This Week: The Greatest Albums of All Time? 💿

Are you ready to rock? 🤘

Rolling Stone published the first edition of their “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” in 2003, followed by periodic updates in 2012, 2020, and 2023. As lifelong music lovers, we took it upon ourselves to listen to, rate, and rank every album on their list… or at least the first 25 for now!

Before we start, an explanation of our rating system: we rated each song (excluding interludes/skits) on a scale of 1-11 (the 11s are for really really really good songs) and then averaged them for an overall album score.

Rolling Stone’s Top 25 Albums of All Time 🎶

Before we get into our scores and (superior) ranking, let’s take a look at how Rolling Stone ranked their Top 25 Albums of All Time:

Of these 25 albums, 60% were first listens for us, meaning there were 15 albums we had never heard in full before preparing for this newsletter.

In terms of decade representation, the 1970s had the most entries on Rolling Stone’s Top 25 with nine, followed by the 60s with seven, the 80s and 90s with three, 2010s with two and the 2000s with one. Unsurprisingly, despite the overall list being updated in 2023 with eight albums from the 2020s, none of them landed in the Top 25.

Three albums emerged from our rating process with “perfect” scores: The Beatles’ Abbey Road, Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp A Butterfly, and Rumours by Fleetwood Mac.

The highest rated decade based on our scores was the 1960s with an average of 9.4, led by high scores from The Beatles, Beach Boys, and Velvet Underground. The 2010s also had a 9.4 average with only two albums rated—the perfect score for To Pimp A Butterfly and an 8.7 for Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

Overall, we rated 60% of the albums in the Top 25 a score of 9.0 or higher and 92% an 8.0 or higher. So while we certainly didn’t agree with the magazine’s exact ranking of the albums, we did love most of the albums we’ve encountered so far.

Calculated by counting the difference in ranking between our list and Rolling Stone’s, we found that Carole King’s Tapestry and The Velvet Underground and Nico were the most underrated, rising 19 and 18 places respectively, based on our album scores.

Nirvana’s Nevermind fell 18 places based on our rating of the album, while Joni Mitchell’s Blue went from 3rd to 16th on our list. Though still ranking high on our list at number 10, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On technically fell nine places, as did The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St.

Of the 332 songs we listened to, we gave “perfect” scores (either a 10 or an 11) to 100 of them. The Beatles lead the way with 17 perfect songs across three albums, followed by Kendrick Lamar with 12 perfect songs, all from To Pimp A Butterfly. Nirvana, Public Enemy, and Radiohead were the only three artists not to have a “perfect” song.

Check out the full playlist of these songs below!

🚨 BONUS LIST ALERT 🚨

…and that’s all folks!