Guides/A Riffiter guide
Albums Rick Rubin produced
Def Jam rap, thrash metal, Johnny Cash's last act — the bare-bones producer who reinvented half a dozen genres.
Rick Rubin is an American record producer and Def Jam co-founder whose stripped-back style has shaped hip-hop, metal, rock and pop for forty years. This guide collects the albums he produced, from the Beastie Boys' Licensed to Ill to Johnny Cash's American Recordings.
Rick Rubin doesn't play an instrument and rarely touches a console. What he does is harder to name: he strips an artist down to the one essential thing they do, then gets out of the way.
That instinct has worked across rap, thrash metal, stadium rock, country and pop — a range no other producer can match. These are the albums where you can hear it.
- 1
Licensed to Ill
Be the first to rate—The album that built Def Jam, the label Rubin co-founded in his NYU dorm. He welded rap to Led Zeppelin riffs and turned three New York punks into the biggest rap act in America.
- 2
- 3
Reign in Blood
★ 5.0 · 4—Twenty-nine minutes of pure velocity. Rubin produced thrash metal's defining record by making it faster, drier and more brutal than anyone thought a studio would allow.
- 4
Blood Sugar Sex Magik
★ 4.3 · 4—The album that turned a cult funk-rock band into superstars. Rubin moved them into a haunted Hollywood mansion, loosened them up, and caught “Under the Bridge” almost by accident.
- 5
American Recordings
Be the first to rate—Rubin's most improbable triumph. He sat an ageing country legend down with a single acoustic guitar and began the late, great final act that made Cash sound eternal.
- 6
Wildflowers
Be the first to rate—Loose, warm and unforced — Petty's most personal record, made the way Rubin likes it, with the songs left room to breathe.
- 7
Toxicity
Be the first to rate—Rubin harnessed one of metal's strangest, most volatile bands without smoothing a single edge, and the result was a number-one album that still sounds like nothing else.
- 8
Audioslave
★ 4.0 · 4—Rubin brought Chris Cornell together with the musicians of Rage Against the Machine and produced the supergroup's thunderous debut.
- 9
The Black Album
★ 3.8 · 2—Rubin came out of rap semi-retirement to build “99 Problems” — a stripped, guitar-driven beat that sounds like 1986 and 2003 at the same time.
- 10
Death Magnetic
★ 4.0 · 3—Rubin pushed Metallica back toward the raw thrash of their youth, ending the band's long studio drift.
- 11
- 12
Yeezus
★ 4.0 · 5—Called in late, Rubin stripped a maximalist record down to its bones in a matter of weeks — the brutal minimalism that gave Yeezus its shock.
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