Best double albums: the ones that earn the second disc

Columbia's paperwork says May 1966, the trade ads point to July, and the fight over whether Dylan or the Mothers got there first has outlived nearly everyone who could settle it. What nobody disputes is side four. It holds one song, "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands", eleven minutes cut in Nashville in the small hours with session players who had no idea what they had walked into. That is the founding move of the format: use the extra space for something a single LP physically cannot hold.

A debut that arrives as a double, which in 1966 was closer to a provocation than an ambition. Tom Wilson signed the Mothers thinking he had a white blues band, then found himself producing "The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet", twelve minutes of percussion and shrieking that closes the record. Zappa used the length to argue about what an album was allowed to contain, and half the records below inherited that argument.

George Martin wanted one strong album out of the thirty songs and has said so ever since. The band overruled him and they were right, though not for the reason people usually give. The White Album works because it is incoherent: four men in separate rooms, ska pastiche next to "Helter Skelter" next to eight minutes of tape collage, a group coming apart in real time on tape. Edit it into a tidy single LP and you delete the subject.

Hendrix produced this himself after Chas Chandler walked out of the sessions, and both the Record Plant bills and the crowd hanging around the studio became legend. Two sides hold the tightest songwriting he ever managed. The other two wander off into "Voodoo Chile" and thirteen minutes of underwater science fiction called "1983... (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)". No guitar record since has been this loose and this precise at once.

Recorded across three days in August 1969 with a band too big for the room, then assembled by Teo Macero with a razor blade: loops, splices and repeats, every studio trick jazz was supposed to be above. It needed two discs because the music is a process rather than a set of tunes. "Pharaoh's Dance" takes twenty minutes to finish becoming itself. Columbia sold it to rock kids, the jazz press howled, and both sides came out of it richer.

Two LPs and a bonus seven-inch, because he still had four songs left over after filling four sides. It entered the Billboard chart at number one, which almost nothing did in 1976. What makes it hold is that Wonder spends the extra room on range rather than length: "Village Ghetto Land" and "Pastime Paradise" sit near "Isn't She Lovely" and neither one cancels the other out.

Rumours sold ten million copies. Lindsey Buckingham's answer was to spend over a million dollars of Warner's money, later reckoned closer to $1.4 million, recording vocals in bathrooms and beating on chairs for percussion. Tusk sold four million and got written up as a catastrophe, which says more about 1979 than about the record. This is the clearest case of the double album as an escape route: the extra side is where a hit machine goes to hide.

The band forced CBS to sell it as a double at the price of a single LP, and hired Guy Stevens, who kept the takes urgent by throwing furniture around the studio. It earns the length through breadth. Reggae, rockabilly, soul and pop all get treated as punk's rightful property rather than a betrayal of it. Nineteen tracks and not one dead side.

A hardcore band on SST making a concept double about a kid who runs away from home, cut at Total Access in Redondo Beach in October 1983 in roughly 85 hours, the last 40 of them one straight mixing session. Nearly everything is a first take and you can hear it. That is also why side four ends with "Reoccurring Dreams", fourteen minutes of instrumental churn nobody had time to trim. American punk stopped being a rulebook here.

What you are hearing is already an edit. Warner refused the triple album Prince wanted, and this double is what survived that fight, along with pieces of the shelved Dream Factory and Camille projects. It plays like four solo careers at once: drum machine minimalism, psychedelic pop, gospel-sized balladry, and "If I Was Your Girlfriend" sung in the pitched-up voice he had invented for a record nobody got to hear. The most single-handed double ever made.

Recorded at Greene St in New York over the summer of 1988, and the doubleness is structural rather than decorative. The band keeps setting up a pop song and then letting the guitars run past the point where a single LP would have to fade out. "Trilogy" closes the record by stretching that habit to fourteen minutes. Every American guitar band of the next decade took notes.

Michael Gira built this out of new recordings, old live tapes, answering machine messages and field recordings, then put it out as the last Swans album. It stayed the last one until 2010. Two hours and twenty minutes, and duration is the point: pieces bleed into each other until you lose your place, which is the only honest way to end a band like this. Least song-shaped record here, most deserving of its second disc.

Released on 25 March 1997, sixteen days after Christopher Wallace was shot dead in Los Angeles, and that timing has bent every reading of it since. Set it aside and this is still the best-sequenced rap double anyone has made: twenty-four tracks that move from Bad Boy radio pop to horror storytelling without the voice changing. Rap doubles usually pad. This one casts.

Stephin Merritt started with a plan for a hundred songs for a stage revue and cut it to sixty-nine across three discs. The conceit only works at full length. One disc alone reads as a clever songwriter doing pastiche; all three together turn into a real argument about how many ways one feeling can be faked and still land. Made largely on cheap instruments by a man in a bad mood, which is part of why it lands at all.

Richard D. James has said he lost a player holding 282 unreleased tracks on the way to a gig, assumed they would leak, and put thirty of them out to get ahead of it. That explains the shape. Prepared piano miniatures alternate with drum programming too fast for hands, there is no arc, and it concedes nothing to anyone. Reviewers filed it as a contract-filler in 2001 and have been quietly revising the verdict ever since.

Three discs, eighteen songs, a shade over two hours, released by Drag City in 2010 after vocal cord damage had forced Newsom into silence and handed her back a lower, plainer voice. Length is the form here: images and phrases from the first hour pay off in the third, a trick you cannot pull on a forty-minute record. Sit with the whole thing once and shorter albums start to feel evasive.

Twenty songs from four sessions in Upstate New York, Topanga Canyon, the Rockies and Tucson, produced by the band's own drummer James Krivchenia and released by 4AD in February 2022. It is scattered on purpose. A fiddle hoedown sits beside a distorted drone and beside the most tender thing Adrianne Lenker had written, and the scatter is what makes it a portrait instead of a collection. The best recent proof that the format still has a use.