Guides/A Riffiter guide
Albums that reinvented their genre
Ten records that drew a line, a clear before and after in the music that followed.
A handful of albums don't just succeed. They reset the rules, leaving every record after them changed. This guide collects ten that reinvented their genres, from Kraftwerk and Black Sabbath to Nirvana and Daft Punk: the turning points of modern music.
Most great albums are the best version of something that already exists. A rare few do something different: they redraw the map, and everyone who comes after has to reckon with them.
These ten records each marked a clear before-and-after, the moment a genre changed direction. You can hear their fingerprints on thousands of albums that followed.
- 1
Paranoid
★ 4.5 · 11The riff that started a genre. Sabbath slowed the blues down, tuned it darker and heavier, and invented heavy metal more or less single-handedly.
- 2
Trans-Europe Express
★ 4.7 · 6The source code for electronic music. Kraftwerk's machine rhythms and robotic vocals laid the groundwork for synth-pop, techno and hip-hop alike.
- 3
- 4
Loveless
★ 4.5 · 17Guitars dissolved into pure texture. Loveless invented the sound of shoegaze so completely that bands are still chasing it three decades later.
- 5
The Chronic
★ 4.4 · 12G-funk takes over. Dre's debut defined the sound of West Coast rap (laid-back, melodic and inescapable) and changed how hip-hop was produced.
- 6
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- 8
Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols
★ 3.0 · 1Punk's year zero. It was so confrontational it felt less like an album than an event, and nothing in British music was the same after it.
- 9
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
★ 4.4 · 5Hip-hop as political alarm. The Bomb Squad's dense wall of noise proved rap could be as confrontational and complex as any music on earth.
- 10
Kind of Blue
★ 4.4 · 4Modal jazz arrives. By building on scales instead of chord changes, Kind of Blue opened jazz up to space and freedom, and became the most loved jazz album ever recorded.
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