Have a favorite year for music? One year that you know better than all others? Perhaps the year when you first really connected with music, the first year that gives you true nostalgia?
With that year in mind, go to rateyourmusic.com and step through that year’s chart of top albums. No matter how well you know the music of your year, I think you’ll be surprised. And I’d wager you’ll find some highly rated albums you’ve never even heard of.
This is an excellent way to discover new music, especially if you are signed up for a service like Apple Music so you can start listening to these new albums immediately.
To get you started, here’s a link to the top albums of the year 2000. To switch to your year, just edit the URL.
I clicked the link expecting to see a list of popular crap I couldn’t care less about. But Modest Mouse is in the top five and Yo La Tengo is in the top twenty? This deserves further exploration!
WTF?
Four albums I know well from 1991:
21 Achtung Baby – U2
31 Metallica
172 Guns N Roses – Use Your Illusion 2
259 Guns N Roses – Use Your Illusion 1
Meanwhile, the top 20 is filled with stuff like “Slint”, “Swan” and “Coroner”. Ummm, yeah.
31 would be too low for Metallica if it was a list of the greatest albums of all time. The Use Your Illusion Albums were huge…. 25 years later, they’re filling football stadiums playing those songs.
What I find interesting, and a bit disappointing, is how the period between 1982 and 1992 is just littered with albums that I would call essential, before and after that period there are still plenty of great albums but the number I would want “on a deserted island” fall off pretty quickly. That period roughly covers my teenage years, and apparently locked in what I consider essential.