mainly by British and American music writers. Hence, pop music (which also includes rock, jazz, R&B, etc.) in the English language dominates the selections. Plus, as I alluded to before, music in the classical tradition isn’t included at all, which I think is a huge missed opportunity. I understand excluding soundtracks and compilations, but no list like this is complete without, for instance, Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, one of the most influential classical works on rock and electronic music from the late 70s and onwards. With all that in mind, I’m viewing this less as a definitive list of the best music ever made, and more as a trip through an established canon of albums which have captured the hearts and minds of the popular music culture of the Anglosphere, plus certain subsets of international, underground and experimental music which fed into that popular music culture.

To assist me in this journey, I’m using the website 1001 Albums Generator (1001AG), which randomly assigns me one album from the list per day. It was created by Swedish developer Alexander Nilsson as a music discovery tool, a way of getting listeners out of their regular, algorithmically manipulated listening habits. (He was interviewed in Exclaim! if you want to know more.) This allows me to go through the list non-chronologically, which has made for quite the smorgasbord. Not to mention, the final list of albums comes out to be 1,089 instead of 1,001, since 1001AG includes every album from every edition of the book from 2005 to its most recent one, which was published in 2021.

I’ve been reviewing all of these albums in a list on Rate Your Music as I go, but the most definitive versions of those writings are the ones that appear on this site. Bear with me, as the process of editing these, while also mirroring them all to webpages made of HTML, might be somewhat slow-going. I started this project in October 2024, but at one point it went on hiatus for over half a year; you’ll notice a jump from early May 2025 on album #144 (Simon & Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water) to late December of the same year on album #145 (Joni Mitchell’s Hejira).