Scary albums: 17 records that still frighten on a Tuesday afternoon
No werewolves, no organ stabs, no Halloween party. Seventeen records from 1968 to 2019 that scare you with the lights on, and what each one uses to do it.
17 entries
From the Riffiter desk
Guides
Best-of rankings, genre primers, and the records and moments worth knowing. Hand-built, opinionated, no filler.
Latest
Emo rap: 15 records from a Tumblr collective to the top of the Billboard 200
GothBoiClique started on Tumblr, making beats out of the emo records its members grew up on. By August 2017 the sound had a No. 1 album. That November it lost Lil Peep.
15 entries
Def Jux: 16 albums from The Cold Vein to the record El-P finished for a friend
Eleven years, one Brooklyn producer's taste, and a catalog that made New York rap sound like it was coming through a broken radio.
16 entries
Southern gothic music: 18 albums, and somebody always ends up in the river
Murder ballads, plywood devils, Memphis tapes and a Denver preacher's grandson. The sound of a literary label, from 1958 to now.
18 entries
Rock nacional: 19 albums, and eight of them belong to Spinetta or Charly García
Oktubre turned 40 on 4 October. This is the Argentine canon it sits in, from a song written outside a bar toilet in 1967 to the La Plata indie bands still working the same ground.
19 entries
Fourth World music: 19 albums from Jon Hassell's first record to his last concert
One trumpeter named a genre in 1980. This is where it went: Eno's studio, Sylvian's Berlin sessions, ECM, Nottingham, Tokyo, and back to a church in Hackney.
19 entries
Kranky Records: 18 albums from the label that made patience a house style
Drone, dub-soaked post-rock, slowcore and the Deerhunter years, from KRANK 001 in 1993 to Grouper's Shade.
18 entries
Gone, not finished: 19 albums that arrived a decade or more late
Ranked by how long the silence lasted, from Linda Perhacs' forty-four years down to Portishead's eleven.
19 entries
Rock progressivo italiano: 22 albums, and most of these bands only got one
Italy's prog boom lasted about five years, produced a staggering number of records, and left a scene full of one-album bands.
22 entries
The whole band was one person: 22 albums made alone
Wendy Carlos in a Manhattan apartment, Springsteen in a bedroom, Jane Remover recording guitar one string at a time. Records where a single player covered every part.
22 entries
Congolese rumba and soukous: a 23-record canon, from Indépendance Cha Cha to the Kinshasa of now
Sixty-five years of dance music from both banks of the river, told through the bands that kept splitting up.
23 entries
One day in the room: 14 albums cut in a single session
No do-overs, no comps across weeks. These records got made in one sitting, and the clock is part of why they sound the way they do.
14 entries
Novi val: 21 albums from the Yugoslav new wave, Ljubljana to Belgrade
Punk and post-punk pressed by the state's own record labels, 1975 to 1986.
21 entries
The wrong album won: 18 records the consensus skipped
Every artist gets reduced to one album. Here are eighteen times the vote went to the wrong one.
18 entries
Yacht rock: 23 albums from a genre that got its name a quarter-century late
A 2005 web comedy invented the term as a punchline. It ended up describing the most precisely built pop music Los Angeles ever made.
23 entries
The TR-808: 19 albums built on a drum machine Roland gave up on
Roland built around 12,000 of them between 1980 and 1983, sold them badly, and stopped. Everything after that happened secondhand.
19 entries
Dungeon synth: 19 albums, from a British bedroom in 1990 to the Bandcamp flood
Solo projects, fantasy pseudonyms, cassette runs of fifty. A route through the underground that never came above ground.
19 entries
Where to start with Boris: 19 albums, four bands, one name
Drone, hard rock, pop, hardcore. Tokyo's least predictable trio, put in an order you can actually follow.
19 entries
Chicha: a Peruvian cumbia canon, from Lima's first electric guitar to LA LOM
Eighteen records across sixty years: Amazonian fuzz, the Andean chicha the reissue labels skip, and the bands playing those guitar lines now.
18 entries
The sophomore slump is a myth: 24 second albums that beat the debut
The record where a band stops auditioning and starts writing, from Ride the Lightning to Ants From Up There.
24 entries
Best albums of 1976: 17 records that still refuse to share a shelf
Fifty years later, punk's first draft, studio-soul maximalism and two very different ideas of the future still belong in the same argument.
17 entries
Best winter albums: 17 records for the coldest part of the year
Snow music without the fireplace cliches: ambient, slowcore, black metal and one frozen New York rap record.
17 entries
K Records and Kill Rock Stars: 22 albums from the town that made amateurism a principle
Two labels, one small state capital, and fifteen years of records made by people who refused to get slick.
22 entries
Best noise rock albums: 25 records that made ugliness a craft
Flipper to Couch Slut, in order, with the labels that paid for it: Touch and Go, Amphetamine Reptile, Skin Graft, The Flenser.
25 entries
Albums about losing your faith: 19 records from both sides of the church door
Judee Sill to Ethel Cain: the ones who left, the ones who stayed and were frightened, and one who walked back in.
19 entries
Best EPs of all time: 21 records that didn't need to be albums
Contract fillers, stopgaps, tour merch. The short format kept producing the sharpest records anyway.
21 entries
Polish jazz: 20 albums the state paid to press
The Muza series, its outliers, and the Wrocław crews who went back and sampled the whole thing.
20 entries
Where to start with Fela Kuti: 19 albums, two songs at a time
Close to fifty LPs, most of them two tracks long, half of them named after whoever had just raided his house. Here is the road in.
19 entries
The Canterbury scene: 18 albums from the most tangled band tree in England
Soft Machine to Caravan to Gong to Hatfield and the North, in the order it actually happened.
18 entries
Best film scores: 23 albums that don't need the film
No song compilations, no needle-drop mixtapes. Composed scores that survive being taken away from the picture.
23 entries
Best grime albums: 22 records from Rinse FM to the Grammys
Two decades of 140bpm out of east London, in order, including the ones the revival forgot.
22 entries
Best album openers: 21 first tracks that set the terms
Track one is a contract. These are the ones that signed it in front of you.
21 entries
Best industrial albums: one word, four genres, 22 records
Tape collage in a Hackney warehouse, body music built for Belgian dancefloors, Birmingham metal at half speed, and whatever Kristin Hayter was doing in 2019.
22 entries
Best 4AD albums: 23 records from the label people bought on the sleeve alone
Bauhaus to Dry Cleaning, run through Ivo Watts-Russell's ear and Vaughan Oliver's eye.
23 entries
American primitive guitar: 22 records from the genre John Fahey invented for himself
From a self-released LP nobody bought in 1959 to a revival with more good players than it can keep track of.
22 entries
Best double albums: the ones that earn the second disc
Most doubles are a failure of editing. These seventeen use the extra side for something a single LP cannot hold.
17 entries
Best slowcore albums: a canon for a genre nobody wanted to be in
Nineteen records, 1989 to 2022, by bands who mostly hated the word.
27 entries
1986: the year the majors came shopping
Forty years on, from Rough Trade's injunction to Def Jam's first platinum plaques.
26 entries
Best outlaw country albums: 24 records from the Nashville revolt to the new drifters
Waylon won creative control out of RCA in 1972 and the shape of the music changed. Fifty years later Charley Crockett is still working the same seam.
24 entries
Detroit techno albums: eighteen records from a scene that lived on singles
Cybotron to Kyle Hall, in order of release. The album canon of a city that mostly did its thinking on 12-inches.
18 entries
Screamo: the canon, from Gravity Records to the 2026 revival
Skramz, not Warped Tour. Twenty-two records that hold the line from San Diego in 1994 to Brighton this March.
22 entries
Where to start with Swans: seventeen albums, in the order you should hear them
Michael Gira has spent forty years making music that punishes casual listening. Chronological order is the worst way in.
17 entries
Best city pop albums: twenty-one records from the studio boom, 1977 to 2006
Sunshower to Tokyo Sniper, in order of release, with the session players and producers who actually built the thing.
21 entries
2005: the year the blogs did the A&R
Nineteen records from the year Last.fm started keeping score and a band sold 125,000 albums out of an apartment.
19 entries
The best debut albums of all time: 27 records that arrived finished
First albums that needed no apprenticeship, ranked, with an honest answer to the question that follows every one of them: did they ever beat it?
27 entries
Post-punk city by city: Cleveland, Manchester, Leeds, Düsseldorf
Post-punk was never one sound. It was a different argument in every town, and this is the map.
24 entries
Best power pop albums: nineteen records with perfect songs and terrible luck
Beatles melody at Who volume, three minutes flat, almost never a hit. The canon of the genre that kept losing.
19 entries
Best breakup albums: the ones that name names
Records made about one specific person walking out, not about sadness in general. Sinatra to Robyn, in the order they happened.
21 entries
Best ambient albums: nineteen records for the far edge of quiet
From the Berlin School to the drone: the ambient canon, in chronological order, with no wallpaper allowed.
19 entries
Best post-rock albums: eighteen records where rock stopped singing
The crescendo, the drone, the slow build — a guitar band's tools turned against the verse and chorus.
18 entries
Best shoegaze albums: sixteen records that hid the song inside the noise
From My Bloody Valentine's Loveless to the American revival — the foundational shoegaze canon, ranked.
16 entries
1996: the year the weird stuff got funded
Twenty-one records from the last moment major labels and basement labels were both paying for the deep end. Ranked.
21 entries
Jazz fusion: the essential albums of the electric decade
From Bitches Brew to Bright Size Life: fifteen records from the years jazz plugged in.
15 entries
Bossa nova beyond 'The Girl from Ipanema': the essential albums
Seventeen records, 1959 to 1977, for anyone whose bossa shelf is one Stan Getz album deep.
17 entries
Neo-soul: the essential albums, from Brown Sugar to the Sault years
Thirty years of a genre almost nobody who made it wanted to be called that.
19 entries
Freak folk: a canon for the New Weird America
The mid-2000s underground where American folk turned psychedelic and homemade again.
15 entries
Comedown: eighteen albums for the morning after
The after-hours canon — downtempo, ambient and dub-soaked records for the long descent from a big night.
18 entries
Chamber pop: a canon for strings, horns, and the well-dressed sad song
The orchestral wing of pop, from the baroque-pop pioneers of 1967 to the indie composers who picked the string section back up.
18 entries
Dub: eighteen records where the engineer became the author
King Tubby's four-track shack in Waterhouse, Lee Perry's Black Ark, Adrian Sherwood's London, and a broken filter in Berlin.
18 entries
ECM: the essential albums of the most beautiful sound next to silence
Nineteen records from Manfred Eicher's label, 1970 to 2015, and how a Munich jazz imprint ended up owning a whole way of hearing a room.
19 entries
