The whole band was one person: 22 albums made alone

The Moog could sound one note at a time, so every voice in every fugue went to tape separately, and the synthesizer drifted out of tune between passes. Carlos spent roughly a thousand hours across five months on this, mostly in her rented apartment on West End Avenue, using an eight-track she built out of Ampex parts. It sold a million copies and sat at the top of the classical chart for three years, which is a strange fate for a record assembled with tweezers.

Rachel Elkind produced and Benjamin Folkman helped with the realizations, so this is not the purest entry here. It is the most patient one by a distance.

Recorded at his house in St John's Wood on a Studer four-track with no mixing desk at all, then smuggled into Morgan Studios under the name Billy Martin to get it onto eight tracks. McCartney plays guitars, bass, drums, piano, Mellotron and wine glasses; Linda sings harmony, most audibly on "Man We Was Lonely".

Half of it is unfinished on purpose and people held that against it in April 1970, when the album arrived alongside the press release that ended the Beatles. Listen now and the sketches are the good part. "Junk" is barely there and it is the best thing on the record.

Rhodes cut the backing tracks on a four-track in his home studio in Hawthorne, California, then bounced them to eight-track to stack the vocals. Union rules meant Dunhill could not admit on the sleeve that a major-label album had been made in a garage.

The usual line is that he sounds like McCartney, which is true and unhelpful. What he actually has is time: nobody was waiting for this record, so the harmonies are stacked further than any band with a studio bill would have allowed.

Two nights at Sound Techniques at the end of October 1971, Drake arriving around eleven at night, nobody in the building but him and John Wood. Half the songs each night, no band, one piano melody dubbed onto the title track and nothing else added.

Island put it out in February 1972 and it ran 28 minutes. Everyone reaches for the biography, but the reason it works is technical: with no arrangement to hide behind, the guitar playing carries the whole emotional load, and it is good enough to do it.

Three of the four sides are Rundgren alone, playing everything, having lost patience with session musicians in Los Angeles. Side four is a live band in New York, added partly to lighten the mood, which is why the record ends up a double.

It is the strongest argument on this list that solitude is a working method rather than a temperament. He proved he could do it alone, then hired people again the moment the joke stopped being funny.

Assembled at home in Nashville on quarter-track reel-to-reel decks and pressed in an edition of 100 on his own Vital Records in 1976, which is roughly a decade before anyone had a name for what he was doing.

Moore never stopped, and the sheer volume of what came after has buried this. Go back to it. The tape splices and the fake jingles are the joke; the songs underneath them are not. Every bedroom-pop record of the last twenty years is downstream of this one, whether or not its maker has heard it.

The sleeve credit reads "produced, arranged, composed and performed by Prince" and the instrument list runs past twenty, from Polymoog and clavinet down to finger cymbals, water drums and handclaps. He was nineteen.

Two asterisks: Patrice Rushen did uncredited synth programming, and Charles Veal arranged the strings on "Baby". The songs are thinner than what came a year later, but you can hear him working out the thing that mattered most to him, which was never needing to ask permission.

A TEAC 144 Portastudio, two SM57s and a bedroom in Colts Neck, between mid-December 1981 and 3 January 1982. He mixed it through an Echoplex onto an old Panasonic boombox, which is where the tape hiss and that flat, close-miked voice come from.

The E Street Band tried these songs at the Power Station in April and the versions died on contact. Columbia put out the demo. It remains the loudest argument in this catalogue for leaving a first take alone.

Recorded in September 1983 at his sister's house in San Marcos, Texas, on a chord organ and piano, with tape collage between songs and a stringed instrument nobody has ever conclusively identified.

The subtitle is The Unfinished Album because he ran out of songs before he ran out of cassette, and it stops at 30 minutes. People sentimentalise Johnston into a mascot. This tape is not cute. "Despair Came Knocking" is a man describing his own mind accurately.

Made in late 1993 in the basement of JJ Gonson's house on a four-track, with an SM57 and a cheap RadioShack microphone, while Smith was still in Heatmiser and had no plans to be anything else.

He expected a seven-inch. Cavity Search asked for the whole tape and put it out in July 1994. The double-tracked whisper that everyone associates with him starts here, and it started as a way of not being overheard through a floor.

A jazz quintet with five members, all of them Madlib: Monk Hughes on bass, Ahmad Miller on vibes, Joe McDurfey, Malik Flavors and Otis Jackson Jr. He played keys, drums, guitar, kalimba and clavinet, gave each alias a personality, and let the joke run for years afterwards.

Stones Throw released it in September 2001. It is loose, slightly out of time and completely charming, and the fiction is doing real work: playing five parts as five characters got him further than playing five parts as himself.

Recorded between 1999 and 2000 on an eight-track borrowed from John Maus, with no drum kit anywhere in the process. The percussion is his mouth, and once you hear it you cannot unhear it.

He handmade the CD-Rs. Animal Collective found one, and Paw Tracks reissued it in October 2004 to an audience that had no idea what to do with music that sounded like a radio station broadcasting from inside a mattress.

Recorded between 2001 and 2003 in a Calgary basement, on instruments VanGaalen partly built himself, and originally released by Flemish Eye in 2004 before Sub Pop picked it up with a different tracklist.

It lurches from folk song to drum-machine sputter with no transition, because a home studio has no producer telling you those two things belong on separate records. That incoherence is why people still play it.

Neige played the guitars, bass, keyboards and drums and sang everything except a guest vocal from Audrey Sylvain on "Sur l'autre rive je t'attendrai". It is the only Alcest album he made this way; Winterhalter arrived on drums afterwards and never left.

Black metal purists treated the record as a betrayal in 2007 because it has no aggression in it at all. They were right about the facts and wrong about everything else. Blackgaze starts here, and so does a decade of bands who could not do it half as well.

The famous one that is not quite true, and it belongs on the list precisely for that. The cabin in northwestern Wisconsin is real, the three months are real, and Vernon did play almost all of it.

But Christy Smith drums and sings on "Flume", and the horns on "For Emma" are John DeHaven on trumpet and Randy Pingrey on trombone. Self-released in 2007, picked up by Jagjaguwar in February 2008, and mythologised so hard that the three guests get written out of every retelling.

Voice, loop pedal, almost nothing else. Barwick stacks wordless lines until they behave like an organ, and the absence of lyrics is a choice rather than a shortage of ideas.

Asthmatic Kitty released it in February 2011. The title comes from a tree on her family's farm that she used to sit under. Knowing that does not change the record, but it does explain the shape of it: one person, one spot, going around again.

Made in GarageBand in a Montreal apartment across roughly three weeks in August 2011, on a Roland Juno-G and a stack of vocal pedals, under a deadline she met by not sleeping. Sebastian Cowan mixed it with her at La Brique.

The cheapness is load-bearing. "Oblivion" is a pop single with the frequencies of a demo, and it worked on radio anyway, which quietly ended the argument about whether laptop pop counted.

Austin Lunn wrote, played and produced a black metal album about coal mining, the union wars and the strip-mined ridges of his home state, with banjo and fiddle tunes sitting between the blast beats rather than decorating them. Johan Becker guests on violin; Colin Marston mixed.

Most genre fusions are a costume. This one is an argument, and the argument is that Appalachian folk music and black metal have the same subject: land that is being taken from people who cannot stop it.

Travis Miller rapped it and produced every beat himself under his Shawn Kemp alias, then put it on Bandcamp in February 2012 for nothing, with Hundebiss handling the vinyl. Supa Sortahuman and Denzel Curry take verses on "Twistin'" and that is the extent of the outside help.

It reads now as the founding document of internet phonk, which undersells it. The Memphis worship is precise, the mixing is deliberately foul, and the writing is far funnier and stranger than the people who copied the drums ever noticed.

Parker wrote, performed, recorded and produced it in his home studio in Fremantle, and for the first time mixed it himself as well, which is the whole reason it sounds the way it does. No other performers appear.

A band would have argued him out of the bass tone on "Let It Happen" and out of a seven-minute lead single. This is the record where the studio hermit finally beat the touring band that shares his name.

Recorded between August and December 2016 in the room where Geneviève Castrée died, on her instruments, with one microphone, straight to a laptop. Elverum has said the choice was practical rather than symbolic, which somehow makes it worse.

There is no craft on display here and that is deliberate: no chorus, no metaphor, no distance. It is the hardest listen on this list and the one most likely to be the reason somebody starts rating albums in the first place.

Written, produced, performed, mixed and mastered by an eighteen-year-old in a New Jersey bedroom across six or seven months, released on deadAir in November 2021 under the name dltzk. She could not play chords, so she recorded the guitar one string at a time and stacked the notes.

That limitation is audible everywhere and it is the sound of the record: shoegaze textures built by someone who learned them from files rather than amplifiers. Every teenager currently making something enormous on a cracked DAW is working in its shadow.