The greatest debut albums ever made

The most influential debut in rock history. It barely sold on release, but the famous line holds: everyone who bought a copy started a band. Andy Warhol's banana cover hides songs about everything polite society wouldn't discuss.

Proto-punk's opening shot. Iggy Pop and the Stooges stripped rock down to raw nerve and pure provocation years before anyone called it punk — primitive, dangerous and ahead of its time.

Where poetry plugs into rock and roll. Horses is fierce, literary and free, and it kicked open a door that punk would charge through two years later.

Fourteen songs, twenty-nine minutes, zero wasted motion. The Ramones' debut invented punk as a working template — fast, loud, hook-first — and dared every kid in the world to start a band in the garage.

Post-punk's dark heart. Spare, haunted and instantly iconic — right down to the cover that's now on a million t-shirts. A debut that sounds like nothing before it.

The best-selling debut album in US history, and the last great dangerous rock record. From “Welcome to the Jungle” to “Sweet Child o' Mine,” it's wall-to-wall classics.

Britpop's swaggering arrival. The sound of a band who believed, totally and loudly, that they were the best in the world — and for one album made you believe it too.

Ten tracks, no filler, the lyrical benchmark every rapper since has measured themselves against. Nas was twenty when he turned his Queensbridge childhood into the most respected debut in hip-hop.

The album that restarted guitar rock for the 2000s. Cool, tight and effortless, it made New York the centre of the musical universe again overnight.

At the time the fastest-selling debut in British chart history. Alex Turner's sharp-eyed tales of nightclubs and taxi ranks made him the best young lyricist in Britain.