Apple Music Top 10 Albums Of All Time [FLAC]
Apple Music's Top 10 Greatest albums of all time!
10. Lemonade (2016), Beyoncé
9. Nevermind (1991), Nirvana
8. Back to Black (2006), Amy Winehouse
7. good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012), Kendrick Lamar
6. Songs in the Key of Life (1976), Stevie Wonder
5. Blonde (2016), Frank Ocean
4. Purple Rain (1984), Prince
3. Abbey Road (1969), The Beatles
2. Thriller (1982), Michael Jackson
1. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998), Lauryn Hill
All tracks are in the FLAC format either ripped from Qobuz or a CD.
Album Descriptions From Apple:
10. Lemonade (2016), Beyoncé
There&s one moment critical to understanding the emotional and cultural heft of Lemonade, Beyoncé&s genre-obliterating blockbuster sixth album—and it arrives at the end of “Freedom,” a storming empowerment anthem that samples a civil-rights-era prison song and features Kendrick Lamar. An elderly woman&s voice cuts in: “I had my ups and downs, but I always find the inner strength to pull myself up,” she says. “I was served lemons, but I made lemonade.”
The speech—made by her husband JAY-Z&s grandmother Hattie White on her 90th birthday in 2015—reportedly inspired the concept behind this radical project, which arrived with an accompanying film as well as words by Somali British poet Warsan Shire. Both the album and its visual companion are deeply tied to Beyoncé&s identity and narrative (her womanhood, her Blackness, her marriage) and make for her most outwardly revealing work to date.
The details, of course, are what make it so relatable, what make each song sting. The project is furious, defiant, anguished, vulnerable, experimental, muscular, triumphant, humorous, and brave—a vivid personal statement, released without warning in a time of public scrutiny and private suffering. It is also astonishingly tough. Through tears, even Beyoncé has to summon her inner Beyoncé, roaring, “I&ma keep running &cause a winner don&t quit on themselves.” This panoramic strength—lyrical, vocal, instrumental, and personal—nudged her public image from mere legend to something closer to real-life superhero.
Every second of Lemonade deserves to be studied and celebrated (the self-punishment in “Sorry,” the politics in “Formation,” the creative enhancements from collaborators like James Blake and Karen O), but the song that aims the highest musically may be “Don&t Hurt Yourself”—a Zeppelin-sampling psych-rock duet with Jack White. “This is your final warning,” she says in a moment of unnerving calm. “If you try this shit again/You gon& lose your wife.” In support, White offers a word to the wise: “Love God herself.”
9. Nevermind (1991), Nirvana
Even now, years after you first felt its edges, the chorus of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” still sounds too dangerous—too loud, too ugly, too upset—for any mainstream. And yet Nevermind&s opening salvo didn&t just mark an unlikely breakthrough for the Seattle trio, it upended popular culture in ways we haven&t seen since. Punk became pop, grunge became global vernacular, industry walls broke into rubble, and lead vocalist Kurt Cobain was anointed the reluctant voice of a generation in need of catharsis, all seemingly overnight. But what makes Nirvana&s second album special isn&t its rage, but its innocence. For as haunting and corrosive as it can often be, it was never at the expense of melody or songcraft or humanity.
The old guard was actually still alive and well: Both Metallica&s Black Album and Guns N& Roses& two-volume Use Your Illusion famously came out within weeks of Nevermind. And while the album went on to sell about as well as those—even displacing Michael Jackson&s Dangerous as the best-selling album in the United States for a brief moment in 1992—Nirvana&s influence extended well beyond sheer economics, cutting a path for generations of forward-looking artists that stretches from Radiohead to Billie Eilish. They presented themselves not as rock gods, but ordinary (and highly sensitive) mortals. As an alternative to the pinup in leather pants, they offered the proud feminist, screaming until his voice gave out (“Territorial Pissings”). In place of the glossy power ballad, they delivered something fragile and raw (“Polly,” “Something in the Way”).
Nirvana&s angst didn&t only come across in the lyrics, but in the delivery. None of Cobain&s wisdom or fury would have resonated in the culture-shaking way it did if not for the sort of tunefulness that has always had a way of making wisdom and fury go down a little easier.
8. Back to Black (2006), Amy Winehouse
Producer Mark Ronson remembers when Amy Winehouse came in with the lyrics for “Back to Black.” They were at a studio in New York in early 2006, their first day working together. Ronson had given her a portable CD player with the song&s piano track, and Winehouse disappeared into the back for about an hour to write. What she reemerged with was masterful: bleak, funny, tough, hopelessly romantic. The chorus, though, kept tripping him up because it didn&t rhyme: “We only said goodbye with words, I died a hundred times.” He asked her to change it, but she just gave him a blank look: That&s just how it came out, she didn&t know how to change it.
For all her brashness, what makes Back to Black so moving is the sense that Winehouse is constantly trying to punch through her pain—not to suppress it exactly, but to wrap it in enough barbed wire that nobody could quite reach its core. The appeal to soul music is obvious: the Motown horns (“Rehab,” “Tears Dry on Their Own”), the girl-group romance (“Back to Black”), the organic quality of the arrangements (“You Know I&m No Good”)—much of it courtesy of Brooklyn outfit The Dap-Kings.
But Winehouse&s presentation and otherworldly, timeless vocals still make her music feel different—not so much an attempt to recreate the past as to honor the music she loved while still being true to the trash-talking, self-effacing millennial she was. Years before the next generation learned to temper their misery with sarcasm, memes, and deadpan fatalism, we had Amy Winehouse, fluttering around words so crass you could barely believe she was singing them at all, let alone with a horn section. The sound of Back to Black might appeal to retro-soul fans and jazz classicists, but the attitude is closer to rap. Yes, she was funny. But she wasn&t kidding.
7. good kid, m.A.A.d city (2012), Kendrick Lamar
A few days after releasing 2012&s good kid, m.A.A.d city, the then-25-year-old Kendrick Lamar deemed his sophomore studio album “classic-worthy.” He wasn&t lying: Lamar&s sophomore album is one of the defining hip-hop records of the 21st century. On the surface, good kid, m.A.A.d city is a hood tragedy, with Lamar painting a vivid picture of Black and brown youths growing up in underserved communities. But the album is also powered by faith and hope, with Lamar chronicling his turbulent coming-of-age through a cast of compelling characters that portray the trauma, familial guidance, and relationships that led to his inevitable ascent.
West Coast hip-hop elders like Snoop and Dre anointed Lamar to carry on the legacy of gangsta rap, and his second studio album—conceptual enough to be a rock opera—certainly uplifts the genre with its near-biblical themes: religion vs. violence and monogamy vs. lust.
Sitting just a few miles from Compton, where much of good kid, m.A.A.d city takes place, Lamar pieced together tracks alongside collaborators Sounwave and Dave Free, both of whom had known the prolific rapper since high school. Throughout the writing process, Lamar would frequently return to his childhood neighborhood to relive the “mental space” he was in during the early days of his rap career, unearthing the deeply personal tales that came to shape the monumental artist.
From the album&s opening scene—a collective prayer of gratitude—Lamar&s approach is entirely theatric (he even gives good kid, m.A.A.d city a subtitle: “A Short Film by Kendrick Lamar”). And he never misses an opportunity to hold listeners in his grip, unspooling a series of vulnerable confessions over the album&s 12 tracks. Graphic scenes of violence, addiction, and disillusionment are pervasive here. But Lamar makes even the harshest truths easy to swallow, as he does on “Swimming Pools (Drank),” a vivid tale of alcoholism. good kid, m.A.A.d city&s legacy is a crucial example of American storytelling that established the future Pulitzer Prize winner as perhaps his generation&s most accomplished writer.
6. Songs in the Key of Life (1976), Stevie Wonder
In 1974, Stevie Wonder was the most critically revered pop star in the world; he was also considering leaving the music industry altogether. So when Songs in the Key of Life was released two years later, demand was so high that it became, at the time, the fastest-selling album in history. All was forgiven.
Wonder positioned himself as the benevolent overlord of a vast self-drawn cosmos, one with a remarkable cache of songs: Songs in the Key of Life, which runs nearly 90 minutes, is effortlessly melodic, broad in scope, deeply personal—and often just plain weird. In the era of the overblown rock epic, Wonder had created the most searching and sprawling soul album ever released.
Start with the brassy, hook-filled, and positively effusive chart-topping singles “Sir Duke” and “I Wish,” both of which have soundtracked countless barbecues and wedding receptions for decades. At the other end of the spectrum: the stark reality-soul of “Village Ghetto Land” and “Pastime Paradise,” on which Wonder leaves the bandstand for the op-ed pages to decry the abandonment of the civil rights dream. Then Wonder&s daughter Aisha shows up in the sugary Girl Dad anthem “Isn&t She Lovely.”
As Songs in the Key of Life nears its conclusion, Wonder clears the dance floor for 15 minutes of sumptuous gospel-disco in “As” and “Another Star.” But the album&s defining moment might come on a bonus track, one originally issued as an extra 45 with the album&s vinyl release. It starts in deep space with the Afrofuturist fantasia “Saturn,” but as its last synthesizer chords fade out, Wonder zooms light-years to an urban playground where we can hear the sound of Black children skipping Double Dutch. Sonically, culturally, and emotionally, Songs in the Key of Life is much more than a gigantic collection of songs—it forms an entire worldview.
5. Blonde (2016), Frank Ocean
In the four years between Frank Ocean&s debut album channel ORANGE and his second, Blonde, he had revealed some of his private life—he published a post on social media about having been in love with a man—but still remained as mysterious and skeptical towards fame as ever, teasing new music sporadically and then disappearing like a wisp on the wind. Behind great innovation, however, is a massive amount of work, and so when Blonde was released one day after a 24-hour streaming performance art piece (Endless) and alongside a limited-edition magazine entitled Boys Don&t Cry, his slipperiness felt more like part of a carefully considered mystique. Even the apparent indecision over the album title&s official spelling can be seen in hindsight as being characteristically mischievous.
Endless featured the mundane beauty of Ocean woodworking in a studio, soundtracked by abstract and meandering ambient music. Blonde built on those ideas and imbued them with more form, taking a left-field, often minimalist approach to his breezy harmonies and ever-present narrative lyricism. His confidence was crucial to the risk of creating a big multimedia project for a sophomore album, but it also extended to his songwriting—his voice surer of itself (“Solo”), his willingness to excavate his weird impulses more prominent (“Good Guy” and “Pretty Sweet,” among others).
Though Blonde packs 17 tracks into one quick hour, it&s a sprawling palette of ideas, a testament to the intelligence of flying one&s own artistic freak flag and trusting that audiences will meet you where you&re at. They did. And Ocean established himself as a generational artist uniquely suited to the complexities and convulsive changes of the second decade of the 21st century.
4. Purple Rain (1984), Prince & The Revolution
You can&t very well tell a story about a troubled artist whose difficult personality belies his musical genius without, you know, actual musical genius. In this sense, the soundtrack to Purple Rain began life with the highest degree of difficulty imaginable; the impossibility that its success could ever have been in doubt is the project&s greatest legacy.
With half its tracklist comprising Top 10 singles, the soundtrack is what truly turned Prince Rogers Nelson from just big enough to get to star in a summer blockbuster based on his life to one of the most instantly recognizable and distinctive pop artists ever. This is no slight to the movie, which has its charms (shout-out Morris Day), as much as it&s a testament to Prince&s all-engulfing star power and genre-fluid/gender-fluid virtuosity—nine perfect, definitive pop-soul-dance-rock-R&B-funk-whatever-else songs that couldn&t help but swallow everything in their orbit.
The brilliance of Purple Rain is how it stirs seemingly contradictory moods—lust, devotion, intimacy, alienation—into a brew where nothing can be separated from anything else. Prince makes trauma sound erotic (“When Doves Cry”) and salvation sound reckless (“Let&s Go Crazy”). His sexual escapades are spiritual, disorienting, and almost psychedelic (“Darling Nikki,” “Computer Blue”), while his spiritual journeys are grounded in the mechanics of a guitar solo (“Purple Rain”). The album broke records and brains: Tipper Gore&s overreaction to the image of Darling Nikki masturbating to a magazine begat a congressional witch hunt debating the morality of pop music. Prince often drew comparisons to Jimi Hendrix for the way he mixed music that felt Black and white, sacred and profane. The reality is that he had no precedent then and no comparison now.
3. Abbey Road (1969), The Beatles
Giles Martin, son of legendary Beatles producer George Martin, once told Apple Music that Abbey Road is the perfect gateway into the Beatles universe because it sounds so contemporary. And it&s true: While other Beatles albums conjure a specific moment frozen in amber—the matching suits and mop-tops or the mid-period mischievous experimentation with pop form or the technicolor burst into psychedelia—Abbey Road sounds like nothing more or less than four extremely gifted humans playing one indelible song after another in the same room together.
The 11th and penultimate album in The Beatles& historic catalog was the last on which all four members worked in the studio as a unit, all at the same time. And while singling out one album as their most impactful is a fool&s errand, 1969&s Abbey Road is indeed the most ageless, simply an immaculate, unmatched collection of songs by a world-changing band at their creative peak.
Following the sprawl of 1968&s White Album, Abbey Road is a relatively concise representation of The Beatles& entire deal: wholesome (“Here Comes the Sun”), a little freaky (“Come Together,” “Polythene Pam”), macabre and wholesome (“Maxwell&s Silver Hammer”), first-wedding-dance romantic (“Something”), whimsical (“Octopus&s Garden,” “Mean Mr. Mustard”), and, with its album-closing eight-song, 16-minute medley, playful with form. The embers of pop music&s most dynamic collaborative force were dying out, but not before yielding one final and definitive document of unmatched creativity and camaraderie.
2. Thriller (1982), Michael Jackson
There are few pop albums, or even works of art, that denote a wholesale shift in time and space the way Michael Jackson&s Thriller did in 1982. Noting its impact on the career trajectory of a child star turned R&B hitmaker feels reductive; talking about its record-smashing commercial success diminishes its creative leaps. It did nothing less than define the modern pop blockbuster and redefine the scope and reach of music.
Stripping the weight of history from Thriller is a big job, but hearing the record as a statement in itself remains hugely rewarding. Seven of its nine original cuts were Top 10 singles, and it became one of the best-selling albums ever made, but more important is the way Jackson and producer Quincy Jones turned the singer&s obsessions into intricate, stunningly sung pop-funk.
The album&s opening throwdown, “Wanna Be Startin& Somethin&,” is Jackson at his fiercest and funkiest, picking up right where 1979&s Off the Wall left off—and shoring up his R&B bona fides. But from the Paul McCartney-blessed pop of the first hit single “The Girl Is Mine” to the Eddie Van Halen-revved pyrotechnics of “Beat It,” Jackson&s crossover moves opened up the eyes and ears of the industry—and audiences around the world—to what music could sound, look, and feel like if we blurred those old color lines. “Billie Jean” is a gripping psycho-study of the paranoia and persecution that he was already feeling—yet it still maintains the mysterious allure of an artist who became the avatar for the omnipresent global pop superstar.
1. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998), Lauryn Hill
Lauryn Hill&s debut—and only—solo studio album was a seismic event in 1998: a stunningly raw, profound look into the spiritual landscape not just of one of the era&s biggest stars, but of the era itself. Decades later, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill still counts as a life-changer, with the preternaturally talented Hill rapping with the confident ferocity of a woman in total creative control and singing with the gospel-hued richness of the soul canon. It was an expression of interior depth during a time in which Black women were often portrayed as one-dimensional archetypes, and Hill delivered her magnum opus of life&s triumphs and setbacks with such singular heart, sincerity, and specificity that it transcended from an album into a universal statement of being. Her fortitude was so powerful that new generations continue to discover an album whose specific mastery of musicality, lyricism, and frankness has not been replicated.
Miseducation was forged in emotional fire. After seven years as the voice of the politically cogent, critically acclaimed New Jersey hip-hop trio Fugees—and in the aftermath of a protracted, tumultuous relationship with her bandmate Wyclef Jean—Hill set out to document a period of major life transitions, including the slow erosion of the group she&d been with since high school. With the trauma came new beginnings: Hill was also inspired by the physical and mental transitions of pregnancy and the birth of Zion, her first child with Rohan Marley, using her attendant spirituality as a guiding light. This potent emotional crossroads led to what remains one of the rawest albums ever created, a lasting artistic beacon for musicians across genre, and a moment in which the whole world recognized Hill&s talents.
Miseducation&s opening track, in which a teacher announces a classroom roll call only for Lauryn Hill to be absent, speaks to its thesis: that its lessons were of the sort that can only be learned through lived experience. As she weaved through painful eviscerations of an ex, which even at the time were understood to be directed at Jean, she redefined the way gritty, sharp rapping and lavish R&B harmonies could fuse together in an era of nearly catholic separation between the two genres. (Even three years after Method Man and Mary J. Blige&s “All I Need” remix, hardcore rap was largely still teeming with misogyny, and R&B was seen as a softer, more feminine pursuit.) Miseducation centered a young woman's point of view, in all her rebellions and vulnerabilities, amid terrain dominated on the hip-hop charts by a certain vision of hypermasculinity. But it also served as an entry point for a mainstream still inclined to denigrate hip-hop&s musicality.
The album was recorded, in part, at Hope Road in Jamaica, in Bob Marley&s home—a legacy reflected in Hill&s idea for the album&s cover art, which echoes The Wailers& Rastaman Vibration cover. Yet the DNA of these songs, and a key to their endurance, draws on a classic Motown/Stax sound that showcases Hill&s immaculate vocal approach; the layered “Doo Wop (That Thing)” alone won her two of the five Grammys she took home in 1999, a validation of the freshness of her sound, as well as the way her music spoke to the emergent feminism of the Hip-Hop Generation.
The vulnerability in Miseducation&s singles is often discussed, but Hill&s concerns, and powers, were multivalent. Once a history major at Columbia University, Hill explored her upbringing in Newark, New Jersey, with a sharp, subtle sociopolitical eye (“Every Ghetto, Every City”) and philosophized on the nature of growing up in a disenfranchised world (“Everything Is Everything”). On the latter song, she benefited from a classic 1970s soul sound with a small band that included jazz bassist Tom Barney and clavinet from Loris Holland, minister of music at the storied Brooklyn Pilgrim Church. The former featured piano from a then-unknown pianist by the name of John Legend.
Miseducation is also proof that pure intention and unflinching emotional truth can be a path to deliverance unto itself. As Hill raps on the politically charged koan “Everything Is Everything”: “My practice extending across the atlas/I begat this.” She was, and remains, a once-in-a-generation talent whose inspiration, and innovation, can be heard through the decades. Artists exhaust long discographies hoping for a cohesive piece of work resonant enough to reshape culture and inscribe its creator into the pantheon; Lauryn Hill did it in one.