Rock in ten albums: where to start

The album where pop became art without losing the tunes. The Beatles spent their fame on studio experiments most bands would never risk, and somehow every gamble lands. If rock has a single front door, this is it.

A concept record about pressure, money and madness that also happens to be a sonic miracle. Pink Floyd built a seamless, immersive world here, and it has never stopped selling because it has never stopped working. Headphones, lights off.

The blueprint for heavy rock: blues turned monumental, folk turned mystical, and a drum sound the whole genre chased for decades. It holds the most famous riff and the most overplayed ballad in rock, and earns both.

Five people falling apart and writing the catchiest songs of their lives about it. Fleetwood Mac turned private wreckage into pure pop craft, and the result is as close to flawless as a record gets. Not a weak track on it.

Punk's restless older sibling: reggae, rockabilly, soul and protest crammed into one sprawling, generous double album. The Clash refused to be one thing, and that refusal still sounds like freedom.

The record that dragged the underground into the mainstream and changed what a rock star could look like. Loud-quiet-loud, melody buried in distortion, and a discomfort with its own success you can hear in every chorus.

Pre-millennial dread rendered as some of the most beautiful guitar music ever recorded. Radiohead diagnosed the anxiety of modern life years early, and the album has only grown more accurate. The peak of thinking-person's rock.

Quiet-loud dynamics, surreal lyrics, and the constant sense the song might fall apart. The Pixies wrote the manual Nirvana and a thousand others studied. Short, sharp and still thrilling.

The album that made guitar bands cool again at the start of a new century. The Strokes sounded effortless and slightly bored, and a generation spent the 2000s trying to copy the trick. Lean, perfect, over too soon.

The fastest, funniest debut British rock has produced this century. Arctic Monkeys caught nights out, taxi ranks and teenage swagger with a novelist's eye and a punk's speed. The last great word-of-mouth phenomenon.